In his novel Baudolino, Umberto Eco writes of a medieval letter forging exercise. For their own political purposes, a group of friends write a realistic, but fake, letter addressed to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. The fake letter is from Prester John.
Surely you know Prester John?
Let’s look at the tacit tradition of disinformation and what will change in the future. What is changing about the nature of truth? Will it be harder to tell what is true? Or was it always hard? What are the unintended consequences?
The Prester John Effect
Prester John was a legendary king of kings who was said to rule a massive kingdom somewhere in Central Asia. Or maybe India. Or Africa. No one knew, but for hundreds of years Europeans held out hope for his (or his descendants’) existence. Popes and kings sent letters to him asking for his support against the military threats of their day.
While Prester John remained unseen, European powers held out great hopes for a glorious alliance with his fantastic kingdom. But as centuries passed, logically, the less likely it was that Prester John or his kingdom even existed.
No matter. When something is desired to be true, hope or sketchy evidence will persuade.
Disinformation vs Misinformation
While misinformation may come from honest mistakes, disinformation is intentional. Its purpose is to mislead and harm. Historically, we see this in propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media. I like the definition from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Disinformation is “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.”
The best thing about the word disinformation is its etymology. Stalin constructed the word with the intention to make it sound non-Russian.
Romanian and Soviet secret police official — and later defector to the US — Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote the book Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West. It’s an interesting read, though naturally at times I wonder about some of his own claims…
Pacepa lists many disinformation campaigns, including planting fake stories of racist American church fires, fooling the international community about the liberalization of Romania, and others that weakened his former enemies.
From Pacepa’s book: “[T]he Western media are quite easily manipulated, for they often craft their stories from press releases and tend, on the whole, to be indiscriminate about the nature and reliability of their sources.”
“During the Cold War, more people in the Soviet bloc worked for the disinformation machinery than for the Soviet army and defense industry put together. The bloc’s intelligence community alone had well over one million officers and several million informants around the world. All were involved in deceiving the West — and their own people — or in supporting this effort.”
Today, there are still large numbers of people employed in disinformation efforts, especially in meme creation and fake news.
One of Pacepa’s examples that had already fooled me was about the news reports that looters had ransacked the Baghdad museum after the American invasion in 2003.
“The museum’s deputy director said looters had taken or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years. ‘They were worth billions of dollars,’ she [Nabhal Amin, deputy director at the Iraqi National Museum] said. ‘The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened.’ Reporters who visited the museum on Saturday saw smashed display cases and broken pieces of pottery.” — reported by the BBC
However, this story — to my surprise — was incorrect. Ms Amin was not the director of the museum, or even an employee. A NY Times article, posted three weeks later, revealed “A top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum’s most precious artifacts in secure ‘repositories.’ Later estimates claimed that 15,000 artifacts were missing.
The incorrect BBC article is still available online.
The Long Con
Investing in years of disinformation was formerly limited to state actors. This might change.
“The AIDS virus, a terrible disease for which up to now no known cure has been found, was, in the opinion of some Western researchers, created in the
laboratories of the Pentagon.” The words on the flag from the beaker: “Virus AIDS.” Caption below reads: “Pentagon (AIDS) specialists.”
Just as the best burglars walk through open doors, the best fakes are believable. Operation Infektion was an example of this. This disinformation campaign was a multi-year Soviet effort to plant stories that the US had invented HIV/AIDS. The purpose was to undermine international US military bases.
The USSR planted international stories that quoted and spread a pseudo-scientific paper that claimed only a bio-warfare lab could have developed HIV. The pattern used to spread the story was to identify a non-Soviet news source quoting the paper and then amplifying their message. This disinformation may have affected more non-Americans than Americans by convincing them that US-produced condoms and treatments were in fact spreading HIV in their countries.
The effects lasted much longer than the disinformation campaign itself. The campaign also eventually impacted Americans directly — after the USSR was no more.
“In 1992, 15 percent of randomly selected Americans considered definitely or probably true the statement ‘the AIDS virus was created deliberately in a government laboratory.’ African Americans were particularly prone to subscribe to the AIDS conspiracy theory. A 1997 survey found that 29 percent of African Americans considered the statement ‘AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory to infect black people’ true or possibly true. And a 2005 study by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University revealed that nearly 50 percent of African Americans thought AIDS was man-made, with over a quarter considering AIDS the product of a government lab.” — Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign (p 19)
There was history behind American willingness to believe that a US military lab created HIV. The Tuskegee syphilis study, run from 1932 to 1972 to observe the way untreated syphilis affected people. The subjects of the study were 399 black men who were told that they were receiving free health care — not about the study itself. This led to a class-action lawsuit in 1973. The damage is still being done. Disinformation related to HIV was easier because governmental trust about health issues was already broken.
The Automated Future
What turns could disinformation take in the future? When it comes to creating and spreading disinformation, a few things have changed.
Distribution. New disinformation can reach the market at increased speed and lower cost than before. When distributing disinformation content via social media, online video, and chat groups, a message can reach millions.
Technology. Creation of realistic content, whether images or video deep fakes is now possible. While fake content has always been spread — whether by text or edited images — the addition of realistic video and sound complicate things. Here, a deep fake video of Mark Zuckerberg shows what’s possible.
Statistical approach. It doesn’t matter if disinformation campaigns can be identified. What matters is when disinformation can be deployed with iterations that test various message At scale some disinformation will always remain unidentified or unidentified for long enough to do damage.
To try to educate readers against fake news, researchers built a game to serve as a “psychological vaccination.” It’s a start, but as seen with a slight edit to financial market close numbers, disinformation can be without emotion (what the game helps guard against).
In Eco’s book, the friends discover that Prester John wrote to too many people. That is, others also found that they could also use the legend of Prester John to trick their own targets and his impact eventually faded.
But new Prester Johns can be created without end.
Consider
- Changes in technology and distribution mean that disinformation attempts cost less. Most of those attempts may fail on their own. But when deployed at scale, it doesn’t matter if most disinformation efforts fail. Some will succeed.
- Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about the way an actual global epidemic could be received. “[W]e’ll be fighting it on two fronts. The first is… understanding the disease, researching a cure and inoculating the population. The second is… fighting the deluge of rumors, misinformation and flat-out lies that will appear on the internet.”
- If anything can be made to look real, will people stop caring and take everything as fake?
- The message need not be extreme. The above example of edited financial market numbers can do lots of damage.
- Ideological subversion is not needed to create and promote disinformation.
- Long-term investment in building trust can minimize the effect of disinformation, as long as official news sources can also get good distribution.
- Disinformation continues in international conflicts. Countries around the world are now starting to address effects of disinformation. As elsewhere, they will always be a step behind.