Evan Genest's Learning Log

I keep notes here. Most of these are related to travel, work, or books.

What I learned from Anne Applebaum

activism

Democracy is losing the propaganda war

By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, June 2024

Background: the 2000s and 2010s

Even in a state (like China) where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. Young people gathered in the streets of Beiing and Shanghai in 2022 to talk about freedom...(similar were the) demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned.

This requires a narrative that damages the idea of democracy and the tools to deliver it

Since 2016, these tactics have been applied across the glove. The Xinhua and RT offices in Africa and around the world, along with Telesur and Hispan TV, create stories, slogans, memes and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies; these in turn are repeated and amplified in many countries, translated into many languages, and reshaped for many local markets. The material is mostly unsophisticated, but it is inexpensive and can change quickly according to the needs of the moment.

2016 Presidential Campaign

RT, Press TV, Telesur, and CGTN function as production facilities, sources of video clips that can be spread online, repurposed and reused in targeted campaigns. In 2016 the Internet Research Agency - now disbanded, but based in St Petersburg, and led by the boss of the Wagner Group - pumped out fake material via fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, designed to confuse American voters. Examples ranged from virulently anti-immigration accounts aimed at benefiting Donald Trump to fake Black Lives Matter accounts that attacked Democrats from the left.

Localize

Not everyone hearing these messages will necessarily know where they come from, because they often appear in forums that conceal their origins. Pressenza, a website founded in Milan and relocated to Ecuador in 2014, publishes in eight languages, describes itself as "an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence". According to the US State Department, Pressenza is part of a project run by three Russian companies, that planned to create articles in Moscow and then translate them for these "native" sites, following Chinese practice, to make them seem "local".

Document No. 9: Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere

In 2019, an internal Chinese memo "Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere" listed seven perils faced by the Chinese Communist Party:

Even the most sophisticated surveillance can't wholly surpress these ideas. This is the core problem for (all) autocracies: the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that this language appeals to some of their citizens:

The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited - especially in the places where they have historically flourished. This is what modern autocrats sell to their citizens and to foreigners, all with the aim of destroying "American hegemony":

Efforts by Americans to protect disinformation networks

In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. Renée DiResta, one of the leaders of what became the Election Integrity Partnership, told me that an early concern was Russian and Chinese campaigns. DiResta assumed that these foreign interventions wouldn’t matter much, but she thought it would be useful and academically interesting to understand their scope. “Lo and behold,” she said, “the entity that becomes the most persistent in alleging that American elections are fraudulent, fake, rigged, and everything else turns out to be the president of the United States.” The Election Integrity Partnership tracked election rumors coming from across the political spectrum, but observed that the MAGA right was far more prolific and significant than any other source.

The Election Integrity Partnership project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.