Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

Before 2016, the public’s biggest anxiety around social media was that it could be used to beam reams of information about us straight to the prying eyes of faceless spies. Now, our chief fear is that those same spies will be the ones beaming information to us. The ongoing revelations surrounding the Russian cyber-disinformation campaign in 2016 and beyond — which included everything from the use of paid trolls and online bots to spread propaganda to the dissemination of fake news to unwitting readers — have spurred an ongoing panic about the effects of such campaigns and the Kremlin’s ability to wage them. This disinformation campaign has been widely labelled “cyber warfare,” a term that traditionally referred to attacks on computers or information networks using viruses and denial of service attacks. Russian intelligence agencies have been dubbed “masters” of such a “cyber foreign policy,” their work likened to “the world of mind control imagined by George Orwell.” As a result, the response from embattled social media companies tends to focus on the dangers of cyber-disinformation originating in Russia. Facebook is working on creating a tool that tells users if they’ve interacted with a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the recently indicted Internet Research Agency (IRA). In response to a report that content from IRA-linked websites was shared on Reddit, the company’s co-founder insisted they were doing what they could about it and that “the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense.” This current laser-like focus on Russia’s “mastery” of cyber-disinformation obscures the full context of the history of such campaigns. Looked at with a wider lens, the affair resembles less a singular act by the Kremlin than the latest episode of a global arms race — often led by Western, democratic countries.

Learning From Democracies The explosion of cyber-disinformation campaigns by governments around the world can be traced back to a US-funded program started eight years ago. “Authoritarian regimes tend to learn from democracies, and really all this stuff started with the United States in 2010” — three years before Russia’s Internet Research Agency was founded — says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University, who co-authored a report last year titled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” documenting such manipulation by governments in twenty-eight countries. “It was DARPA that put money into studying how messages go viral on social media and how to generate movement around particular issues. That research has now made its way back to politics,” she says. DARPA, the Pentagon’s internal research arm, put $8.9 million towards its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMIC) program, funding a variety of studies that tracked social media content, individuals’ online behavior, and how information spreads on the web. In 2014, the Guardian reported on this research, which studied Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber’s tweets, the social interactions of 2,400 Twitter users located in the Middle East, and online discussions of fracking and other controversial topics. Researchers even interacted with users online to figure out which of them were the most effective influencers. The studies had a number of potential implications. Some involved the question of how best to propagate information online, while others looked at how to target the right users to promote particular government-approved campaigns and messages. Several were linked to automated analyses of how well people knew each other based on their social media interactions, in line with the work of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency, which often uses computers to analyze the vast stores of metadata it collects about individuals. “We demonstrate on Twitter data collected for thousands of users that content transfer is able to capture non-trivial, predictive relationships even for pairs of users not linked in the follower or mention graph,” boasted one DARPA-funded study, explaining that the findings make “large quantities of previously under-utilized social media content accessible to rigorous statistical causal analysis.” DARPA no longer hosts the list of studies on its site, but an archived version can still be accessed, and the papers are available online. SMIC continued to produce studies in subsequent years, which you can find here. One looked at the nature of “social contagion” on social media platforms, while another examined how the ordering of content on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter impacted peer recommendation and the ability to focus users’ attention on particular content.

Propaganda and Disinformation DARPA presented the study as a defensive action meant to help the military detect and counter the spread of disinformation or otherwise unwelcome content, particularly in areas where US troops are fighting. Bradshaw agrees, saying the efforts are very different from what the Kremlin has been accused of doing. “We weren’t trying to say democracies are doing disinformation,” she says. “It’s a lot more about spreading good information.” But it’s not hard to see more troubling implications behind the DARPA research. In 2015, Rand Waltzman, the DARPA program director who commissioned SMIC, wrote about the importance of having an effective US propaganda program in place to combat foreign social media disinformation. Propaganda wasn’t always negative, he explained; originally it referred to Pope Gregory XV’s attempt to combat the spread of Protestantism and “help people follow the ‘true’ path.” He approvingly quoted Edward Bernays, considered the father of public relations, who wrote that the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Waltzman went on to lament the fact that “the US is unable to effectively take advantage of social media and the internet due to poorly conceived US policies and antiquated laws,” such as those barring the intelligence community from influencing domestic politics. Because of the diffuse nature of the internet, there was no way to guarantee Americans wouldn’t “be inadvertently exposed to information operations that are not intended for them.” Other governments have no qualms with using such tools to manipulate both their own and other countries’ populations, China and Russia being foremost among them. The Philippines’ Duterte, meanwhile, is renowned for heading a virtual army that uses Facebook to promote the president and attack his critics, especially potent given the powerful position social media has in the country. But are democratic, Western countries really just bystanders in this game?