{"id":9263,"date":"2020-02-15T23:22:40","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T07:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=9263"},"modified":"2020-03-07T07:39:28","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T15:39:28","slug":"issue-of-the-week-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=9263","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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‘The 2020 Disinformation War”,<\/em> The Atlantic, March Issue, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today is the start of the President’s Day weekend in the US.<\/p>\n

A week and a half ago, only the third impeachment of a president in US history concluded.<\/p>\n

Even this seems another century ago amidst the faster than the speed of light neverending toxic events since November 8, 2016 and the acceleration of other major global crises.<\/p>\n

The outcome of acquittal was a forgone conclusion–but there was an unexpected twist and ending.<\/p>\n

The “Trial” constitutionally mandated in the Senate almost occurred against all odds when new information created a brief window of potentially bringing witnesses, with the spectre of nailing the coffin shut for Donald Trump’s presidency. The great majority of Americans wanted witnesses to be heard. And had it happened, it was a whole new ball game. At the least, the process would have gone on and been far more unpredictable. Public opinion would then have determined the endgame. (As it was, it did in some ways, by staying more or less split on conviction or acquittal, largely reflecting the polarization in the country, even though a majority thought Trump’s actions were wrong.)<\/p>\n

Only four Republicans were needed to vote yes.<\/p>\n

Two did. But the key to making it four, even though he was the protege of the famous Howard Baker, the Republican who led the way in bringing down Nixon in Wateragte, was the close friend of the Majoirity Leader committed to acquitting Trump–and the politics were such that a profile in courage at that level was unlikely.<\/p>\n

And so it went. But the narrative as to why, adopted by a majority of Republicans up-front or behind the scenes, was stunning:<\/p>\n

The House Managers–the prosecutors–have proven their case. Trump is guilty. No witness needed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Translate, no witnesses alllowed because the public presure to remove Trump then could have taken off exponentially.<\/p>\n

Instead, we all agree he’s guilty. But instead of doing what jurors do at that point–convict–we’re going to let him off–in the name of the people deciding in the election in a few months, which is not what impeachment is constitutionally mandated as. The Senate, as the Jury, decides. They did–to find him guilty and punt.<\/p>\n

Of course, impeachment is a poltical process so anything is possible. And this was the first impeachment with an election looming. But his own party said in effect–you did it.<\/p>\n

This was not the way the play was supposed to go.<\/p>\n

Nor were all the Democrats supposed to vote in unison to convict without any defections, regardless of the political consequences for some of them.<\/p>\n

And then the coup de gr\u00e2ce.<\/p>\n

A Republican senator joined the Democrats and voted to convict on Abuse of Power.<\/p>\n

The first in history to vote to convict a president of his own party.<\/p>\n

And his antipathy for Trump was irrelevant. Every Senator who now supported the president and either employed or generally stayed silent on his tactics had said plainly during the election, he is barbaric, unhinged, infantile, crazy, unfit, dangerous, and so on.<\/p>\n

And this is not any Senator, but the standard-bearer for the presidency for the Republicans the last time before 2016, in 2012, against Obama, who came far closer to winning than most people know, even though Obama pulled away at the end. That’s another story.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney represented then, in hindsight, the last moment of norms of a civilization, politics and society that had been in place since, well for practical purposes, forever.<\/p>\n

He also focussed on Russia in the 2012 campaign, and was laughed at, one might want to remember.<\/p>\n

(The Republican led Senate commitee investigating interference in the 2016 campaign found unanimously the Russians had done so)<\/p>\n

Quite apart from whatever his faults over his career, he stood in the Senate and gave the speech of a lifetime on his vote to remove Trump from office on the article of impeachment for abuse of power.<\/p>\n

He gave an interview to McKay Coppins in The Atlantic<\/em> to be released when he announced his vote.<\/p>\n

Here it is. Seriously, read it.<\/p>\n

“How Mitt Romney Decided Trump Is Guilty”<\/a><\/p>\n

Comparing the president\u2019s behavior to that of an autocrat, the Republican senator explains to The Atlantic why he\u2019s voting to convict him.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Read the rest at the link above.)<\/p>\n

Romney snatched the moment from Trump and gave it to history.<\/p>\n

And we might add once again that the corrosive elements of Trump are a sympton for which we are all responsible to varying degrees–inequality (the rage about appealed to, in part through classic misdirection, but not delivered on in the main by Trump–although an appearance of delivery on the surface that has had the primary effect of further enriching the 1% may work one more time) and a culture of narcissm after years finally blowing up.<\/p>\n

Clinton could have been president in 2016 if any number of things had not influenced the small number of votes that swung the election electorally, and Sanders could have won if nominated that year, but with all the other reasons it easily could have gone another way, the underlying issue was a rage about inequality building for decades (which is why Sanders almost got the nomination in 2016), as Frontline<\/em>\u00a0has pointed out so well more than once, along with Obama’s original mistake in not turning this around when he had the power to do so.<\/p>\n

At the same time, empathy must also run deep for the burden of being the first African-American President and all the considerations this entailed. And a scandal-free White House with a model family was a welcome cultural tonic for eight years. Furthermore, the economy Trump takes credit for was Obama’s established trend after saving it from catastrophe. The error was that saving the status quo wasn’t going to do anymore (it may or may not continue on the surface for a while longer, but its not sustainable). Obama created more jobs in his last 35 months than Trump has in his first 35. But the level of wages and inequality isn’t fundamentally getting better–and Trump’s tax cuts for the corporations and the rich have never solved that problem in history, just made it worse.<\/p>\n

Romney would have been president if he received the same percentage of Latino vote McCain did, who would have been president had he received the same percentage as Bush. And the great irony, Trump received 1% more than Romney.<\/p>\n

More on all the twists and turns to come.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Trump under any other circumstances would have been removed by impeachment or other constutional means or resigned long ago in the world that existed before his election–and even after his election for a time and at various points. Any president would have. We’ll just focus on one simple fact here. Trump got lucky. The special prosecutor law was gone. Mueller didn’t have that power. Otherwise Trump would have been forced to do live<\/em> depositions.<\/p>\n

No living being, even in the age when many will say anything, has credibly suggested that Trump could have survived that for a minute, much less countless hours. Or all the scrutiny the power of that office would have brought to many things that normally had been, but that have not been transparent. And to the many other avenues of inquiry then opened up and the poltical impact this has.<\/p>\n

So we move forward to the next election, and November 8, 2016 better at least have taught everyone how ludicrous predictions are.<\/p>\n

What we have learned about since then, are many other dangers, such as the convergence of new technology, interference by other forces, and the truly poisonous impact of lie upon lie upon lie delivered in manners leading one to question what truth even is.<\/p>\n

McKay Coppins has written a major article on the subject of digital misinformation campaigns and the new levels of hell they are reaching in the March Issue of the Atlantic. It may be Trump-team led, but as Coppins points out, it’s being adopted, and will be sure to be, by Democrats as well. And God help us all.<\/p>\n

Not to be missed. Here it is:<\/p>\n

“The 2020 Disinformation War”<\/a><\/p>\n

Story by McKay Coppins, March Issue 2020, The Atlantic<\/p>\n

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

One day last fall<\/span>, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked \u201cLike\u201d on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook\u2019s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like \u201cIn Trump We Trust.\u201d I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans\u2019 understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.<\/p>\n

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president\u2019s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video\u2014served up by the Trump campaign\u2014that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait<\/i>, I caught myself wondering more than once, is <\/i>that what happened today?<\/i><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: \u201cThat\u2019s right, the whistleblower\u2019s own lawyer said, \u2018The coup has started \u2026\u2019\u200a\u201d Swipe<\/i>. \u201cDemocrats are doing Putin\u2019s bidding \u2026\u201d Swipe<\/i>. \u201cThe only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing \u2026\u201d Swipe<\/i>. \u201cOnly one man can stop this chaos \u2026\u201d Swipe<\/i>, swipe<\/i>, swipe<\/i>.I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I\u2019d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every<\/i> headline. It wasn\u2019t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself\u2014about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else\u2014felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes\u2014jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world\u2019s demagogues and strongmen in power.<\/section>\n
\n

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year\u2019s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view\u2014one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.<\/p>\n

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.<\/p>\n

THE DEATH STAR<\/h4>\n

The campaign is run<\/a> from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected\u2014with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower\u2014his 2020 enterprise<\/a> is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as \u201cthe Death Star.\u201d<\/p>\n

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn\u2019t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office\u2014and his efforts will shape this year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale<\/a>, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple \u201cfarm boy from Kansas\u201d (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an \u201cIvy League\u201d school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9\/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds\u2014claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his \u201clast $500\u201d (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice\u2014including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice<\/i>, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. \u201cI just made up a price,\u201d he later told The<\/i> Washington Post<\/i>. \u201cI recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.\u201d The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures\u2014a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale\u2014a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience\u2014was running the Republican front-runner\u2019s digital operation from his personal laptop.<\/section>\n
Parscale slid comfortably into Trump\u2019s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious\u2014with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives\u2014but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate\u2019s. \u201cBrad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,\u201d says a former colleague from the campaign.Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending\u2014none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump\u2019s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.<\/p>\n

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale\u2019s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising\u2014amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton\u2019s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism\u2014Parscale\u2019s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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As Trump\u2019s 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale flooded the internet with the campaign\u2019s messages. (Illustration: Mishko; Jabin Botsford \/ The Washington Post<\/em> \/ Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. \u201cHe was a get-shit-done type of person,\u201d says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him<\/a>. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. \u201cHe was probably better at managing up,\u201d Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate\u2019s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump\u2019s digital ignorance to flatter him. \u201cParscale would come in and tell Trump he didn\u2019t need to listen to the polls, because he\u2019d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,\u201d one former campaign staffer told me. \u201cI was like, \u2018Come on, man, don\u2019t bullshit a bullshitter.\u2019\u200a\u201d But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news<\/a><\/section>\n
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale\u2019s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform\u2019s new tools. \u201cWhereas some grizzled campaign strategist who\u2019d been around the block a few times might say, \u2018Oh, that will never work,\u2019 Brad\u2019s predisposition was to say, \u2018Yeah, let\u2019s try it.\u2019\u200a\u201d From June to November, Trump\u2019s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton\u2019s ran just 66,000<\/a>. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump \u201cgot elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I\u2019ve ever seen from any advertiser<\/a>.\u201dThough some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump\u2019s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a \u201cgenius\u201d and the campaign\u2019s \u201csecret weapon,\u201d and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president\u2019s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.<\/p>\n

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica<\/i> reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. \u201cWhen I give a speech, I tell it like a story,\u201d he said. \u201cMy story is my story.\u201d<\/p>\n

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE<\/h4>\n

In his book This Is Not Propaganda<\/i><\/a>, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls \u201cP.\u201d In college, P had studied the \u201cLittle Albert experiment,\u201d in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough\u2014about 100,000 members\u2014he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted<\/a> that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P\u2019s experiment was one plank in a larger \u201cdisinformation architecture\u201d\u2014which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers\u2014that experts say aided Duterte\u2019s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.<\/div>\n
The campaign in the Philippines<\/a> was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area<\/a>. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to \u201can invisible radiation\u201d that takes effect while \u201cthe population doesn\u2019t even feel it is being acted upon.\u201d) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.<\/p>\n

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology\u2014muddy the waters<\/i>; alternative facts<\/i>\u2014but they\u2019re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Central to that effort is the campaign\u2019s use of micro-targeting\u2014the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.Parscale didn\u2019t invent this practice\u2014Barack Obama\u2019s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton\u2019s followed suit. But Trump\u2019s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump\u2019s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, \u201cHillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.\u201d An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek <\/i>that it was one of \u201cthree major voter suppression operations underway<\/a>.\u201d (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.<\/section>\n
<\/div>\n
The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources\u2014without users\u2019 consent\u2014Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed \u201cpsychographic profiles\u201d<\/a> for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: \u201cDid you feel like you had to say that?\u201dChristopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that \u201cwith the right kind of nudges,\u201d people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. \u201cRather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,\u201d Wylie said. \u201cWe were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.\u201dCambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual \u201choney traps\u201d on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its \u201cpsychographic\u201d targeting really had. But Wylie\u2014who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster\u2014said the firm\u2019s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.<\/section>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cWhat happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?\u201d he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year\u2019s election. \u201cThere are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do \u2026 and make it much more sophisticated.\u201d These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press<\/a>, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data<\/a> and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University<\/a>, the CEO argued that his company shouldn\u2019t be responsible for arbitrating political speech<\/a>, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.<\/p>\n