Dr Emma Briant & the tip of the iceberg
Weaned on a steady diet of Canadian and American cable news, I remember feeling mesmerised by that funky blue globe spinning around my TV screen, announcing the NBC ‘In the News' segments on Saturday mornings in between Scooby Doo and Superfriends. I never doubted a word of the news reporting: Walter Cronkite was giving it to me straight.
This is why I’m a social media peasant. I admit it: sometimes, I literally need to ask my daughter, who’s 23, to take a look at a post for me, and I’m amazed that at a glance, she can tell if it’s real or fake. I mean…instantly.
In her view, Facebook was for ‘old people’ so she grew up on Instagram; it’s an environment she’s totally comfortable in. I’ve thought a lot about how my generation can be duped so easily by disinformation campaigns and one of the reasons is this: since she was exposed to social media slowly over time (I was not), in all likelihood, she’s developed some sort of fake news radar- she can pick up signals and nuances that I simply can’t- a bit like being street smart, but in the virtual piazza.
Today we’ve become familiar with these terms- ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’- thanks to the research and forensic investigations of pioneering scholars and journalists post-2016.
What most of us end up doing is stopping at the fake news bit: we’re taken by the latest crazy tweet or conspiracy theory and then move on…to the next. The way we deal with the dissemination of disinformation is the same way it’s dealt with by social media platforms and our elected officials: stop-gap measures like deplatforming or taking down posts, which frankly don’t address the underlying causes.
In a recent webinar on the current state of Covid disinformation in Europe, Edward Lucas described the disinformation that we see as only ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ implying a hidden world underneath, albeit impactful on our political, economic and civil security.
It’s the world of the influence industry.
It’s serious business, and it’s raking in the cash.
One of the first to look into the influence industry was Dr Emma Briant, who began investigating Cambridge Analytica and the data agents doing business with it, which will be the core of our up-coming chat, among other things.
She presented her findings in testimony submitted to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee Inquiry into Fake News in the UK and in American Congressional hearings in 2018. Dr Briant explained what the bigger picture is all about:
It’s a story about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment of propaganda tools- based on propaganda techniques that were researched and designed for use as weapons in warzones- on citizens in democratic elections. It’s a logical product of a poorly regulated, opaque and lucrative influence industry. There was little or nothing in place to stop them.
CA’s parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratory developed the ‘target audience analysis’ (TAA) methodology, gleaned from the most advanced social science research in order to measure populations and find out how population groups would act and react under certain conditions.
We learned from Brittany Kaiser’s testimony (ex-SCL employee) that NATO and its defence departments use SCL services, and that CA’s political operations copied SCL’s social scientific research and data science techniques. SCL has reiterated time and again that Cambridge Analytica had been doing their own thing and they had nothing to do with CA’s operations, but as confirmed by Dr Briant, there did seem to be a lot of overlap between the two in terms of personnel and methodology.
What’s important here is that we’re talking about a highly effective weapons-grade communication tool used on civilians:
the companies were well equipped to understand what might drive extremism from their shared research base, and to understand the impact of the ‘othering’ or violent and terrifying ads deployed in domestic and international campaigns.
If you’re not up to scratch on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s role, start with the Emmy-Nominated ‘The Great Hack,’ for which Dr Briant was senior researcher.
When I discovered Dr Briant’s work, among others, I was left speechless by the idea that these pyschological weapons are being used in political influence campaigns and in training courses for the military all over the world.
The Cambridge Analytica story is a story of how the new digital mercenaries transformed the influence industry to extend contemporary imperialism. The worst abuses by CA and its parent company SCL occurred beyond the economically powerful West. With white consultants setting up in places such as the Caribbean, Africa or South America- places without strong civil society or privacy protections- and being paid millions to underine local peoples’ hopes for a better future for their country.
Dr Briant is keeping track of new companies being opened by ex-CA-employees, as in the case with Emic Consulting Ltd, opened just a week before CA went bust.
David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen revealed how Emic was providing services to the Dutch Ministry of Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces back in 2018 and continued to do so even up to October 2020. As Pugliese points out,
while Canadian parliamentarians were being praised in the UK for their strong handling of the investigation into Cambridge Analytica and SCL, their military was seeking out training that is a direct descendent of SCL Group’s behavioural dynamics methodology.
Pugliese’s reporting sparked a government investigation into “allegations that its military conducted unauthorised operations to influence the public during the coronavirus pandemic,” which included “village assessments” and “social media data profile” mining. This is the kicker: even as the investigation is on-going, the Canadian Armed Forces awarded yet another contract to Emic for training courses at a cost of CDN $578,285 in October 2020.
While companies that create and direct influence campaigns and training courses certainly aren’t illegal, they are, however, unregulated and there seems to be very little oversight by government agencies into their operations. After all, their work does impact on civilian populations- that’s what they’re meant to do- and we have no idea who they are, what kind of tools they employ, and if they’re ethical operators. There’s simply no standard for the industry.
The US Presidential Election provided yet another lucrative opportunity for the influence industry to impact electors.
Another project Dr Briant collaborated on, with senior investigator Brent Allpress, was the documentary ‘People You May Know,’ which unveils how apps and web services, made available to pastors across the US, were used to harvest personal data from parishioners in Evangelical and Catholic communities. One in particular developed by Gloo gathered a series of data points: age, marital status, children, work, donations, volunteer work, insurance data, mental health data, etc. This information indentified the ‘persuadable’ faithful, who were then bombarded by political posts on Facebook, all in the name of increasing the voter rolls of the Republican Party.
The whole operation involved numerous ‘charitable’ organisations, almost all of which were guided and funded by members of the Council for National Policy, a radical conservative umbrella group, which significantly influenced the Trump White House. Prof Anne Nelson’s exhaustive work ‘Shadow Network’ provides the fundamentals on the CNP. I’m sure you’re already familiar with some members: ex-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, White House Advisor Peter Navarro, ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Communications advisor Kellyanne Conway among many, many others.
Their targets were fragile people who were having substance abuse or mental health issues, or problems in their marriage. When they began using the apps, they thought they were connecting with like-minded souls in their community, wanting friendship and support; they had absolutely no idea their data was being used for political purposes.
It won’t surprise you to learn that some of the apps mentioned in the documentary were developed by Gloo, a Cambridge Analytica spinoff.
At the end of the film, I looked a lot like the man above: I sat back, went completely still, feeling horrified by what I’d just seen, and asked why this is even allowed. And then it hit me: because they can.
Which begs the question: what, if anything, are our governments doing to regulate the influence industry?
Like many others in her field, Dr Briant believes that the public and governments need to change their focus from disinformation posts, and de-platforming efforts to the underlying industry itself: we should be
revealing the powerful networks of companies and clients around the world, patterns of data use and technologies, funding streams, clients, and strategies, and communicating complex data for policymakers and publics in accessible ways.
This isn’t some periferal issue.
Our states depend on transparency, oversight and truthful, verifiable information so we can make policy decisions and face emergencies as they arise. This includes oversight and transparency for the influence campaigns and the firms that create them and impact on our decision-making as citizens.
If we’re being exposed to influence campaigns, funded by agents and actors who may be operating in their own interests and not in ours, how can democracy work?
There’s another aspect to all this: every time a new scandal emerges, it’s one more nail in the coffin of public trust- the bedrock of democracy. We simply don’t know who to trust anymore.
Think of the erosion of public trust happening right before our eyes.
The Leave.EU campaign used fear of the ‘other,’ the immigrant, as a trigger in their political messaging, targetting voters they had found through a personality quiz on Facebook and then persuaded them to believe the unbelievable. When the illusion of Brexit comes crashing down in time, and they realise that they’ve been duped, how can they trust their politicians again?
Parishioners across the States who were looking for a friend, someone who could listen to their problems and offer support, are now fodder for the GOP political machine. Do they feel used? Can they approach their pastors for advice ever again?
Anti-maskers and Covid deniers across the West are protesting to defend their freedom to harm their neighbours, perhaps unaware that they are being manipulated by domestic and foreign actors. After months of medical disinformation, how many of them will trust health officials enough to take the Covid vaccine?
…and January 6th 2021: Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 Election through violence…
The power of disinformation, pumped out by the influence industry, was in full display for the world to see, as violent mobs breached the Capitol Building, intent on finding Congresssional leaders to stop the confirmation process of the duly-elected President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to post-election polling, Trump’s supporters believe his lies. I’m sure it’s not all of them, but those that descended on Capitol Hill certainly believe that the Dems and the ‘radical left’ media ‘stole the election’ and they acted on the incitement of a leader bent exclusively on his personal power. They acted on years of disinformation from media funded by pressure groups, which found the culprit of their malaise and the downfall of the American way of life: the evil socialist left- that powerful narrative of ‘us vs them.’ It’s incredible to me that in Donald Trump they saw their saviour, impervious to all the facts telling them differently. Yet, this is what weapons-grade communication tools can do.
It’s not over: the threat to American democracy continues. The threat to all democracies continues.
These are examples of the destructiveness of shady influence campaigns, which directly impact our choices and views, but it doesn’t need to be this way. Along with Dr Briant, Edward Lucas also suggests influence campaigns can be put to good use if they’re considered part of ‘state security.’
We’re very happy to have functioning hospitals, competent doctors and transparent medical information because if we do, we’re protecting our physical and mental health. Why wouldn’t we want the same for our democracy?
Making sure that our information environment is safe, transparent and trustworthy, through the measures that Dr Briant has suggested (standardisation, regulation, transparency in funding), means we’re protecting our institutions and way of life. It means we’re also prepared for foreign threats to our democracies, and we can use an array of active measures to counter them.
Should we fail to realise how important the health of our information enviornment is, the stuff of an Orwellian future awaits us.
Further reading…
Dr Emma Briant (2020), “Government efforts to counter propaganda risk undermining public trust”, Ottawa Citizen
Dr Emma Briant, Dmitry Chernobrov (2020), Competing propagandas: How the United States and Russia represent mutual propaganda activities, Sage Journal
Competing propagandas: How the United States and Russia represent mutual propaganda activities - Dmitry Chernobrov, Emma L Briant, 2020 (sagepub.com)
Please consult Dr Emma Briant’s website for all her publications and interviews.
Op Dirty Oil & the fishermen
CTP senior researcher Davide Cortese has been looking into the little-known and discussed Libyan-Maltese Affaire…he reports:
We've recently witnessed the influence and power of foreign money flows entering the EU often by illicit means and money laundering schemes.
Malta seems to be the main gateway for these kinds of operations, even more so when it comes to the "nationalization" of oil smuggled from Libya and Algeria by means of fake fishermen, oil tankers and conniving traders.
Thanks to ‘Operation Dirty Oil’ conducted by the Italian Guardia di Finanza (2017), one of these smuggling networks moved Libyan oil from the Zawiya refinery 45km west of Tripoli, to the Sicilian port of Mazara del Vallo, mainly through Malta and Maltese operators.
This same operation by the Italian authorities marginally unmasked the involvement of a Swiss trading company: an investigation by Public Eye and TRIAL also sounded alarm bells exposing how smuggled oil gets "nationalized.” It is blended with EU oil to lose any trace of its Libyan origin.
They also rightfully point out how this may constitute the war crime of "pillaging" according to both international and Swiss laws.
With Libya split in two, one wonders if a similar smuggling network also exists on the east side of the country, considering that the region controlled by the Benghazi-based faction covers 80% of Libyan refineries.
My interest was recently piqued when I read the words “fishermen,” “Mazara del Vallo” and “Libya” all in the same sentence: the Haftar-lead Benghazi faction in the Libyan war "arrested" 18 Sicilian fishermen from Mazara del Vallo on 2 boats 25 miles off Benghazi and kept them for over 100 days. Just recently, the Italian government managed to get them released, but not without paying a big diplomatic price.
I’ll be keeping my eye on this story for any further developments.
Bibliography
Luca Ranieri, THE MALTA CONNECTION: A CORRUPTING ISLAND IN A “CORRUPTING SEA”?, Research Fellow in the Department of Law and Politics at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa.
Public Eye, TRIAL, Libyan fuel smuggling: a Swiss trader sailing through troubled waters
UP-COMING CTP PODCAST INTERVIEWS:
Jan 14: Dr Emma Briant
Jan 22: Prof Daniele Albertazzi
GREAT READS…
New York Times, “As Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm,” Jan 2, 2020
Edward Lucas, “Winners and Losers of 2020” CEPA Jan 4, 2020
Claire Berlinski, “Incompetence and Doomsday,” Claire’s Invariably Interesting Thoughts
Graphika Report, Echoes of Fake News, Jan 12, 2020
Feel free to comment or DM me at @Monique Camarra on Twitter, here in comments section or at our email: coffeetalkpolitics@gmail.com
Thanks for reading!
Mo