We start with the story of Omar Hammami who came from Alabama and was recruited by al-Qaeda in Mogadishu in 2006. Western recruits were coveted by Al-Qaeda and, by extension, al-Shabaab for their propaganda value and their operational utility according to Watts. The author clears one thing up immediately before continuing on. He says that the social media experiments detailed in the book were carried out at his home, coffee shop, on the train, and other locations. The conversations with terrorists on Twitter, the tracking of al-Qaeda verses ISIS on social media, and the mapping of Russian trolls were all research and development projects for his mind. He wasn’t doing this on the behest of the U.S. government. Speaking of social media, we tend to laud these platforms initially, but, as is pointed out, “each of these applications ultimately introduces unimagined negative outcomes.” We can easily see this as the author discusses his ongoing operations; it becomes obvious in the book. These social-media-enabled zealots have become an undercurrent for global-jihad that upend not only terrorist organizations but also democracies.
The Iraq war was something that reinvigorated al-Qaeda. When the U.S. invaded, fractured, and destabilized the nation in the heart of the Muslim world, new life was breathed into the terrorist ideology. Now a need was seen to travel to Iraq to free Muslims from Western oppression. And the recruitment process was getting more sophisticated. Al-Qaeda had synchronized all of its online operations on social media. Everything could be done from afar now: radicalize, recruit, operate, finance, train and direct. The author notes that “the internet had saved al-Qaeda from demise, and social media seemed to be restoring its lethality.” Now that Iraq was broken, we see the rise of ISIS. At one point “ISIS member and supporter social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter were everywhere numbering in the tens of thousands.” Unfortunately for al-Qaeda, the internet social media enabled competitors, detractors, and dissenters from jihad’s younger generation. Now everyone could become an imam and then pick and choose sacred texts to justify any act of violence. The evolution on the Internet for jihadis went from “websites to forums, forums to social media, and mainstream apps to encrypted apps.”
The author noted that by 2014, social media was becoming more antisocial by the day. He noticed a relentless onslaught of trolls about a year after ending discussions with Hammami. Now we were seeing automation alongside humans at work “creating a new alternative, and false perception of the world.” We are introduced to “computational propaganda.” This is the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions and influence behavior. We see the rise of the social bots. This can be dangerous as they can create a “majority illusion” where many people appear to believe something. These trolls became interested in the American audience in particular. One example of the Russian trolls impacting the American public can be seen in the Jade Helm 15 exercises in southwestern states. We see the rise of RT (Russia Today), which today has about four times the YouTube subscribers as CNN. Then there is Sputnik International and, of course, the Internet Research Agency. We all surely know about WikiLeaks. Assange’s efforts seem to have supported Russia above all countries. The nation most harmed – the U.S. We get an ideal of the secret goings on in the world with the release of the Panama Papers and later the Paradise Papers – bridges between dark money and the open markets, obscuring assets, offshore trusts, and the like.
I found it interesting that by the 1980’s the Soviet Union knew its communist society could not keep pace with American capitalism. Over time it came to realize that “active measures” would become the new campaign to defeat the West “through the force of politics, rather than the politics of force.” This began with forgeries in media outlets around the world - propaganda and provocateurs abounded. Operation Infektion spread the idea that AIDS was unleased by the U.S. as a biological weapon. However, these actives measures were burdensome to implement, that is, until the rise of the Internet. Today they have the advantages of cyberspace and social media to accomplish what they could not back then in the early days. Today the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and the Federal Security Service (FSB) are busy at work like never before. Now the Russians could “talk to the Americans as equals.” Unfortunately, today the American electorate still doesn’t grasp the information war perpetrated against the U.S., why it works or why it continues. You don’t have to hack election machines and change the vote when you can hack the minds of people. In fact, the author shows why he feels Russian influence swung two states, Michigan and Wisconsin, to Trump’s favor. It is also interesting to learn about what is called “plausible deniability” and how Russia counters attribution claims via three techniques: “alternative perceptions, parsing and refuting facts, and counteraccusations.” An example is the Trump Tower meeting; it can easily be explained away.
We can see how propaganda campaigns are effective on social media. We have confirmation bias and implicit bias that together pull us into digital tribes. We then make collective decisions based on groupthink. This causes us to block out alternative viewpoints and ideas. These tribes then “stratify over time into political, social, religious, ethnic, and economic enclaves.” We also see what the author refers to as “social media nationalism” and “clickbait populism” leading to “the death of expertise.” You see, now anyone regardless of education or status can explore information and voice their opinion. People then selectively choose information and “expertise” they like even over what is actually true. It’s actually become quite scary. Even if a social media user knows something to be true, the endless stream of contradictory information can create persistent doubt. We find this constant bombardment of contradiction exhausting, leaving us “confused, bewildered, and ultimately apathetic.” So we fall back on our biases, and those we trust – those in our preference bubbles. The author presents something even more scary – social inception. “A hidden elite core will social-engineer an unwitting crowd into choosing the policies, politics, and preferences of the hidden elite, all without the crowd’s ever realizing it.” The dangerous thing here is that democracy dies in preference bubbles.
In the end, the author notes, “it won’t be the Russians who come to dismantle our collective psyche; it will be Americans willfully doing it to one another, in pursuit of their own personal gain.” Let’s hope we’re better than that.
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Top reviews from other countries
aquinas
Very, very detailed. Transcripts of interactions between the author and his targets.
Reviewed in Canada on July 3, 2018
