More On Spotting Social Media Disinformation

(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)

Introduction

It must be said at the outset that the behaviors and tactics described below aren’t limited by any means to the social media sphere other than the raw mechanics of using social media as the delivery mechanism for disinformation. Nor are they limited to high-powered international politics, or even professionally organized information management firms.

These behaviors are fundamentally those engaged in by those who see life as competition and are set out to win even if it hurts someone else along the way. Whether it’s musicians and comedians competing for ticket sales, actors competing for roles, nations competing for resources, politicians competing for office, there is a moral calculus in every decision as to whether one human being or the next, making the decision for themselves hundreds of times every day, chooses to compete against their fellow human beings, or to work with them against the greater challenges facing the species as a whole.

Those who choose to put themselves above others are absolute master artisans with these behaviors. Even to the level of family dysfunction and relationship abuse patterns, it all shows up the same way in the end, and it’s all corrosive to our individual and collective well-being and health.

That’s why It is absolutely crucial to understand and teach yourself to identify and reject social media disinformation. The damage done just in the last few years by this problem includes millions of lives lost.

One classic tactic of disinformation campaigns is “counter-intelligence.” This phrase gets thrown around a great deal in online conversation these days, often by conspiracy theorists and sovereign citizen types and the like, but it very much is a thing, and you are very much being bombarded with it.

I recently ran into a good example of aggressive counter-intelligence with a high likelihood* of being a deliberate and planned disinformation campaign via a message posted by a page labeling itself with leftist, anti-capitalist terminology.

I won’t link to the page or the displayed content, but I don’t have to hide the page’s name, either. The piece immediately caught my attention, not because oh a swastika or I care what some neofash has to say, they all say the same things anyway. What caught my attention is that this page is “calling out” the Biden administration, treating this ridiculous and obvious display as thought it were in any way meaningful to a thoughtful consideration of…well, anything.

I didn’t even pay attention to what page this appeared on until after I’d commented, and while I wasn’t ridiculously aggressive I also minced no words. What I said was, in short: this is absolute nonsense for a million reasons. I laid my case out firmly, clearly, and without flinching, but also without profanity or threats or aggression.

I did this deliberately, and I try to do it consistently, because the first response of the source nearly always tells you everything you need to know. We’ll get into that, and more details about all the specific disinformation tactics being employed here, why I have a high degree of confidence that this is deliberate behavior by willful neo-fascists, and how you can be better equipped to wade through the onion-layers of online disinformation without falling prey to it.

So the first question, obviously, is “how do you know? Let’s look at that on the next page.

How do I know?

How do I know this image is disinformation? How can I determine the intent of the poster, the writer, the man in the photo, in a brief interaction?

Obviously to fully answer this question you have to read the entire article; that’s why I wrote it, but in a nutshell, given all the factors at hand, there are only two conclusions to be drawn about this information as it is:

1. The person who posted it genuinely believes what they’re saying. Somewhere, they’ve managed to convinced themselves that what’s written in the text is true. If that is the case and their genuine goal is to work against capitalism, they are simply incompetent to do so. I don’t mean I disagree, I mean they are blatantly and directly working to propagate information that works directly against their publicly identified and self-stated intentions and interests.
   
   They do this in the very act of attempting to advocate for those intentions. There simply can be no other word: they are not competent to do what they are doing, and if they genuinely want to advance their cause they would best do so by sitting down, shutting up, and letting someone competent do the talking. Have all the opinions you want, but don’t present yourself as some kind of expert when you clearly aren’t. It causes great harm – millions of deaths just in the last few years. When someone points it out to you, makes their case clearly, and you want to argue? That leads us to…
2. The other possibility, which is that the person is fully aware of what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. That makes them a deliberate and willful disinformation agent. In the case of this image, it makes them a deliberate and willful neo-fascists advancing a obviously constructed pro-Putin narrative with eyes wide open.

I repeat: there are no other reasonable explanations. It may very well be that the person really believes what they’re doing, but in refusing to stop doing it when they’re told what they’re doing they are actively advancing the agenda of autocracy and totalitarianism. In immediately jumping to a fevered and meaningless rationalizations of their behavior and attacking the messenger, they reveal their priorities to be other than truth, no matter what those priorities may be.

Exactly who is this person? Exactly what are their priorities? Exactly why did they choose to share this story and then stand by it? It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. What matters is regardless of the answers to those questions, you know with a very high degree of certainty that whatever you’re dealing with isn’t worth dealing with and should be ignored. Why? Because as we’ve already outlined, either they’re incompetent or deliberately lying. We’ll discuss this more in a later section of this article.

But what makes the story nonsense? That’s important because if the story has reasonable merit then my response to it did not, so let’s talk about that next.

The Story Itself

Let’s start with the first thing that caught my eye about this story: the premise. In short: a known neo-Nazi “endorsed” the Biden administration and praised their decision to send arms to Ukraine. Therefore, asserts the post and poster, the Biden administration should be opposed in every way because clearly they are Nazis.

While it’s very difficult to find specific examples and citable scholarship in a casual search on the open web, this is a well-known and widely discussed tactic of manipulation that nearly any of us will recognize. The “bad” actor deliberately associates themselves with an enemy. In doing so, they deliberately create an opening for the suggestion this proves that the person they want to discredit surely must be a bad person.

(There’s a variant of this thinking that you see in abusive relationship patterns and gaslighting, which can be loosely rendered as “you must have something wrong with you, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be with me.“)

Fundamentally this relies on exploiting a logical fallacy called “association fallacy.” It has various types and synonyms – well-poisoning is a type of this fallacy, for instance. In the case of the piece we’re looking at today, the specific type of association fallacy is “guilt by association.”

There are a couple of reasons this logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The first is because Biden has no control whatsoever over who endorses him, nor what they give as their reasons; assuming there’s any responsibility for any of this on the part of the Biden administration is childishly silly in that aspect.

The second reason is the endorsement is obviously not made in good faith. This bad actor knows what he’s doing, so much so that he’s nearly winking at you as he does it – is winking at his ideological comrades. They know there’s no way to conclusively prove he’s deliberately lying for the overt purpose of associating the Biden administration with neo-Nazism, that would require mind-reading. So they lie with just the thinnest pretense of believing their own BS, knowing that calling them out on it directly would just end in inconclusive bickering.

Millions of abusers and tyrants and bullies and bigots throughout human history have manipulated association fallacy the same way, and we’ve all seen it in our lives many times if you give it some thought. Being able to recognize this level of manipulation and cunning is critical to protecting yourself against it on all levels.

The Premise

It’s also important to say out loud that part of what makes this effective is that you can make reasonable arguments for different dimensions of the argument – “People KNOW Biden is a fascist,” because it’s only a shade off the truth. You can build the argument quite easily. Certainly Joe Biden could be characterized as pro-Capitalist. I’ve said myself many times (and will probably have it on a shirt or something here in a minute), the win condition of capitalism is fascism. You can’t escape it when you play it out, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.

In the mean time, in the full context of the world and life and history and everything else that’s relevant, Biden is just not plausible as a marauding autocrat deliberately burning the world down to put money in his own pocket. Biden is not plausible as even deliberately evil most of the time. But if you get baited in to trying to argue with the idea that he has the approval of neo-Nazis and that makes him evil, you’ve already lost because you’ve validated the idea that this assertion is sufficiently credible to require counter-argument.

Truth is, in some ways Biden’s very progressive – one can hardly overlook how he forced the Obama administration’s hand on gay marriage, for instance. In other ways, he’ll likely never catch up completely. The ending of capitalism is one of those latter things. I think he’ll never stop believing that there is some way to engage in capitalism – not commerce, mind you, capitalism – without ending up breaking everything beyond repair. He has made decisions in the past that I believe had evil consequences. I believe that in particular some of the decisions he made, votes he cast, etc., early in his political career displayed much more of that tendency to make decisions that were hurtful to innocent people.

That also doesn’t make him “a fascist,” at least not in the intentional and deliberate sense intended by the writer.

Fascism requires deliberate, willful, hostile intent to establish or defend autocracy. Biden still believes the whole “American Dream” thing he grew up on. You work hard for a fair wage, you make enough to live on and enjoy a hobby, and if you care to and want to you can even go do something other than wage work to live on, you know the drill. He’s not ready to think post-capitalism. Neither is most of the rest of the world. That doesn’t make him a “fascist” in any but the most technical of senses, and most importantly that doesn’t make him an irredeemable soul like some of the great monsters of history, which is the narrative this whole mess is trying to sell.

The Propagator

Having reviewed the message, now let’s take a look at the messenger.

The first thing you notice is that it appears to be a radically left-wing page – the name “Capitalism Kills” is a giant dogwhistle of course, but they referred to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” and the other content on the page falls in to the same far-left tropes and symbolism.

“We attack both US political parties” isn’t a meaningful rebuttal in the least. Nor is the assertion “we’re marxist-leninsts here.” If anything they seem more like people out to make the general public think of “Marxism” and “Leninism” as these radically anti-American ideologies, foolish and extreme.

Not to say there is no -ism involved here, but if we credit the speaker for good faith belief in their own words the -ism is “egotism.” No reasonable person sweeps with this broad a brush; nobody who’s interested in real progress or discourse is going to spend all their time throwing around the idea of “condemning all US presidents past and present” as though it’s a meaningful and carefully considered position. It’s intellectually lazy and logically invalid, a position taken solely for the emotional satisfaction of the person taking it.

That’s if we credit the speaker with believing their own words, which I’m not entirely sure is a good idea. If I was going to create an identity to make leftists look ignorant, radical, aggressive, and unreasonable, I could hardly do better than this set of messages.

The assertions about “Biden and Obama helping the Nazis in Ukraine” is also, at very best, a radical misrepresentation of reality. While there has been aid from the US to Ukraine this has been consistently a matter of assisting their defense against ongoing Russian aggression into the territory. There is simply no reasoned basis to hold forth the notion that the Ukrainian government or any more significant portion of its people that could be found in any other country are “Nazis” or fascists of anything of the sort.

This is typically where the propagandist will start gloating little factoids and trivia bits. In the context of Ukraine, invoking the Azov Battalion is a constant go-to, as though the existence of an isolated group of right-wing extremists is evidence the entire country is corrupt. This is illogic on the level of pointing to the Westboro Baptist Church as evidence that the entire US are raging fundamentalist religious bigots.

In this case they went with a video showing a trident patch on a Ukranian military official’s uniform and then portraying this as evidence of Nazi control, in spite of the fact that the symbolism is at best ambiguous and focusing on it is ridiculous on the level of conspiracy theorism.

The point however isn’t that the symbolism is ambiguous or that the Azov group was like thirty people; the point is to get you talking about those things rather than the fact that Russia is conducting an entirely unjustified and illegal war against another sovereign nation. The point is to focus negative attention among the hard left in the west against their own leaders by building accusations of their allegiance to far right, fascist, and or Nazi ideology.

Then as a final nudge, we add a little social proof to validate ourselves by having another account – again, with the clear dogwhistle right in the name – come in and validate us without actually adding any substance or clarity to the conversation, or even trying to make an argument in support. Just say “nope, that one’s right” and get a little heart react and everybody’s warm and fuzzy while the person pointing out the propaganda is discredited and run off.

In Conclusion

This message was crafted to stoke anti-war sentiment and progressive distrust of the status quo Democrats into pro-Russian sentiment that also inflames internal opposition to Biden. The “left” in the US has never been particularly cohesive to begin with, and it’s quite easy to invoke anti-war noisemaking to create conflict among us. Start throwing around exaggerated and baseless but emotionally appealing claims and you’re certain to ensnare those whose egos far outpace their intellect.

This, assembled guests, is just one example from the millions and millions of social media messages sent out every day with deliberately manipultive and malicious intent. The Russian government does a great deal of it to garner support for Putin’s imperalist aspirations; the plutocracy does it to herd us back to work in a pandemic; various and sundry interest who profit from confusion and strife are filling us constantly with well-designed nonsense – usually based on appealing to our egos in some way because that’s where we’re weakest – in order to weaken the entire concept of “democracy” because they believe that, being ruthless and having some access to resources, they believe they will benefit from the fall of democracy just like the Nazis benefitted from the persecution of Jews in the sudden availability to “good Germans” of fully furnished homes and fully stocked stores that had been appropriated by that persecution.

Of course the great truth of hard-right ideology is that the monsters these people are feeding will be perfectly happy eating them for lunch when they run out of “others.” You can always create more “others,” just pick a new group to scapegoat – Jews, leftists, people of color, religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill – as long as you can maintain that us vs. them pretense and con enough people into believing they’ll always be an “us” and never a “them,” you’ll not lack for targets for persecution until there’s nobody left to persecute at all and we’re reduced to a state of social development that makes feudalism look like egregious liberty.

They always believe they’re driving the machine until it runs them over.

Those of us with the perception to understand this is a losing strategy for everyone must ensure we are well armed and with eyes wide open. A startling percentage of leftists have been sucked in by this narrative.

Now (writing in October 2023) we’re seeing a whole new set of social disruption and argument in the wake of the recently escalated conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people – an argument with no possible “clean” resolution that’s been going on in one form or another literally since pre-historic times. We’ll be encouraged to pick one point or another in the past when things were “right,” then blame the “other” for making a mess of it.

Of course the only solution there ever was is for people to learn how to live peacefully and cooperatively together, but instead we’ll be continuously baited into these pointless arguments, we’ll become ever more radicalized against each other, and in the end the real objective – creating further factiousness and dissent among the free nations of the world, particularly those on the left working toward every more refined and effective democracy – will be gained unless we start taking the problem of disinformation seriously, right now.

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