Disinformation Studies – A Dismal Cold War Science
The current malaise around tech platforms and our democracy has come to be understood as primarily a question of disinformation. Government agencies, Silicon Valley NGOs and research centers have been crucial in channeling our disgust with unaccountable tech-oligarchs into a singular preoccupation with truth. From Russiagate, January 6th and Covid-denialism all these are deemed problems of ‘epistemic terrorism’, Facebook acting as a ‘hostile foreign power’ or Russia hacking our minds. In the place of public interest regulation and an anti-trust blowtorch there has been a revolving door established between the national security state and platforms. Only the disinformation experts get to peek into the algorithmic black boxes that govern the internet. While regulatory prospects have always been slim critical researchers and left-wing activists would do well to avoid reinforcing the dismal cold war science of disinformation studies. In order to develop a robust imaginary of what a public interest internet might look like it is crucial to situate the question of disinformation within a political economic history.
Weaponized Communication
The story of the post-2016 populist tumult has centered on “bad actors”, from foreign trolls to populist political operatives, weaponizing the openness and ubiquity of network communication. A Western internet innocence has been taken away from us by Russian malevolence and their deployment of useful idiots from across the political spectrum, the narrative goes. In a reversion to Cold War propaganda the Russians are said to benefit from their masterful centralization of power and requires us, a divided and embattled West, to defend our precious freedoms. However odious and criminal the Putin regime is, this story does not take seriously Russia’s strategic goals and is meant principally to gain consent for a sprawling hybrid war with Russia and China. I have spent a good part of the last few years publishing research on the fatuous and hysterical nature of the Russiagate panic. While we may be removed from the days of Buff Bernie and Jesus masturbation memes being presented to the US Senate Intelligence committee, we are still gripped by the idea that our mundane social media lives are the stuff of civilizational war.
Writing in the New York Times the great public intellectual of this internet malaise, Shoshona Zuboff has claimed that ‘You Are Now Remotely Controlled’. Sophisticated data tools makes us dance to an unknown master, she writes:
‘This new power “to make them dance” does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder. It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun’
This is the kind of uni-causality that is ascribed to disinformation in the current moment. A cappuccino is part of the totalizing logic of hybrid war, a doctrine of war stretched to absurdity and said to be mastered by the ever perfidious Russians. This techno-horror is a neat inversion of how the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group market themselves as ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ able to turn a paint brush into weapon.
The way the current panic reverts back seamlessly to cold war hysteria of occulted enemies and brainwashing is instructive of the long-running weaponization of communication. Communication networks have always promised connectivity through a new universal language, while belying imperial fantasies of mapping and controlling the world. As Yasha Levine puts it, the internet is a weapon born as a product of missile defense and counter-insurgency and imbued with cold war propaganda logics. The coordination of military, industrial and academic resources for this task formed what Eisenhower called an ‘organic military structure’ at this fundamental level.
In his seminal work ‘Science of Coercion’ Christopher Simpson describes the foundational theories of information warfare that would undergird the new communicative age. Communication’s essence was domination. Leo Lowenthal proffered a ‘push-button millennium’ in which computational methods would perfect media messages so as to remotely vanquish the enemy. Internet prophet Ithiel De Sola Pool would apply cybernetics to dirty wars, political campaigns and the private sector as the perfection of the technocratic management of American empire. As Jill Lepore’s history of Pool’s firm Simulmatics recounts, the new Mandarins of ARPANET would serve as a model for Palantir, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and others that apply ‘the science of psychological warfare to the affairs of ordinary life’. Platforms like Google and Facebook have always been central to central empire- from promoting American soft power, extracting IP rents, to their imbrication in the military and intelligence infrastructure.
For the emerging class of disinformation expert its necessary to disavow this historical continuum, 2016 has to be a neutron bomb event rather than Facebook being used ‘as it was always intended to be used’. A western internet exceptionalism might redeem Facebook and our communicative age with the technocratic management of disinformation experts. Their skill set combines big data methods with Kremlinology, and the rallying of digital civil society with the platitudes of open-source collaboration and an intrepid OSINT identity. In line with the history of psychological warfare research this is a positivist approach uninterested in communication as a complex communal social practice, rather it can be reduced to Cold War binary models of persuasion and coercion.
This is how Zuboff can reheat the fears of remotely controlled Manchurian candidates or how Renee DiResta, the star of this discipline, can claim that the humorous double entendre of Jesus masturbation memes is a ‘timeless espionage practice…[of] recruiting an asset by exploiting a personal vulnerability’. The political economy of online and our own capacity for critical reception is flattened into occulted Soviet-style forces perpetually attacking the fabric of reality in terms that really reach a Lovecraftian horror dimension. The horror and hysteria is foundational to the disinfo paradigm. It has in fact given rise to an academic sub-field of Lacanian security studies. The function of predicting infinite AI disinfo is in reifying the myths of big data, crucial to American tech-capital, and serves the organic national defense in rallying users and the population to this hybrid war conflict. In other words it is a potent form of propaganda.
Disinformation Field
The attempt to make disinformation the defining source of our political malaise helps the national security state wage hybrid war, but it also bestows a tremendous amount of cultural capital on the technocratic class that helped get us into this mess. There is no time to relitigate the 1996 Telecommunications Act when we simply need to understand the Russian playbook and defeat the global fascist insurgency. I use here Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as we have seen the professional authority of the disinfo expert flourish across journalism, academia and cyber-intelligence. There has been an attempt to understand every instantiation of populism and social tumult as a question of disinformation. The utility of this to the moribund democratic party politics was clear in Susan Rice’s invocation of the Russian playbook at work during the 2020 BLM protest movement. So we have new means of understanding politics and movements as pseudo-actors subservient to an underlying system of information war. In this way the disinfo technocrats imagine themselves as the Hegelian universal class masking their subservience to empire with claims to ‘promote objective fact as the basis for democratic governance worldwide’.
So the disinformation technocrats have come to save the internet and our democracy. A transformation of internet governance has taken place, not through public interest regulation, but the partnering of internet companies with national security elites such at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLabs to make key editorial decisions. The disinformation rubric makes overt the organic solidarity between corporate, academic and intelligence fields that Eisenhower spoke of. It may even take the appearance of a digital civil society movement through Silicon Valley NGOs like the Centre for Humane Technology (CHT) conflating hybrid war concerns with teen body image issues on Instagram. CHT’s vanity project, the documentary The Social Dilemma, brought together Silicon Valley insiders like Tristan Harris, Zuboff and DiResta to present these technocrats as the humane and moral agents able to lead the transformation of tech in our stead.
DiResta is a highly accomplished exemplar of the disinformation field and her exploits demonstrate how disinformation expertise traverses different professional fields. She is a founding advisor to CHT and head of research at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a crucial institute at the heart of Silicon Valley in which academic tools are developed in partnership with platforms to study disinformation. Her work has been regularly featured in The Atlantic and Wired; and in fora such as the Aspen Ideas Fest and the Joe Rogan Experience. She was the lead author of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Russian Internet Research Agency, for the now disgraced cyber intelligence firm New Knowledge, and her national security ties include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. A former Thiel Foundation fellow she claims to have been involved with him ‘before he went reactionary’.
In an interview she gave with CHT co-founder Aza Raskin as part of The Social Dilemma she neatly demonstrates how truth is ultimately structured by a hybrid war logic. Raskin addresses the camera to tell the audience that DiResta ‘broke his mind recently’. The power of her disinfo expertise was simply telling him that Russian troll farms are involved in pushing anti-fracking content to the West in order to protect Russian state oil interests. A relatively mundane form of online influence elicits from Raskin:
(anti)Fracking is just…a default position of mine…I don’t really know why I have the opinion about fracking that I do. How is it that I know what I know ? The realization that I couldn’t answer that question really hit home for me that I am personally just as influenceable and vulnerable as every other human about things that really matter…that was just a gut punch…I don’t know why I know what I think I know.
Raskin assumes that his own views are Russian implants and that he might have been an unwitting agent. Perhaps he’s forgotten watching Gasland back in 2010? The solution here is not to develop political conviction around his views but to react to this mendacious all knowing enemy. It’s a means of making a virtue of having no moral or political courage and simply trusting what the Cold War technocrats tell you about the data.
Against Disinfo Experts
The rubric of disinformation has been taken up far and wide, not simply by NatSec types. Understanding the media and propaganda methods of the far-right obviously has a long tradition in left and anti-fascist struggle, however we can do better than to align ourselves with a discipline that reheats anti-communism as part of hybrid war narratives. Disinformation studies is highly normative in that it makes a defence of democratic institutions paramount. There is no ability to acknowledge the crisis of democracy that is structural, material and predates QAnon clout chasers. As the critical disinfo scholars at UNC’s Centre for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) identify there is a retreat into fantasies of an epistemically consistent past which allows technocrats to treat political challenges from the left as part of the attack on ‘our way of life’. This is manifest in the key strategic interventions of disinfo warriors in previous electoral cycles in the UK and US. DFRLabs Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker used anonymous intelligence reports to assert that the George Floyd protests and the Bernie Sanders campaign where the two most impactful foreign interference attempts of 2020. Similarly Ben Nimmo, formerly of DFRLabs now head of Facebook’s influence operations intelligence, was able to reframe Jeremy Corbyn’s use in the campaign of a factually accurate, leaked draft trade deal as principally an issue of hybrid war.
So long as we portray the current crisis of democracy and tech-oligarchy as algorithmic behaviourism, the menace of Putin and the perfection of communication as a weapon, we reinforce American hybrid war aims. This framework designates particular agents able to serve brokers to the ‘real’ reality and act in the place of a democratic public. Ham-fisted attempts to create a ‘Reality Czar’ or DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board aid the right and solidify the idea that the only alternative to technocratic governance is the pure libertarian self-publishing ontology of posting as sine qua non freedom.
The task of critical communication scholars and anti-fascist researchers should not be to strengthen technocratic governance and dissipate the techlash. There is a robust tradition of propaganda studies that might help contextualize some of the data tools around engagement, provenance and trends that disinformation research prioritizes. Alan MacLeod, cited heavily in this article, takes up the task in his academic work to bring scholars like Herman and Chomsky to bear on the current convergence of capital, tech and empire. The aforementioned work of CITAP is also key for an understanding of the anti-blackness and anti-communism that has been long been a feature of the psychological warfare paradigm.
Any understanding of the current crisis of democracy must radically expand the scope of critique beyond big data tools and place us in this historical moment in which empire and tech-capital are ascendent and diminishing our capacity for meaningful public action.
Dr Olivier Jutel, communications lecturer, University of Otago