By Cory Doctorow
Nov 27 2018
<https://boingboing.net/2018/11/27/autocracy-loves-confusion.html>

The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society — beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few — are a source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.

In a new Harvard Berkman Center paper, Common -Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, political scientist Henry Farrell (previously and security expert Bruce Schneier (previously) team up to explore this subject by using information security techniques, and come to a very plausible-seeming explanation and a set of policy recommendations to address the issue.

Farrell and Schneier start by exploring the failures of both national security and information security paradigms to come to grips with the issue: Cold War-style national security is oriented around Cold War ideas like “offense–defense balance, conventional deterrence theory, and deterrence by denial,” none of which are very useful for thinking about disinformation attacks; meanwhile, information security limits itself to thinking about “servers and individual networks” and not “the consequences of attacks for the broader fabric of democratic societies.”

Despite these limits, the authors say that there is a way to use the tools of information security to unpick these kinds of “information attacks” on democracies: treat “the entire polity as an information system with associated attack surfaces and threat models” — that is, to think about the democracy itself as the thing to be defended, rather than networks or computers.

From there, they revisit the different disinformation styles of various autocracies and autocratic movements, particularly the Russian style of sowing doubt about what truth is and where it can be found (infamously, Russia’s leading political strategist admits that he secretly funds some opposition groups, but won’t say which ones, leaving everyone to wonder whether a given group is genuine or manufactured — there’s some excellent scholarship contrasting this with the style used by the Chinese state and also with techniques used by authoritarian insurgents inside of democracies, like Milo Yiannopoulos).

In the paper’s framework, the stability of autocrats’ power requires that the public not know how other people feel — for there to be constant confusion about which institutions, groups and views are genuine and which ones are conspiracies, frauds, or power-grabs. Once members of the public discover how many of their neighbors agree that the ruling autocracy is garbage, they are emboldened to rise up against it. Tunisia’s dictatorship was stable so long as the law banning dissent could be enforced, but the lack of enforcement on Facebook allowed Tunisians to gain insight into their neighbors’ discontent, leading to the collapse of the regime.

By contrast, democracies rely on good knowledge about the views of other people, most notably embodied by things like free and fair elections, where citizens get a sense of their neighbors’ views, and are thus motivated to find solutions that they know will be widely viewed as legitimate and will therefore be sustainable.

So when information attacks against democracies sow doubt about the genuineness of movements and views — when Soros is accused of funding left-wing movements, when Koch Industries’ name is all over the funding sources of right-wing think-tanks, when politicians depend on big money, and when Facebook ads and its engagement algorithm pushes people to hoaxes and conspiracies — it weakens democracy in exactly the same way that it strengthens autocracy. Without a sense of which political views are genuine and which are disinformation, all debate degenerates into people calling each other shills or bots, and never arriving at compromises with the stamp of broad legitimacy.

It’s not a coincidence that the right’s political playbook is so intertwined with this kind of disinformation and weakening of democracy.

A widely held belief on the political right is that the most important “freedom” is private property rights, and since rich people are always outnumbered by poor people, subscribers to this ideology hold that “freedom is incompatible with democracy,” because in a fair vote, the majority 99% will vote to redistribute the fortunes of the minority 1%. In this conception, the rich are the only “oppressed minority” who can’t be defended by democracy.

This gives rise to the right’s belief in natural hierarchies, which are sorted out by markets, with the best people rising to the top (Boris Johnson: “As many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.”).

The right’s position, fundamentally, is that the “best” people should boss everyone else around for their own good:

kings should boss around commoners (monarchists); slavers should boss around enslaved people (white nationalists); husbands should boss around wives and kids (Dominionists); America should boss around the world (imperialists); and rich people should boss around workers (capitalists).

[snip]

How fighting political disinformation could collide with the First Amendment

By Deanna Paul <behind paywall>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/30/how-fighting-political-disinformation-could-collide-with-first-amendment/