Celine Dion: a Canadian singer says,
“Life imposes things on you that you can’t control, but you still have the choice of how you’re going to live through this”.
Information disorder is one such thing that has been enforce upon us intentionally or unintentionally and now it is up to us how we can deal with it.
According to leading social media expert of “First Draft”, misinformation has created a “New World Disorder” mainly due to willingness to share disinformation without realizing that these are false or misleading, which means contents that are intentionally false and designed to cause harm are shared to contact the likeminded people or groups who can be terrorists, money launderers, religious extremists or racial extremist depending upon the message conveyed through shared disinformation.
Another adulterant of information arena is the term “mal-information” which is sharing of genuine information with an intent to cause harm. A textbook example of this is hacking of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and leaking it to the public to damage her reputations during the election 2016 campaign which Hillary lost.
The latest definition of mal information is that it is a “news or story line” which is not entirely fake but have some genuine content which, the perpetrator reframes and portray it using exaggerated headlines in such a way that it become misleading.
The intention of such misleading and falsely fabricated stories/news is to convert it into a satire, which is difficult to be detected by the factcheckers and to connect with different people or group of people with different opinions or to completely opposing people or groups to create intentional chaos.
This is what is called “weaponizing the context” which can be exemplified by an edited video of “US House Speaker” that was circulated in May 2018. It was a genuine video but slowed down and then posted with a clip that “house speaker was slurring her words”. Viewers immediately began speculating that she was dunked, and the video spread on social media. When mainstream media picked it up and showed it to many more people than those originally encountered, the intentions were achieved.
Although, misinformation is not a new phenomenon nevertheless in 2016, some specific events made it obvious that some forces with nephrons designs were weaponizing the information to influence opinion of the opinion maker.
Rodrigo Duterte’s coming to power in Philippines, unexpected Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections were enough to indicate how systematically and deliberately, information are being and will be used as “weapon”.
What will be the consequences? Nobody can imagine
Weaponized information can either be a message, or a piece of content designed in a way that can influence the recipient’s perception about something or someone in such a way that is not justified because it points towards a target with the intention to cause harm.
The ultimate goal of weaponized information (sometime called cognitive hacking) is to change the recipient’s behavior, beliefs, and attitudes to promote a specific behavior that serves the attacker’s purpose.
One of the most dangerous outcomes of this phenomenon would be intense susceptibility of public at large to misinformation and conspiracy theories and increased lack of trust in institutions. “The Atlantic” an American magazine and multi-platform publisher, published in March 2020, a story by “McKay Coppin’s” titled “The billion-dollar election campaign to reelect president: how new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election”?
In the section “Disinformation Architecture” of this story, Peter Pomerantsev (the author of “This is not propaganda: Adventures in the war against Reality” (currently a researcher at London School of Economics), writes about a young Filipino political consultant whom he calls “P”.
In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment” which is a controlled experiment showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans.
For this purpose, 11 months old Albert was put on a mattress lying on a table placed in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert, and he was allowed to play with it. The moment he started playing with rat, a loud sound was made behind Albert’s back each time Albert touched the rat. Albert responded to the noise by crying and showing fear. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was presented with only the rat. Upon seeing the rat, Albert got very distressed, started crying, and crawling away. Apparently, Albert associated the white rat with the noise. The experiment was conducted in Johns Hopkins University and the results were published in February 1920 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The experiment gave P an idea “how and what kind of fear can be created in the public. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough (about 100,000 members), he began posting local crime stories with horrific headlines and falsely binding them to drug cartels. He then instructed his employees to leave comments which immediately filled the Facebook pages with frightening conversation, rumors whirled, and conspiracy theories metastasized.
“This cleverly designed, and very well-planned exercise firmly established that all crimes are drug crimes or drug related crimes”
Without their prior knowledge and without any kind of realization, Facebook groups were designed to boost the election campaign of Rodrigo Duterte who was contesting presidential office on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. The exercise was just one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture” which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls (trolling to defend a stance on an issue for payment: look at our social media and you will understand this phenomenon) working out of call centers which according to experts helped Duterte’s rise to power. After assuming office in 2016, Duterte reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.
The campaign in Philippine was a representative of an emerging propaganda playbook, that uses new tools for the age-old end of dictatorship.
As per 2011 manual of Russian Civil Servants, “propaganda and disinformation” is like “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon”. A textbook example of this situation can be witnessed in Pakistan where complete chaos, lawlessness and uncertainty is prevailing buoyed by conspiracy theories, disinformation, and misgoverness. The government is helpless, everyone is master of his/her own thinking and perception (largely distorted) as if some unseen forces want to deepen the existing tensions and fuel the crises with the understanding that it will raise public anger and ignite the emotions of targeted users to become the messenger of the weaponized information through their own social media platforms. The original message this way will not only get credibility, but it will further spread like wildfire and will help achieved the designed but, nephrons objectives.
So dear readers, be alert and vigilant to thwart the designs of those who wanted to harm you.
“Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as you can “Hillary Clinton”,
It is obligatory for all of use to fight the menace of “New world disorder” and do all the good that together we can do. Agreed?
See you next week, Take cake care and stay blessed. Please don’t forget to comment and share.
