Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Tuesday, 11 September 2018

Propaganda is not (just) about persuasion

If you can't convince, then confuse. Take rational judgement out of the picture completely. That way, instead of belief being driven by ideology but at least tempered by evidence, it becomes utterly driven dominated by ideology. Allow the now-irrational populace to interact without a common set of facts and let feedback work its magic.

Mainstream media comes up with some almighty mistakes, but not even the Daily Fail does this. They at least try to present a consistent set of facts and a largely consistent ideology. Having a few opinion pieces that go against the grain has a categorically different effect than publishing a deluge of pieces that don't even agree on what happened, much less how or why. The latter is the mad situation of impartiality completely unrestricted by objectivity.

What would matter would be that some people following the story would begin to question what was real and what wasn't. Some might even begin to question the very idea that there was a real, reliable version of events at all.

...Analysts say the Russian state is now the chief exponent of a new kind of information warfare. A loosely-defined network of Russian state actors, state-controlled media, and armies of social media bots and trolls is said to work in unison to spread and amplify multiple narratives and conspiracies around cases like the Skripal poisoning. The goal is no longer to deny or disprove an official version of events, it is to flood the zone with so many competing versions that nothing seems to make sense.

"What is really striking is that you no longer see the Russian machine pushing a single message, it pushes dozens of messages," said Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Russian disinformation. "The idea is to confuse people."

"The more different theories you put out, the more different Google results you're going to get," said Mr Nimmo. "So instead of seeing two or three different versions of the story you're seeing 20 or 30. And for someone who is not following the story regularly that becomes more and more confusing until they give up. And at that point, the Russian disinformation has had its effect."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45454142

1 comment:

  1. Interestingly, and as ever, we tend not so much to see new things (per se) emerge as we see the same things at higher resolution, technologically-facillitated. Sun Tze describes war as an art of deception and while this is unlikely to ever radically change, the technological sophistication and information-channel bandwidth of the current game has, if not changed the base axioms or rules and motivations of the competition, at least introduced many more degrees of freedom, vectors of influence and methods of semi-autonomous message and misinformation amplification.

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