Confronting Memetics in 20/20
Are you even you anymore?
The single most powerful article I read last year was a very thorough report by the Citizen Lab. Their article “Burned After Reading: Endless Mayfly” was one of the most unnerving investigations into the use of social media to manipulate reputable authors to replicate false information. A combination of manufactured trust, effective false flags and ephemeral nature led to a new level in the public deception by 5th column agitators.
Since reading this article, I have seen a pattern similar to this in many false flag narratives that have manipulated vulnerable agitated cohorts to escalate their activities at the detriment of social cohesion. The brief survey below is a very parsimonious look at the players, methods and means of what I have seen in memetic warfare. A larger work will be attempted at a later time.
Cambridge Analytica and the initiation of psychometric directed memetic warfare.
When NATO published their bulletin on The New Frontier of Memetic Warfare in 2015, it was received with perhaps less foresight than General John Allen would give it in 2020 with his most recent article decrying the fall of American Democracy. But while they were looking to the future, the egregious danger foreshadowed in that article had begun two years earlier with the formation of Cambridge Analytica, a small startup that was designed to assist and affect public opinion using social media. Byt the time NATO saw the problem, it was already happening.
The Guardian has produced a near bottomless examination of Cambridge Analytica and the model they created to disrupt the 2016 election. In as simple a summary as possible, a young savant programmer was commissioned by Steve Bannon and Bob Mercer to create data modeling of 230 million US voters. At the top of the food chain, the client Vagit Alekperov (CEO of Lukoil) was directing and guiding this work, inferentially at the behest of Valdimir Putin.
Working with a Russian research Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, the author of the infamous “thisismydigitallife” quizzes of 2015, he was able to integrate the modeling found by Stillwell and Kosinski’s seminal paper “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans” to make predictive models of how US voters would react to choices in the coming election. This was used to create psychographic messaging “payloads” which Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL used to inject into the electorate.
On the ground this translated Brad Parscale’s Alamo Group enacting programs both enacting “voter-suppression… specifically targeting ‘idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans’…” along with the manipulation of Clinton’s image to be that of a traitor that had caused the death of American contractors in Benghazi Libya.
By de-energizing the left and energizing the right, the democratic process of the US election was subverted and the world found itself with an oligarch sitting in the presidential office of the most influential nation on the planet.
Take home:
Propaganda can now be tailored to an individuals personality profile. Your identity is modeled, predicted and targeted.
Endless Mayfly, rise of the ephemeral memetic.
In 2017 we saw a jump in memetic warfare technology from the Islamic Republic of Iran. In their exhaustive work “Burned After Reading; Endless Mayfly”, the Citizen lab unraveled new and unparalleled techniques of audience manipulation that expanded the idea of “Dark Posting” to metastatic levels.
Prior to Endless Mayfly, false information was propagated in a way that constellated the material and left it in a steady state. Endless Mayfly introduced ephemeral targeted disinformation similar to psychographic targeting used by the Trump campaign, but impossible to be refuted because the source material would disappear.
Source: Citizen Lab, “Burned After Reading; Endless Mayfly”
In Endless Mayfly, false identities were created en mass. These phishing bots produced socially acceptable, benevolent and helpful stories that attracted followers in mainstream media. When the mayfly lure hooked a valuable target, the bot would propagate harmful misinformation that was masked in order to appear reputable.
The bots redirected users to inauthentic sites using “typosquatting” — the action of altering letters in URLs to make the user appear to be going to a reputable news source — when the site was actually an emulation designed to inject false information into the information space.
This is where it becomes insidious. After propagation of the meme, it then disappears and Twitter account removes itself, and the typosquatting websites disappear. While the researchers at Citizen Lab found several hundred accounts doing this work, the ephemeral nature of the accounts and their automated nature can allow us to infer that there were likely as many Mayfly bots as servers can propagate,which brings us to the next observation of the state of memetic warfare: an estimated 90 million false Twitter accounts working to induce the amplification of COVID-19.
Take Home: Propaganda is ephemeral and sensing. Propaganda can be released to targeted persons and then disappear so as to not be disproved or inspected.
Memetic Warfare to weaponize a pandemic.
Kathryn Carley, the director of Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University recently reported that 82% of the most influential Twitter accounts discussing COVID-19 were actually fake bot accounts. While disturbing in its own right, this is also a milepost we have crossed where information on social media is being propagated by artificial personalities in higher volume than by actual human identities.
In a stunning bit of investigative journalism, Business Insider worked with the folks over at Bot Sentinel to uncover 3.4 million accounts that were spreading disinformation that would propagate COVID-19 infections in populations. The European Union has reported that they have reported Russian operatives in Italy during last month’s spike in the pandemic publishing en masse false information that was aligned with Iranian propaganda.
And we come to the current moment of memetic war, a moment in our nation’s history where a false flag led to a call for the Insurrection Act. While details are still emerging, the white supremacist organization Identity Evropa has been caught attempting to incite a race war using falsified account to manipulate antifa protesters into violence and mobilize right wing militias to go as far as burn down the capitol building of Minnesota.
Take Home: False Flags are taking upt to 80% of the operating space of the Internet and the weaponized form is being homegrown by independent operators.
Where are we now?
We have reached a point where the general public can be manipulated in large enough numbers to begin calling for anti-insurrection actions by Donald Trump. This is playing far too much into his wishes and the Dictators Handbook to be mere coincidence. This is orchestrated, but to find that level of induction, we will have to be vigilant and investigate all media we encounter.
Last month, rural America was induced into infecting themselves to COVID-19. This month, urban America was induced into attempting to provoke a race war. Neither of these events were aspects of the public will; these events were a result of agitation by national and international entities attempting to destroy the United States. There is no middle ground on this; we are at war and it is a war unlike anything we have seen, only glibly foretold half a decade ago in a NATO brief on memetic warfare.
The only path to survival is, as General James Mattis said so eloquently, to remember “In Unity Is Strength” and to remember the words of Martin Luther King, “In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.”
So what is to become of us?
What percentage of the population will become literal Memetic Zombies, functioning not on an empirical truth, but simply taking action based on the manipulations of the mediaspace.
I will end this on a fun little video from the past…
In 2004 a video produced by the “Museum of Media History” there was implied a world where the internet was so inundated with individual authors that news in itself became questionable and the internet had become useless. “Epic 2014” was a trendsetting look at the future, but what they did not predict was that in this coming reality, up to 80% of that information flooding the user of the internet would be false information, untraceable, produced by nation states using computer targeted memetic weapons modeled to each individual user seeking to manipulate them to take mass action.
We cannot unplug as is fantasized by the authors — Pandora’s box is open. So we must wait until it is empty, but only then will the last spirit exit, for that spirit is hope.
In the words of 2002… the future is eπic…
