Facebook’s changes

January 11, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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[Disclosure: I raised $14 million from Facebook, the Craig Newmark and Ford foundations, and others to start the News Integrity Initiative. I personally receive no money from and am independent of Facebook.]

So, here’s what’s on my mind about Facebook’s changes, just announced by Mark Zuckerberg, to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people” over content from media and brands.

Yes, I’m worried. Let me start there.

I’m worried that now that Facebook has become a primary distributor of news and information in society, it cannot abrogate its responsibility — no matter how accidentally that role was acquired — to help inform our citizenry.

I’m worried that news and media companies — convinced by Facebook (and in some cases by me) to put their content on Facebook or to pivot to video — will now see their fears about having the rug pulled out from under them realized and they will shrink back from taking journalism to the people where they are having their conversations because there is no money to be made there.

I’m worried for Facebook and Silicon Valley that both media and politicians will use this change to stir up the moral panic about technology I see rising in Europe and now in America.

But…

I am hopeful that Facebook’s effort to encourage “meaningful interactions” could lead to greater civility in our conversations, which society desperately needs. The question is: Will Facebook value and measure civility, intelligence, and credibility or mere conversation? We know what conversation alone brings us: comments and trolls. What are “meaningful interactions?”

And…

I wish that Facebook would fuel and support a flight to quality in news. Facebook has lumped all so-called “public content” into one, big, gnarly bucket. It is is dying to get rid of the shit content that gets them into political and PR trouble and that degrades the experience on Facebook and in our lives. Fine. But they must not throw the journalistic baby out with the trolly bathwater. Facebook needs to differentiate and value quality content — links to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and thousands of responsible, informative, useful old and new news outlets around the world.

I wish that Facebook would make clear that it will not use this change to exploit media companies for more advertising revenue when the goal is to inform the public.

I wish that Facebook would not just connect us with the people we know and agree with — our social filter bubbles — but also would devote effort to making strangers less strange, to robbing the demagogues and hate mongers of their favorite weapon: the Other. That, I firmly believe, is the most valuable thing Facebook could do to combat polarization in our world: creating safe spaces where people can share their lives and perspectives with others, helping to build bridges among communities.

I wish that Facebook would work with journalists to help them learn how to use Facebook natively to inform the public conversation where and when it occurs. Until now, Facebook has tried to suck up to media companies (and by extension politicians) by providing distribution and monetization opportunties through Instant Articles and video. Oh, well. So much for that. Now I want to see Facebook help news media make sharable journalism and help them make money through that. But I worry that news organizations will be gun-shy of even trying, sans rug.

So…

I have been rethinking my definition of journalism. It used to be: helping communties organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That was an information-based definition.

After our elections in the U.S., the U.K., Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, I have seen that civility is a dire need and a precondition for journalism and an informed society. So now I have a new definition for journalism, an imperative that I believe news organizations share with Facebook (if it is serious about building communities).

My new definition of journalism: convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.

Will Facebook’s changes help or hurt that cause? We shall see.

LATER: One more thought overnight on what publishers and Facebook should do now: Facebook makes it clear that the best way to get distribution there is for users to share and talk about your links. Conversation is now a key measure of value in Facebook.

The wrong thing to do would be to make and promote content that stirs up short and nasty conversation: “Asshole.” “Fuck you.” “No, fuck you, troll.” “Cuck.” “Nazi.” You know the script. I don’t want to see media move from clickbait to commentbait. Facebook won’t value that. No one will.

The right thing to do — as I have been arguing for almost two years — is to bring journalism to people on Facebook (and Twitter and Snap and Instagram and YouTube…) natively as part of people’s conversations. The easiest example, which I wrote about here, is the meme that someone passes along because it speaks for them, because it adds facts and perspectives to their conversation. There are many other forms and opportunities to make shareable, conversational journalism; a colleague is planning to create a course at CUNY Journalism School around just that.

The problem that will keep publishers from doing this is that there are few ways to monetize using Facebook as Facebook should be used. I’ve been arguing to Facebook for more than two years that they should see Jersey Shore Hurricane News as a model of native news on Facebook — with its loyal members contributing and conversing about their community — and that they should help its creator, Justin Auciello, make money there. Instead, Facebook has had to play to large, established publishers’ desires to distribute the content they have. So Facebook created formats for self-contained content — Instant Articles and videos — with the monetization within. Facebook and publishers painted themselves into a corner by trying to transpose old forms of media into a new reality. Now they’re admitting that doesn’t work.

But journalism and news clearly do have a place on Facebook. Many people learn what’s going on in the world in their conversations there and on the other social platforms. So we need to look how to create conversational news. The platforms need to help us make money that way. It’s good for everybody, especially for citizens.

Death to the Mass(es)!

December 29, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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In the tweets above, leading journalists Ezra Klein and Anne Applebaum reflect the accepted wisdom, raison d’être, and foundational myth of their field: that journalism exists to align the nation upon a common ground of facts, so a uniformly informed mass of citizens can then manage their democracy.

The idea that the nation can and should share one view of reality based on one set of facts is the Cronkite-era myth of mass media: And that’s the way it is.But it wasn’t. The single shared viewpoint was imposed by the means of media production: broadcast uniformity replaced media diversity.

Now that era is over. What the internet kills is the mass media business model, with it mass media, and with it the idea of “the mass” as the homogenized, melted pot of citizens.

I’ll argue that we are returning to a media model that existed before broadcast: with many voices from and for many worldviews.

We are also returning to an earlier meaning of the word “mass” — from “mass market” to “the masses” as the political mob, the uninformed crowd, the ruly multitude … Trump’s base, in other words. That’s what the tweets above lament: a large proportion of the nation (at least ≈30%) who accept what is fed to them by Fox News and fake news and come out believing, just for example, that Obamacare is dead. What are we to do?

The answer isn’t to hope for a return to the Cronkite myth, for it was a myth. Mainstream media did not reflect reality for countless unreflected, underrepresented, and underserved communities; now, thanks to the net, we can better hear them. And mainstream media did not uniformly inform the entire nation; we just couldn’t know who all was uninformed, but now we have a better sense of our failings.

In 1964, E.V. Walter examined the shift from “the masses” to “mass” in his paper, Mass Society: The late stages of an idea in Social Research. He wrote (his emphases):

In the historical course of the idea, the decade 1930–1939 is a watershed. Before those years, thinking about mass behavior was restricted to dealing with the “mass” as a part of society, examining the conditions that produced it, the types of actions peculiar to it and their implications. After that time, the characteristics of the “mass” were attributed to society as a whole. This change was associated with significant historical events. One was the development of mass media…. The other was the more traumatic development of totalitarian systems…

Mass media, mass marketing, and mass production turned the ugly masses, the mobs, into the good mass, the marketplace-of-all to whom we sold uniform products (news, deodorant, politicians), convincing them that everyone should like what everyone else likes: the rule of the Jones. Well, good-bye to all that.

And so we are properly freaked out today: The mass isn’t a cohesive whole anymore (or now we know better). The masses have re-emerged as a mob and have taken over the country. We’ve seen how this played out before with the rise of totalitarian states riding on the shoulders of unruly, uninformed, angry crowds. “[T]he masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general,” José Ortega y Gasset properly fretted in 1930 in The Revolt of the Masses.

So what do we do? Let’s start by recalling that before the 1920s and radio and the 1950s and television, media better reflected the diversity of society with newspapers for the elite, the working class, the immigrant (54 papers were published in New York in 1865; today we can barely scrape together one that covers the city effectively). Some of those newspapers were scurrilous and divisive. The yellow journalism rags could lie worse than even Fox News and Breitbart. Yet the nation survived and managed its way through an industrial revolution, a civil war, a Great Depression, and two world wars, emerging as a relatively intact democracy. How?

It is tempting to consider ignoring and writing off as hopeless the masses, the third of Americans who take Fox and Trump at their words. Clearly that would not be productive. These people managed to elect a president. That’s how they showed the rest of us they cannot be ignored. I worry about an effort to return to rule by the elite because the elites (the intelligent and the informed) are not the same as the powerful (see: Congress).

It is tempting, too, to pay too much attention to that so-called base, reporting on the lies and myths they believe without challenge. This presents two problems. The first, as pointed out by Ezra Klein, is that the election hinged not on the base but on the hinge.

 

 

The second problem is that by paying so much attention to that base, we risk ignoring the majority of Americans who don’t believe these lies, who don’t approve of Trump’s behavior, who don’t approve of the tax bill just signed. As my Twitter friends love to point out, where have you seen the empathetic stories listening to the plurality of voters who elected Hillary Clinton?

The problem is that we in media keep seeking to cadge together a mass that makes sense. We don’t know how to — or have lost from our ancestral memory the ability to — serve diverse communities.

I argue that one solution is not just diversity in the newsrooms we have but diversity in the news and media ecosystem as a whole, with new and better outlets serving and informing many communities, owned by those communities: African-Americans, Latino-Americans, immigrant Americans, old Americans, young Americans, and, yes, conservative Americans.

We need to work with Facebook particularly to find ways to build bridges among communities, so the demagogues cannot fuel and exploit fear of strangers.

We need to work on better systems of holding both politicians and media to account for lies. Fact-checking is a start but is insufficient. Is there any way to shame Fox News into telling the truth? Is there any way to let its viewers know how they are being lied to and used?

We need to listen to James Carey’s lessons about journalism as transmission of fact (that’s what the exchange above is about) to journalism as a ritual of communication. This is why we need to examine new forms of journalism. (This is why we’re looking to start a lab at the CUNY J-school and why I’m leading a brief class next month in Comedy as a Tool of Journalism — and Journalism as a Tool of Comedy.)

What makes me happy about the Twitter exchange atop this post is that it resets the metric of journalistic success away from audience and attention and toward the outcome that matters: whether the public is informed or not. “Not” should scare the shit out of us.

I’m working on a larger piece (maybe a book or a part of one) about post-mass society and the many implications of this shift. A slice of it is how the mass-media mindset affects our view of our work in journalism and of the structure of politics and society. We need a reset. The bad guys — trolls and Russians, to name a few — have learned that talking to the mass is a waste of time and money and targeting is more effective. They have learned that creating social tokens is a more effective means of informing people than creating articles. We have lessons to learn even from them.

The mass is dead. I don’t regret its passing. In some ways, we need to learn how society managed before media helped create this monster. In other ways, we need to recognize how we can use new tools — the ones the bad guys have exploited first — to better connect and inform and manage society. Let’s begin by recognizing that the goal is not to create one shared view of reality but instead to inform discussion and deliberation among many different communities with different perspectives and needs. That’s what society needs. That’s what journalism must become

Democracy Dies in the Light

December 22, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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When the nation’s representatives pass sweeping tax legislation that the majority of voters do not want and that will in the long-run harm most citizens — helping instead corporations, a small, rich elite (including donors), and the politicians themselves — there can be only one interpretation:

Our representatives no longer represent the public; they do not care to. American democracy has died.

Democracy didn’t die in darkness. It died in the light.

The full glare of journalism was turned on this legislation, its impact and motives, but that didn’t matter to those who had the power to go ahead anyway. Journalism, then, proved to be an ineffective protector of democracy, just as it is proving ineffective against every other attack on democracy’s institutions by this gang. Fox News was right to declare a coup, wrong about the source. The coup already happened. The junta is in power. In fact, Fox News led it. We have an administration and Congress that are tearing down government institutions — law enforcement, the courts, the State Department and foreign relations, safety nets, consumer protection, environmental protection — and society’s institutions, starting with the press and science, not to mention truth itself. The junta is, collaborative or independently, doing the bidding of a foreign power whose aim is to get democracy to destroy itself. Journalism, apparently, was powerless to stop any of this.

I don’t mean to say that journalism is solely to blame. But journalism is far from blameless. I have sat in conferences listening to panels of journalists who blame the public they serve. These days, I watch journalists blame Facebook, as if the sickness in American democracy is only a decade old and could be turned on by a machine. I believe that journalism must engage in its own truth and reconciliation process to learn what we have done wrong: how our business models encourage discord and reduction of any complexity to the absurd; how we concentrate on prediction over information and education;how we waste journalistic resource on repetition; how we lately have used ourfalse god of balance to elevate the venal to the normal; how we are redlining quality journalism as a product for the elite. I don’t believe we can fix journalism until we recognize its faults. But I’ll save that for another day. Now I want to ask a more urgent question given the state of democracy.

What should journalism do? Better: What should journalism be? It is obviously insufficient to merely say “this happened today” or “this could happen tomorrow.”

What should journalism’s measures of value be? A stronger democracy? An informed public conversation? Civil discourse? We fail at all those measures now. How can journalism change to succeed at them? What can it do to strengthen — to rescue — democracy? That is the question that consumes me now.

I will start here. We must learn to listen and help the public listen to itself. We in media were never good at listening — not really — but in our defense our media, print and broadcast, were designed for speaking. The internet intervened and enabled everyone to speak but helped no one listen. So now we live in amid ceaseless dissonance: all mouths, no ears. I am coming to see that civility — through listening, understanding, and empathy — is a necessary precondition to learning, to accepting facts and understanding other positions, to changing one’s mind and finding common ground. Thus I have changed my own definition of journalism.

My definition used to be: Helping communities organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That was conveniently broad enough to fit most any entrepreneurial journalism students’ ideas. It was information based, for that was my presumption — the accepted wisdom — about journalism: It lives to inform. Now I have a new definition of journalism:

To convene communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation.

Journalism — and, I’d argue, Facebook and internet platforms — share this imperative to reduce the polarization we all helped cause by helping citizens find common ground.

This is the philosophy behind our Social Journalism program at CUNY. It is why we at the News Integrity Initiative invested in Spaceship Media’s work, to convene communities in conflict into meaningful conversation. But that is just the beginning.

Clearly, journalism must devote more of its resources to investigation, to making sure that the powerful know they are watched, whether they give a damn or not. Journalism must understand its role as an educator and measure its success or failure based on whether the public is more informed. Journalism and the platforms need to provide the tools for communities to organize and act in collaborative, constructive ways. I will leave this exploration, too, for another day.

We are in a crisis of democracy and its institutions, including journalism. The solutions will not be easy or quick. We cannot get there if we assume what we are living through is a new normal or worse if we make it seem normal. We cannot succeed if we assume our old ways are sufficient for a new reality. We must explore new goals, new paths, new tools, new measures of our work.

Moral Authority as a Platform

October 4, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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[See my disclosures below.*]

Since the election, I have been begging the platforms to be transparent about efforts to manipulate them — and thus the public. I wish they had not waited so long, until they were under pressure from journalists, politicians, and prosecutors. I wish they would realize the imperative to make these decisions based on higher responsibility. I wish they would see the need and opportunity to thus build moral authority.

Too often, technology companies hide behind the law as a minimal standard. At a conference in Vienna called Darwin’s Circle, Palantir CEO Alexander Karp (an American speaking impressive German) told Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern that he supports the primacy of the state and that government must set moral standards. Representatives of European institutions were pleasantly surprised not to be challenged with Silicon Valley libertarian dogma. But as I thought about it, I came to see that Karp was copping out, delegating his and his company’s ethical responsibility to the state.

At other events recently, I’ve watched journalists quiz representatives of platforms about what they reveal about manipulation and also what they do and do not distribute and promote on behalf of the manipulators. Again I heard the platforms duck under the law — “We follow the laws of the nations we are in,” they chant — while the journalists pushed them for a higher moral standard. So what is that standard?

Transparency should be easy. If Facebook, Twitter, and Google had revealed that they were the objects of Russian manipulation as soon as they knew it, then the story would have been Russia. Instead the story is the platforms.

I’m glad that Mark Zuckerberg has said that in the future, if you see a political ad in your feed, you will be able to link to the page or user that bought it. I’d like the platforms to all go farther:

  • First, internet platforms should make every political ad available for public inspection, setting a standard that goes far beyond the transparency required of political advertising on broadcast and certainly beyond what we can find out about dark political advertising in direct mail and robocalls. Why shouldn’t the platforms lead the way?
  • Second, I think it is critical that the platforms reveal the targeting criteria used for these political ads so we can see what messages (and lies and hate) are aimed at whom.
  • Third, I’d like to see all this data made available to researchers and journalists so the public — the real target of manipulation — can learn more about what is aimed at them.

The reason to do this is just not to avoid bad PR or merely to follow the law, to meet minimal expectations. The reason to do all this is to establish public responsibility consumate with the platforms’ roles as the proprietors of so much of the internet and thus the future.

In What Would Google Do?, I praised the Google founders’ admonition to their staff — “Don’t be evil” — as a means to keep the company honest. The cost of doing evil in business has risen as customers have gained the ability to talk about a company and as anyone could move to a competitor with a click. But that, too, was a minimal standard. I now see that Google — and its peers — should have evolved to a higher standard:

“Do good. Be good.”

I don’t buy the arguments of cynics who say it is impossible for a corporation to be anything other than greedy and evil and that we should give up on them. I believe in the possibility and wisdom of enlightened self-interest and I believe we can hold these companies to an expectation of public spirit if not benevolence. I also take Zuck at his word when he asks forgiveness “for the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together,” and vows to do better. So let us help him define better.

The caveats are obvious: I agree with the platforms that we do not want them to become censors and arbiters of right v. wrong; to enforce prohibitions determined by the lowest-common-demoninators of offensiveness; to set precedents that will be exploited by authoritarian governments; to make editorial judgments.

But doing good and being good as a standard led Google to its unsung announcement last April that it would counteract manipulation of search ranking by taking account of the reliability, authority, and quality of sources. Thus Google took the side of science over crackpot conspirators, because it was the right thing to do. (But then again, I just saw that Alternet complains that it and other advocacy and radical sites are being hit hard by this change. We need to make clear that fighting racism and hate is not to be treated like spreading racism and hate. We must be able to have an open discussion about how these standards are being executed.)

Doing good and being good would have led Facebook to transparency about Russian manipulation sooner.

Doing good and being good would have led Twitter to devote resources to understanding and revealing how it is being used as a tool of manipulation — instead of merely following Facebook’s lead and disappointing Congressional investigators. More importantly, I believe a standard of doing good and being good would lead Twitter to set a higher bar of civility and take steps to stop the harassment, stalking, impersonation, fraud, racism, misogyny, and hate directed at its own innocent users.

Doing good and being good would also lead journalistic institutions to examine how they are being manipulated, how they are allowing Russians, trolls, and racists to set the agenda of the public conversation. It would lead us to decide what our real job is and what our outcomes should be in informing productive and civil civic conversation. It would lead us to recognize new roles and responsibilities in convening communities in conflict into uncomfortable but necessary conversation, starting with listening to those communities. It should lead us to collaborate with and set an example for the platforms, rather than reveling in schadenfreude when they get in trouble. It should also lead us all — media companies and platforms alike — to recognize the moral hazards embedded in our business models.

I don’t mean to oversimplify even as I know I am. I mean only to suggest that we must raise up not only the quality of public conversation but also our own expectations of ourselves in technology and media, of our roles in supporting democratic deliberation and civil (all senses of the word) society. I mean to say that this is the conversation we should be having among ourselves: What does it mean to do and be good? What are our standards and responsibilities? How do we set them? How do we live by them?

Building and then operating from that position of moral authority becomes the platform more than the technology. See how long it is taking news organizations to learn that they should be defined not by their technology — “We print content” — but instead by their trust and authority. That must be the case for technology companies as well. They aren’t just code; they must become their missions.

* Disclosure: The News Integrity Initiative, operated independently at CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center, which I direct, received funding from Facebook, the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, and the Ford Foundation and support from the Knight and Tow foundations, Mozilla, Betaworks, AppNexus, and the Democracy Fund.

Our problem isn’t ‘fake news.’ Our problems are trust and manipulation.

June 12, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

“Fake news” is merely a symptom of greater social ills. Our real problems: trust and manipulation. Our untrusted — and untrustworthy — institutions are vulnerable to manipulation by a slough of bad guys, from trolls and ideologues to Russians and terrorists, all operating under varying motives but similar methods.

Trust is the longer-term problem — decades- or even a century-long. But if we don’t grapple with the immediate and urgent problem of manipulation, those institutions may not live to reinvent themselves and earn the public’s trust back with greater inclusion, equity, transparency, responsiveness, and honesty. At the News Integrity Initiative, we will begin to address both needs.

Here I want to examine the emergency of manipulation with a series of suggestions about the defenses needed by many sectors — not just news and media but also platforms, technology companies, brands, marketing, government, politics, education. These include:

  • Awareness. As Storyful asks, “Who’s your 4chan correspondent?” If we do not understand how we are being manipulated, we become the manipulators’ agents.
  • Starving the manipulators of money but more importantly of attention, exposing their methods without giving unwarranted attention to their messages.
  • Learning from the success of the manipulators’ methods and co-opting them to bring facts, journalism, and truth to the public conversation where it occurs.
  • Bringing greater transparency and accountability to our institutions. In journalism’s case, this means showing our work, recognizing the danger of speed (a game the manipulators will always win), and learning to listen to the public to reflect and serve communities’ distinct needs. In the platforms’ case, it means accounting for quality in algorithmic decisions and helping users better judge the sources of information. In the ad industry’s case, it means bringing tools to bear so we can hold brands, agencies, and networks responsible for what they choose to support.

I will explore these suggestions in greater detail after first examining the mechanisms and motives of manipulation. I claim no expertise in this; I’m just sharing my learning as it occurs.

I became convinced that manipulation is the immediate emergency thanks to danah boyd of Data & Society, which recently issued an excellent report by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” They catalog who is trying to manipulate media — trolls, ideologues, hate groups, conspiracy theorists, gamergaters; where and how they do it — via blogs, sites, message boards, and social media; and why they do it — for money, for hate, for power, to cause polarization, to disrupt institutions, or for the lulz.

In discussing manipulation, it is important to also examine Russian means and methods. For that, I recommend two provocative reports: the NATO Defense College’s “Handbook of Russian Information Warfare” by Keir Giles and the RAND Corporation’s “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model” by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews.

Says danah: “Our media, our tools, and our politics are being leveraged to help breed polarization by countless actors who can leverage these systems for personal, economic, and ideological gain. Sometimes, it’s for the lulz. Sometimes, the goals are much more disturbing.”

In short: We are being used.

Russian manipulation

I found the NATO manual particularly worrying, for in examining what Russia has done to manipulate information in Ukraine and elsewhere, we see the script for much of what is happening now in the United States. I’m not suggesting Russia is behind this all but instead that all the manipulators learn from each other while we in media do not.

NATO emphasizes that Russia does not think of this as cyber warfare but instead as information warfare. “Russia refers to ‘information space,’” Rand says, “and includes in this space both computer and human information processing, in effect the cognitive domain.” Human psychology, that is. Thus, Russia’s weapons work neatly not only online but also in mainstream media, enabling it to “steal, plant, interdict, manipulate, distort or destroy information.”

“Information,” says the author of a Russian paper NATO cites, “has become the same kind of weapon as a missile, a bomb, and so on [but it] allows you to use a very small amount of matter or energy to begin, monitor, and control processes whose matter and energy parameters are many orders of magnitude larger.”

Russia has weaponized a new chain reaction in social media. To what end?

“The main aim of information-psychological conflict is regime change,” says another Russian paper, “by means of influence on the mass consciousness of the population — directing people so that the population of the victim country is induced to support the aggressor, acting against its own interests.”

Sound familiar? Sound chilling? See, our problem is not just some crappy content containing lies and stupidity. The problem is a powerful strategy to manipulate you.

Our institutions help them. “Russia seeks to influence foreign decision-making by supplying polluted information,” NATO says, “exploiting the fact that Western elected representatives receive and are sensitive to the same information flows as their voters.” That is, when they play along, the journalism, the open internet, and the free speech we cherish are used against us. “Even responsible media reporting can inadvertently lend authority to false Russian arguments.” Therein lies the most insidious danger that danah boyd warns against: playing into their hands by giving them attention and calling it news.

Their goal is polarization — inside a nation and among its allies — and getting a country to eat its own institutions. Their tactics, in the words of former NATO press officer Ben Nimmo, aim to “‘dismiss, distract, dismay’ and can be achieved by exploiting vulnerabilities in the target society, particularly freedom of expression and democratic principles.” They use “‘mass information armies’ conducting direct dialogue with people on the internet” and describe information weapons as “more dangerous than nuclear ones.” Or as the Russian authors of a paper NATO cites say: “The mass media today can stir up chaos and confusion in government and military management of any country and instill ideas of violence, treachery, and immorality and demoralize the public.”

Feel demoralized these days? Then it’s working.

The Russian paper on information-psychological warfare that NATO quotes lists Russia’s key tactics, which— like their goals and outcomes — will sound eerily familiar:

The primary methods of manipulating information used by the mass media in the interests of information-psychological confrontation objectives are:

Direct lies for the purpose of disinformation….;

Concealing critically important information;

Burying valuable information in a mass of information dross…;

Terminological substitution: use of concepts and terms whose meaning is unclear or has undergone qualitative change, which makes it harder to form a true picture of events; [see “fake news”]

Introducing taboos on specific forms of information or categories of news…; [see “political correctness”]

Providing negative information, which is more readily accepted by the audience than positive.

More tactics: Trolls and bots are used to create a sense of public opinion so it is picked up by media. Journalists are harassed and intimidated, also by trolls and bots. They exploit volume: “When information volume is low,” says RAND, “recipients tend to favor experts, but when information volume is high, recipients tend to favor information from other uses.” And they exploit speed: “Russian propaganda has the agility to be first,” Rand observes. “It takes less time to make up facts than it does to verify them.” And the first impression sets the agenda.

At the highest level, they attack truth. “Multiple untruths, not necessarily consistent, are in part designed to undermine trust in the existence of objective truth, whether from media or from official sources,” says NATO. “This contributes to eroding the comparative advantages of liberal democratic societies when seeking to counter disinformation.” [My emphasis]

What do we in journalism do in response? We fact-check. We debunk. We cover them. But that’s precisely what they want us to do for then we give them attention. Says former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt: “You could spend every hour of every day trying to bat down every lie, to the point where you don’t achieve anything else. And that’s exactly what the Kremlin wants.”

Western manipulation

Again, I am not saying the Russia is behind all media manipulation. Far from it. But as Hillary Clinton suggested, the Macedonian fake news factory that went after her learned their tricks somewhere. Trolls and manipulators learn from each other and so we must learn about them ourselves.

In their Data & Society report, Marwick and Lewis do considerable forensic research into the dissemination of pro-Trump populist messages, which spread (1) “through memes shared on blogs and Facebook, through Twitter bots, through YouTube channels;” sometimes passing through even (2) the Trump’s own Twitter account; until they are then (3) “propagated by a far-right hyper-partisan press rooted in conspiracy theories and disinformation” (read: Breitbart et al); until (4) “they influenced the agenda of mainstream news sources.” From 4chan and 8chan to Alex Jones to Breitbart to Trump to Fox to CNN to you.

Just as “fake news” is a sloppy label, so is “alt-right.” Marwick and Lewis dissect that worm into its constituent segments: “an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, techno-libertarians, white nationalists, Men’s Rights advocates, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration activists, and bored young people.” They “leverage both the techniques of participatory culture and the affordances of social media to spread their various beliefs” and “target vulnerabilities in the news media ecosystem to increase the visibility of and audience for their messages.” What ties them together is some measure of belief — anti-establishment, anti-multiculturalism, anti-globalism, anti-feminism, anti-Semitic, anti-political correctness, and nationalist and racist ideologies. But what mostly links them is their techniques. As trolls, they aim for reaction for reaction’s sake. They mock the “type of tragedy-of-the-week moral panic perpetrated by talk shows and cable news,” as observed by net scholar Whitney Phillips. And they exploit Poe’s Law, playing “with ambiguity in such a way that the audience is never quite sure whether or not they are serious.”

They hack social media, media, and ultimately attention and democracy.

And therein lies the paradoxical vice in which we find ourselves: When we address, check, and attack them, we feed them with attention. Hillary Clinton learned the hard way that “by addressing [fringe] ideas, she also gave them new visibility and legitimacy.” She “inadvertently cemented their importance.” Say Marwick and Lewis: “By getting the media to cover certain stories, even by debunking them, media manipulators are able to influence the public agenda.”

And it is only going to get worse. At a World Economic Forum discussion on the topic that I facilitated in San Francisco, I heard a few frightening predictions: First, the bad guys’ next targets will be “pillars of society” — doctors, pastors, auditors, judges. Second, communities will devolve into “belief tribes” where anyone who disagrees with an orthodoxy of opinion will be branded a shill. Third, augmented reality will make it easier to fake not just text and photo but also audio and video and thus identity. And fourth, what I am coming to fear greatly: a coming Luddite rebellion against technology will separate us into “connected and disconnected tribes.”

At another WEF discussion, I heard from executives of NGOs, governments, banks, consumer brands, pharma, accounting, and media that they are beginning to recognize the emergency we face. Good.

So WTF do we do?

We in media and other institutions must develop new strategies that account for the very new tactics undertaken by our new enemies. We must go far beyond where we are now.

Today, some are tackling falsehoods by fact-checking. Some want to enhance the public’s critical thinking through so-called news literacy. Some are compiling lists and signals of vice (NII is collaborating with Storyful and Moat in one such effort) and of virtue in sources. Google is seeking to account for the reliability, authority, and quality of sources in its ranking. Facebook is killing the fake accounts used to mimic public conversation. (If only Twitter would get aggressive against malevolent bots and fakes.) I’ve seen no end of (Quixotic, I believe) efforts to rank sites for quality.

These are fine as far as they go, but rather than attacking the facts, sources, and accounts — merely tactics — we need to go after the real symptom (manipulation) and the real ill (trust). “The first step is to recognize that this is a nontrivial challenge,” RAND understates. Some of the suggestions I’m thinking about:

Build awareness: News media must recognize how and when they are the objects of manipulation. I so like Storyful’s idea of hiring a 4chan correspondent that we at NII are thinking of underwriting just such a journalist to help news organizations understand what is happening to them, giving them advance notice of the campaigns against them.

I also want to see all the experts I quote above — and others on my growing list — school media and other sectors in how they are being manipulated and what they could do in defense. Without that, they become trolls’ toys and Putin’s playthings.

Share intelligence: Besides 4chan correspondents, major newsrooms should have threat officers whose job it is to recognize manipulation before it affects news coverage and veracity. These threat officers should be communicating with their counterparts in newsrooms elsewhere. At the WEF meetings, I was struck how major brands staff war rooms to deal with disinformation attacks yet they don’t share information among themselves. So let’s establish networks of security executives in and across sectors to share intelligence, threat assessments, warnings, best practices, and lessons. To borrow the framing of NII supporter Craig Newmark, these could be NATOs for journalism, media, brands, and so on, established to both inform and protect each other. NII would be eager to help such efforts.

Starve them: There are lots of efforts underway — some linked above — to starve manipulators of their economic support through advertising, helping ad networks, agencies, and brands avoid putting their money behind the bad guys (and, I hope, choosing instead to support quality in media). We also need to put the so-called recommendations engines (Revcontent, Adblade, News Max, as well as Taboola and Outbrain) on the spot for supporting and profiting fake news — likewise for the publishers that distribute their dross. Even this takes us only so far.

The tougher challenge — especially for news organizations — is starving the manipulators of what they crave and feed upon: attention. I can hear journalists object that they have to cover what people are talking about. But what if people aren’t talking about it; bots are? What if the only reason people end up talking is because a polluted wellspring of manipulation rose from a few fanatics on 4chan to Infowars to Breitbart to Fox to MSM and — thanks to the work of a 4chan correspondent — you now know that? I can also hear journalists argue that everything I’ve presented here makes manipulators a story worth covering and telling the public about. Yes, but only to an extent. I’ll argue that journalism should cover the manipulators’ methods but not their messages.

Get ahead of them: RAND warns that there is no hope in answering the manipulators, so it is wiser to compete with them. “Don’t direct your flow of information directly back at the firehose of falsehood; instead, point your stream at whatever the firehose is aimed at, and try to push that audience in more productive directions…. Increase the flow of persuasive information and start to compete.” In other words, if you know — thanks to your intelligence network and 4chan correspondent — that the bad guys are going to go after, say, vaccines, than get there first and set the public agenda with journalism and facts about it. Warn the public about how someone will try to manipulate them. Don’t react later. Inform first.

Learn from them: We in media continue to insist that the world has not changed around us, that citizens must come to us and our fonts of information to be informed. No! We must change how we operate, taking journalism to the public where and when their conversation occurs. We should learn from the bad guys’ lessons in spreading disinformation so we can use their techniques to spread information. We also should not assume that all our tried-and-true tools — articles, explainers, fact-checking — can counteract manipulators’ propaganda. We must experiment and learn what does and does not persuade people to favor facts and rationality.

Rebuild yourself and your trust: Finally, we move from the symptoms to ailments. Our institutions are not trusted for many reasons and we must address those reasons. Media — not just our legacy institutions but also the larger media ecosystem — must become more equitable, inclusive, reflective of, and accountable to many communities. We must become more transparent. We must learn to listen first before creating the product we call content. Brands, government, and politics must also learn to listen first. These are longer-term goals.