Tag: disinformation

This Disinformation Is Just for You

IT’S NOW WELL understood that generative AI will increase the spread of disinformation on the internet. From deepfakes to fake news articles to bots, AI will generate not only more disinformation, but more convincing disinformation. But what people are only starting to understand is how disinformation will become more targeted and better able to engage with people and sway their opinions.

When Russia tried to influence the 2016 US presidential election via the now disbanded Internet Research Agency, the operation was run by humans who often had little cultural fluency or even fluency in the English language and so were not always able to relate to the groups they were targeting. With generative AI tools, those waging disinformation campaigns will be able to finely tune their approach by profiling individuals and groups. These operatives can produce content that seems legitimate and relatable to the people on the other end and even target individuals with personalized disinformation based on data they’ve collected. Generative AI will also make it much easier to produce disinformation and will thus increase the amount of disinformation that’s freely flowing on the internet, experts say.

“Generative AI lowers the financial barrier for creating content that’s tailored to certain audiences,” says Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. “You can tailor it to audiences and make sure the narrative hits on the values and beliefs of those audiences, as well as the strategic part of the narrative.”

Rather than producing just a handful of articles a day,  Starbird adds, “You can actually write one article and tailor it to 12 different audiences. It takes five minutes for each one of them.”

Considering how much content people post to social media and other platforms, it’s very easy to collect data to build a disinformation campaign. Once operatives are able to profile different groups of people throughout a country, they can teach the generative AI system they’re using to create content that manipulates those targets in highly sophisticated ways.

“You’re going to see that capacity to fine-tune. You’re going to see that precision increase. You’re going to see the relevancy increase,” says Renee Diresta, the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

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UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

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Troubling questions surround BBC ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring

Little is known about the history of Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first “disinformation correspondent.” But her record of churning out disinfo of her own in the service of British government objectives sends a bright red flag up over the new Verify project. 

The launch of BBC Verify, “a new brand to address the growing threat of disinformation and build trust with audiences by transparently showing how BBC journalists know the information they are reporting,” has raised questions about whether the British state broadcaster is ramping up plans to manufacture consent for official objectives while maligning dissent. 

The endeavor is said to be “a highly specialized team with a range of forensic and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques.” In all, 60 BBC journalists are involved – including the “specialist disinformation correspondent” Marianna Spring.

The week after Verify’s rollout was announced, the 27-year-old Spring took to airwaves to acquaint BBC Breakfast viewers with her new venture. She explained its mission was to “verify video, factcheck, counter disinformation, and analyze really complex stories so we can get to the truth of what’s going on.”

Standing before three interactive video screens, Spring outlined an array of investigative projects soon to appear under the auspices of Verify. They included an initiative employing “undercover accounts” which comprise a set of fake “characters” active on social media networks. The ostensible purpose of the sock-puppets created by Spring and her BBC associates is to “really understand polarization online and what’s happening on our social media feeds and what we’re being recommended and being pushed to us [sic] can affect all of us.”

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INSIDE THE PENTAGON’S NEW “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT” OFFICE TO COUNTER DISINFORMATION

NOT LONG AFTER the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched what it called the Office of Strategic Influence, which would seek to “counter the enemy’s perception management” in the so-called war on terror. But it quickly became clear that the office, operating under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, would be managing those perceptions with its own disinformation.

As the New York Times reported at the time, its work was to “provide news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.” In the nascent Internet age, observers worried the propaganda could boomerang back on Americans.

“The question is whether the Pentagon and military should undertake an official program that uses disinformation to shape perceptions abroad,” the Times reported in 2004. “But in a modern world wired by satellite television and the Internet, any misleading information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by American news outlets.”

Now, two decades later, “perception management” is once again becoming a central focus for the national security state. On March 1, 2022, the Pentagon established a new office with similar goals to the one once deemed too controversial to remain open. Very little has been made public about the effort, which The Intercept learned about through a review of budget documents and an internal memo we obtained. This iteration is called the Influence and Perception Management Office, or IPMO, according to the memo, which was produced by the office for an academic institution, and its responsibilities include overseeing and coordinating the various counter-disinformation efforts being conducted by the military, which can include the U.S.’s own propaganda abroad.

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UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

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DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide

When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in “best practices.”

A year later, Mayorkas’ department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from “blowback,” FOIA documents showed. 

More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board’s former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. 

What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by “hostile” news outlets.

In the FOIA emails, Jankowicz cited “blowback and abuse” after certain media outlets began describing the board as the “Ministry of Truth” as word spread about its formation. 

“There is a fair possibility this could end up on a hostile TV network in the coming days,” she wrote.

Some of the communications show the board’s responses to direct questions posed in a letter from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), such as what language in the Constitution allows DHS to create such a board and hire staff for it.

Other questions included which parts of DHS would be “responsible for monitoring and collecting data” on misinformation and what “specific actions” DHS intended to take to “counter misinformation.” Each answer was redacted by the department. 

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A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century

If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

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New Law Sought by Brazil’s Lula to Ban and Punish “Fake News and Disinformation” Threatens the Free Internet Everywhere

A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil’s new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning, and punishing not only “fake news” and “disinformation” online, but also punishing those deemed guilty of spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet’s most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. 

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase “the democratic world” and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid “democracies” – then one could argue that a couple other “democratic” governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw “fake news” and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors. 

Last May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to retreat from its attempt to appoint a “disinformation czar” to oversee what would effectively be its Ministry of Truth. That new DHS agency, at least nominally, was to be only advisory: it would declare truth and falsity and then pressure online platforms to comply by banning that which was deemed false. The backlash was so great that DHS finally claimed to cancel it, though secret documents emerged in October describing the agency’s plans to continue to shape online censorship decisions of Big Tech. 

Brazil’s law would be anything but advisory. Though the details are still yet to be released, it would empower law enforcement officials to take action against citizens deemed to be publishing statements that the government classifies as “false,” and to solicit courts to impose punishment on those who do so.

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Ad Network Owned by Microsoft Is Using Foreign Disinformation ‘Experts’ to Blacklist Conservative Media Companies

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign think tank headquartered in the United Kingdom, released an assessment of American online media designed to blacklist conservative media outlets and choke off their advertising revenue. The information is kept on what GDI calls its “Dynamic Exclusion List.”

Ad networks — including most prominently Xandr — which is owned by Microsoft — are now using this list to refuse to allow advertising on conservative media websites.

Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment regarding Xandr’s use of the Dynamic Exclusion List, which is censoring conservative outlets. 

GDI in December released its report that detailed the alleged “disinformation risk” for the American online media market in partnership with the Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL), a think tank at the University of Texas at Austin that generates policy recommendations and solutions to combat disinformation.  

The GDI report on the American online media landscape reviewed 69 news outlets, and listed ten outlets it found are the most at risk of spreading disinformation, and ten outlets that are the least likely to spread disinformation. GDI rated conservative sites as having the highest risk for spreading disinformation and liberal websites as the most trusted.

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