OSF - 2.35 - scams - discord attacks
This can be very easily seen as political, primarily because it actually *is* political, although not necessarily in the ways people think about political issues. A number of the examples that I am going to use are related to nation-state actors, and you may think that in the first place I am attacking certain countries that may be identified with this type of activity, or that, not being a nation state yourself, this doesn't apply to you and you don't need to worry about it. These ideas are not correct.
As I have said, for almost forty years, I have been researching, and working in, information security. And I get to talk to people in related communities, like the intelligence community. Those are the spies. And the counterspies. And we talk about things like disinformation.
Now there's misinformation, which is just when you make a mistake, and you believe something that's wrong. That's bad enough. But disinformation is when somebody deliberately tells you a lie, designed so that you will believe it. This has been happening for as long as people have been fighting, and that goes back an awfully long way. As a matter of fact, possibly we can go right back to Cain and Abel. God comes to Cain and says, where is your brother And Cain tries to tell a lie, without even telling a lie. He just says, am I my brother's keeper? But God, of course, sees through this and it doesn't work.
Now, when you are dealing with human beings, and not God, it works a little better. So, someone tells you a lie. And they tell the lie that they know you are going to believe. Because it's a lie about someone you don't like. And the person who tells you this lie, knows that you are going to believe it, because you are willing to believe the worst about the person that you don't like. So, you believe that lie. And you repeat that lie. You tell that lie to other people, because, of course, you want to cause trouble for the person that you don't like. Or, at the very least, you want to warn other people about the person that you don't like.
So, you have now become a liar. Oh, maybe you will object that you don't know that it's a lie, but you're repeating a lie anyway. So, in fact, you are a liar. And you know what else you are You are now a weapon. You are the weapon of the person who told you the lie in the first place. That's what disinformation does. It weaponizes lies, and it weaponizes people. And if you believe, and repeat those lies, you become the weapon. You become evil, or at least a part of evil. You are working for evil.
You didn't mean to, of course, but that's the way things ended up.
Now, one of my other fields is emergency management. We deal with disasters. And one of the things that we know about disasters, is the disasters bring out both the best, and the worst, in people. There are going to be people who try to help during a disaster. And then there are those who are going to try and take advantage of the situation.
But the pandemic has been different. For me, personally, the pandemic has been very disappointing. The pandemic seems to have given everyone permission to be their very worst. To misbehave, although misbehavior is far too weak a term for what we have seen during the pandemic. The pandemic has given everyone permission to be racist. To consider anyone who believes in a different political party or stance to be evil. To allow people to engage in violence on the streets because they don't like another person's skin color, or facial characteristics, or the political symbol that they put on the back of their car, or they don't like the fact that somebody has an "I got vaccinated" sticker on their shirt, or they don't like the fact that somebody has a vaccines kill bumper sticker on the back of their car. And everybody just seems to think that because you don't agree with me, I have the right to beat you up or run into your car, or post lies about you. Oh yes, we're dealing with the lies here.
We'll come back to the lies in a bit here.
As I've said I've been very disappointed during the course of the pandemic by the way that people have been misbehaving. And I expressed this to a friend and she said, well, it's because they're all grieving.
Now, of course, one of the other things that I am is a grieving widower. And I have been studying grief. And I have been studying the ways that people behave when they are grieving. And in discussing this with a friend, she said, that's because they are grieving. And suddenly, because of what she said, everything came into focus. Yes, people have been grieving.
Grief is about loss. And, during the pandemic, everybody has lost something. Maybe it wasn't a close friend or family member who died. Maybe you lost a job. Maybe you just lost an opportunity. Maybe you just lost the ability to go down to the pub anytime you wanted for a beer. But everybody has lost something.
Those who are grieving experience a range of emotions. But one of the most common is anger. We are angry about our loss. But, as human beings, we are not particularly good at identifying why we are feeling anger, or indeed any good at identifying any strong emotion that we are feeling and what it actually is. Our brain tries to find a reason for the strong emotion that we are feeling. The reason that it generates doesn't have to be correct. It doesn't even have to make sense. It's just a presentation that our brain makes to us about why we are feeling some strong emotion. So, very often, we feel that we are angry at God. Or at the universe. (Or even the person who died, which makes no sense at all.) Or at that person who has skin of a different color. Or at that person who holds a different political view. It's their fault. Whatever it is.
Thus, we have a whole bunch of people who feel very, very strongly that those people over there are responsible for my pain. They are angry. Whether they have any valid reasons or not, they are angry. And they are taking it out on those people over there. Maybe they won't actually perpetrate physical violence against them. But they are certainly willing to believe anything bad about them. And to repeat any lie that they hear about them, as long as it paints them in a bad light.
There's another thing about grief: desperately intense loneliness. If you are grieving, you are not just grieving the loss of relationship with one particular person. You seem to be grieving the loss of relationship in general. And, therefore, it's almost a cliche that when mom dies, dad, all too soon, falls for some inappropriate female, and forms an inappropriate attachment.
And so what have we seen during the pandemic We have seen all kinds of people, joining all kinds of groups, groups espousing all kinds of weird conspiracy theories, just so that they can belong. To anything. With anyone.
And so we come back to the lies. Because of the anger, people are willing to tell lies. They're willing to believe lies. Because of the loneliness, they're willing to join with other people who believe lies.
And how does all this fit together?
Well, like I told you, some of my friends are spies. And they have been noticing, that during the pandemic, the campaigns, by various foreign governments, to try and make trouble for those of us who live in democracies, have stepped up the disinformation campaigns. Because, right now, with everybody angry, and everybody joining with cults and conspiracy theories, everybody is willing to spread lies. There are all kinds of people who are willing to become weapons of disinformation campaigns. It's become so prevalent that the intelligence community has a name for it they call it discord attacks. People who are our enemies are sowing lies knowing that a large number of us will believe the lies, and spread the lies, and even amplify the lies. Thus making disinformation campaigns very much more successful recently than they ever have been in the past.
Now, as I have said, a lot of the information and research in this particular area involves nation state actors. And, you may be saying thinking that I am saying that certain nation states are attacking our nation state with particular sets of lies. And you may be thinking that that is unfair.
The thing is, I am not saying this only about other countries attacking us. Telling lies, in terms of nation states, is basically known as propaganda. It is a part of what is known as "soft power." Soft power is an attempt to influence other countries, without actually threatening or attacking them. Sometimes soft power can be a positive thing. For example, most countries are involved with foreign aid: sending money and or aid to other countries. Obviously, this is an attempt to influence the other countries. It is an attempt to influence them by doing something positive for them, but there is another term for that: it is often called bribery. Regardless, it is an attempt to influence other countries, on a nation-state basis, and everybody does it. It's part of soft power.
Well, discord attacks are soft power as well. Sometimes it's outright propaganda, but the discord attacks are a little bit less obvious. Discord attacks are mounted, in terms of propaganda, against different groups in the country that you are trying to influence. These will be groups that do not agree with each other. So, what a discord attack will do is to create and submit lies, disinformation if you will, aimed at being targeted in a negative way, against one group, but really, in fact, targeted at the opposite group, by being a lie that the opposing group will want to consume. It is something that they will want to believe, because it says something bad about the other side.
As I say, so far I have been talking and using illustrations about nation state level discord attacks. The thing is, it's not just nation states that do these things. In recent years, this has become extremely common in propagandizing, and attempting to influence either committed groups, or the general public, even within small communities. People are using discord attacks very frequently, and unfortunately very effectively, particularly within social media. Some of these discord attacks are aimed at political groups, and, since politics touches pretty much every human activity, I guess you could say that all of this is politics, or political activity. But this is not necessarily just about right-wing parties versus left-wing parties. Sometimes it is targeted at small groups within a town, and even within an individual organization. Anytime there is a division, it seems that people are selling lies to one side, in order to get them inflamed against the other side.
And selling is very often an operative word here. Particularly in regard to social media, some people are just in it for the money. Online advertising is still a very significant source of revenue for social media platforms and pretty much anybody else who has a presence on the Internet. The social media platforms, all of them, push for engagement: the attempt to get the social media user to stay on their platform, read their postings, and spend time reacting to their postings, or forwarding those postings on to other people. Unfortunately, it does seem to be the case that, for a variety of psychological reasons, the most effective way to keep people engaged on social media is to promote hatred. To get one group of people upset at another group of people. And it doesn't seem to matter what the groups are. As long as somebody is stirring up trouble, and spreading malicious gossip, social media users consume it, and spend more time on the platforms. That makes the owners of the social media platforms happy, and it enriches the bank accounts of the people who create and spread lies about various issues and groups.
And this is really the entire point that I am trying to make about this kind of attack. When you read something that upsets you, please do not simply automatically share it with all of your friends. Find out whether it has any basis in fact, first. If you are spreading malicious gossip that has been created falsely, purely for the purposes of stirring up trouble, and possibly partly for the purpose of enriching somebody who makes up lies for a living, then you are promoting discord attacks yourself. You are helping to spread the lies. You are lying. You are also helping to enrich the people who create this deceitful disinformation, and do it just because it makes them money.
