by Clint Watts
During the war on terror, I worked “by, with, and through” the U.S. government. To fight Russia from my office and a laptop, I would need to go “over, under, and around” the U.S. government. Westerners wanting to protect their democracies need to bypass their governments and create their own online counterinsurgency, and here in civil society we may all develop the best solutions. The first step: show the world what the Kremlin is peddling. Arm the public with information and awareness, challenge Russian conspiracies and narratives, and have them challenge Russia’s bots, propagandists, and authoritarian supporters.
My colleagues and I initiated a new approach, and this time I wasn’t going to be alone messing with an enemy on social media. We’d been watching feeds for years that tipped us off to the Kremlin’s disinformation spreading on Twitter. If the public could see what we were seeing, it could avoid consuming or inadvertently promoting Russian propaganda. Journalists could research the outlets pumping Kremlin themes, and citizens could work to discredit false personas pushing fake news. J. M., Andrew, and I teamed up with Jonathon Morgan to create a real-time dashboard displaying the summation of the key Twitter accounts we monitor. We initially planned to go it alone, but the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ new Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan effort to counter Russian influence worldwide, emerged to back our pilot project. The dashboard showcased two components of Russian social media influence: the stories the Kremlin’s overt English broadcasting media outlets were spreading, and the topics and stories Russia’s Twitter troll networks—a mix of overt Russia supporters and social bots—promoted to American audiences. We named the platform Hamilton 68, harking back to the Federalist Papers, where Alexander Hamilton, writing under the alias “Publius,” warned of foreign meddling in American elections.
“These most deadly adversaries of republican government,” Hamilton wrote, “might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than on quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils . . . by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union.”51
Hamilton foresaw the vulnerabilities of a free society—how an outside meddler could harm Americans—long before social media arrived to open up the Kremlin playbook in America.
The Hamilton 68 dashboard launched on Wednesday, August 3, 2017. In only a few days, the website garnered hundreds of thousands of visits, and we aggressively tried to explain how the page worked, what one can learn and observe. Meanwhile, I waited for a Kremlin counterattack, a public data dump or smear campaign. By and large, the feedback proved positive, and the public took to studying the top and trending Twitter topics pushed by the Kremlin. Of course, some on the left accused us of McCarthyism and questioned our methodology, suggesting that we somehow were trying to malign unnamed Twitter accounts. Right-wing trolls, meanwhile, shouted a well-worn label. “You are part of the deep state,” they would tweet.
We knew we had been successful when five Sputnik English articles discrediting the Hamilton 68 dashboard and the German Marshall Fund appeared in the first forty-eight hours after launch. Each article strategically sought a new angle to undermine the dashboard along one of two themes: the dashboard was either laughably incompetent or extremely weak in its capability. “Social Media Activists Mock Project Tracking Sputnik, RT Accounts” cited overt Twitter supporters of the Kremlin. “US-Funded Service Tracking Sputnik, RT Attempt to ‘Monopolize Truth’” quoted an unknown French lawmaker. But the best response was “Ex-Russian Ambassador to US Kislyak Surprised by US Efforts to Track Sputnik, RT.” Kislyak, the diplomat whose hand tainted so many in Team Trump, said “he had not expected that the level of the western countries’ capabilities to articulate threats would be at such a low level.”52 As Sputnik pushed out a total of eight posts maligning the Hamilton 68 dashboard, I watched as the links to those Sputnik articles climbed into the “Trending URLs” tracked on the Hamilton 68 dashboard. I felt even more confident we were on target. The goal of influence is to create a behavior change in one’s adversary. Eight articles from Sputnik in less than a month—I think the Kremlin got our message.
Some of our followers visited the dashboard each day, examining the top hashtags and earmarking trending topics. Those with technical skills used Hamilton 68 to employ machine learning to detect and out social bots spreading divisive messages in the United States. One enterprising American began identifying bots tied to Kremlin-promoted hashtags and then repeatedly tweeted anti-Kremlin links at the accounts. Others outed false personas, which would disappear within a few hours or a day. The efforts were small but effective in signaling a turn in the propaganda wars against the Kremlin. A month after the English-speaking Hamilton 68 dashboard launched, we used the same template to offer a parallel dashboard showing Russian influence of the German population leading up to the September 17, 2017, election. The platform used a similar moniker, Artikel 38.
After a year of publicly speaking and writing about Russian influence efforts, I’ve found communicating the complexity and depth of the Kremlin’s deceptive operations difficult to communicate to the public. Confusion over Russian hacking of voting machines and the manipulation of social media by the Internet Research Agency has continued as Congressional committee investigations linger on, selectively leaking information at politically opportune times. The Hamilton 68 dashboard sought to resolve some of this confusion, but explaining its outputs to the public and media outlets remains a challenge and I still look for better ways to articulate Russian subversion to audiences that may not realize the effect its having on them.
U.S. government resources are needed to fund a truly effective effort. Intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, and the State Department would need to rally and coordinate. Instead, on the day before we launched Hamilton 68, Politico reported that President Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had yet to tap into $80 million in counterpropaganda resources, much of which Congress had set aside for challenging Russian active measures. We hoped to provide a spark, but we still are waiting to see who will carry it forward. Our effort, at the time of publication, remains underfunded, and a side project from our day jobs. It’s a start, but not at all what America needs to do against Russian influence. Kislyak was right, and Putin must still wonder, “Why hasn’t America punched back?”
8
Staring at the Men Who Stare at Goats
“What do I do with this?” Colonel Smith* said to a crowd gathered around a conference table. In his hands was a copy of the Militant Ideology Atlas, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s first major project. Dr. William McCants, fresh out of Princeton University’s doctoral program on Middle Eastern history, had just finished a yearlong study with a great team of Arabic-language researchers. Al-Qaeda’s online library at tawhed.ws provided nearly every ideological text powering jihad’s preachers. Using citation analysis, the West Point team had mapped who referenced whom in all of these militant texts, similar to the way Google’s search engine originally tracked web links for its algorithm. Will’s team deciphered who the thought leaders behind bin Laden’s violent madness were. Thousands of logged citations produced a map of key messages and messengers al-Qaeda terrorists used to enrage their supporters, inspire their followers, and motivate some to join them on the battlefield. The work provided a blueprint, much-needed reconnaissance for launching America’s new fight in the “war of ideas” against al-Qaeda.
“Benny, Benny,* what do you think of this? What do we do with it?” Colonel Smith called out for his top deputy, a junior officer whose opinion carried more weight among the staff because he’d read a book on al-Qaeda once and, above all, he had been in this military unit longer than any of the others.
“Sir, I don’t know,” Benny said, looking disapprovingly at the academics in their suits and ties. “And I’m not sure about putting it on the internet, either.” Colonel Smith stared blankly at the table. Before this meeting, the colonel h
adn’t had a clue about this million-dollar Department of Defense–funded project. Now briefed on it, he didn’t know what to do with it, and he didn’t want it to bite him in the ass. The academics offered some ideas for what to do with the project’s outputs. Chief among them was posting the findings and data on the internet at the Combating Terrorism Center’s website. The insights from this analysis could fuel research worldwide and help crowdsource solutions for challenging the underpinnings and justifications of al-Qaeda’s new era of terrorism. Experts on militant jihad, world history, languages, and public diplomacy could power their own cost-free, independent research from the project. Colonel Smith concluded the meeting with no conclusion; he’d think about our request for release and likely forget the findings almost immediately.
Weeks of negotiating finally led to the approvals needed to post our research on West Point’s website. The military quickly forgot they’d paid for the study—and its results. Academics and researchers visited the work in droves. Within just a few months, the Militant Ideology Atlas began surfacing in other studies around the world, fertilizing discussions on what al-Qaeda truly stood for, the group’s strengths and weaknesses, and the cracks in its bankrupt ideology. The atlas provided the map, the needed reconnaissance for fighting America’s highly touted war of ideas.
I remember this meeting, out of the hundreds I’ve had since 9/11, only because of where the Militant Ideology Atlas landed. Researchers weren’t the only visitors to the study; terrorists came, too. Long before I chatted with Omar Hammami on Twitter, al-Qaeda conducted e-counterintelligence on America, perusing the Combating Terrorism Center’s website to feed both their narcissism and their fears. At times, the terrorist leaders the center studied, like today’s head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, publicly complained about the study’s reports.
The Militant Ideology Atlas, the information weapon we offered to Colonel Smith, the book he gripped and forgot, was recovered by U.S. Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011.1 Resting on bin Laden’s bookshelf were the Militant Ideology Atlas and several of the Harmony reports containing bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s internal documents. In a note written to a courier, bin Laden issued instructions:
“Please send all that is issued from the Combating Terrorism Center of the American military.”
The report is one of the few that actually altered the enemy’s thinking, created a behavior change, the prime objective of the war of ideas. Unlike thousands of other reports funded for millions of dollars, it succeeded because it wasn’t the work of the D.C. Beltway contracting machine, and because its funders decided to take a risk and make it available to the public. It was a visible victory in the open-source battle with al-Qaeda, and a successful program ultimately killed by the American bureaucracy that once championed it.
* * *
America sucks at information warfare, absolutely sucks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Democracies are marketplaces of ideas. We stand for freedom, liberty, human rights, and peaceful protest, so stopping one thing, like the violent views of terrorists or nefarious Russian influence of homegrown Americans, gets quite tricky. American values and those of other Western democracies are their greatest strength when shared and promoted—and a major vulnerability in the eyes of those who seek to exploit them. Suppressing ideas undermines American values. And so countering bad ideas, like those that fuel terrorism or authoritarianism, proves vexing, as we tend to believe that the remedy to be applied is more speech, even though we are not entirely sure what to say, how to say it, or who should say it.
Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Syria, Russia, or even a political campaign—each knows exactly what it seeks to accomplish on the social media battlefield. The conceptual approach is the first hurdle to successfully countering these bad actors on social media, but the U.S. government doesn’t have much consensus about what should be done, how it should be done, and who should do it—the message, the messenger, and the method.
Al-Qaeda’s message may have been bankrupt, but it was very clear from the beginning. Western countries, and particularly America, must be attacked, as they are Islam’s “far enemy” and they back corrupt Arab dictators (the near enemy) that oppress local Muslims. ISIS, which became the Islamic State, provided equally clear guidance; its name actually spelled out its objective—to create an Islamic caliphate ruled by Sharia law, in line with the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Anyone who fails to follow in this directive or convert to its brand of Islam should be killed. The Russians, in similar fashion, may mask how they influence, but they always know what they seek to achieve with their influence: to reduce American power, creating room for Russia’s ascension on the world stage and the pursuit of its foreign policy goals. In Syria, the Kremlin sought to maintain President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, secure its own stake in the Levant, restore stability to the country, and quash terrorists. In Ukraine, Russia saw an ethnic Russian population on the strategic Crimean Peninsula that was ripe for a return to Russian rule. Russia’s influence campaigns amid Western elections have sought to nudge Western audiences to support the breakup of the European Union and NATO, to promote its own nationalism rather than globalism, and ultimately to undermine democracies.
America’s response to each of these influential messages has been difficult to comprehend. When bombs and bloodshed didn’t bring an end to al-Qaeda as it migrated to the internet, the U.S. government began pursuing “public diplomacy” to thwart the unending challenge presented by a violent ideology spread across many continents. Conferences were convened and contracts issued for the development of plans and programs to tackle the persistent jihadis plaguing America. By the mid-2000s, the war of ideas had become the new confrontation between the West and al-Qaeda. Billions of dollars soon poured into the creation of counternarratives against all jihadis far and wide.
The Department of Defense started its “soft power” assault on al-Qaeda toward the end of the Bush administration and continued it perpetually through the Obama administration. Defense secretary Robert Gates, who served in both administrations, noted these efforts in 2007, stating:
The government must improve its skills at public diplomacy and public affairs to better describe the nation’s strategy and values to a global audience. We are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America.2
Secretary Gates was exactly right, but his words and U.S. government efforts didn’t significantly change the problem. Billions in funding didn’t result in disenfranchised Muslim men marching toward democracy and away from militancy. Instead, more Western spending on counterpropaganda over the past decade has correlated with the rapid rise of the Islamic State.
American campaigns to promote democracy, civil liberties, and freedoms to disenfranchised Muslim boys landed sideways in countries where religion and tribal loyalties define survival. Repression of civil liberties and freedoms was the staple of the regimes oppressing young Muslim men that trotted off to al-Qaeda—regimes often backed by or partnering with the United States in hard counterterrorism. Inside government, bureaucratic battles over message control and hand-wringing over risk watered down countermessages, creating sanitized flops. Western media contributed to these failures. Newly minted journalists manning blogs, many of them with no understanding of terrorist propaganda, invariably heaped scorn on any government effort. The perceptions of incompetency or ineffectiveness they dropped on civil servants, whether merited or not, would routinely halt any Defense or State Department information campaign.
All the major agencies fighting terrorists launched some sort of information campaign. None were particularly effective, and some even contradicted one another. Today, Russia offers an anti-EU, anti-NATO, nationalist message to sympathetic American audiences. The Trump administration often spouts similar themes. How can America countermessage Russia w
hen President Trump’s statements mirror those of President Putin?
America’s counterpropaganda doesn’t just suffer from a message problem; it also has a messenger problem. Whether it’s official spokesmen standing at lecterns or official social media accounts, the West’s personas in real life and the virtual world don’t resonate with audiences influenced by terrorists or the Russians. A stiff white guy in a suit, a general on a press junket, a Twitter handle sporting the American flag—these don’t elicit sympathy or fear among U.S. adversaries. The solution during the counterterrorism years became “moderate voices”: Muslim clerics preaching a brand of Islam that promotes more peace than violence. The idea was to amplify moderate voices in online discussions as a way to steer radical Islam back to the mainstream and dissuade vulnerable minds from going toward the darkness of terrorism. This ignored research showing that extreme positions outplay moderate ones and that negative content routinely outperforms positive content. Not only did moderate voices in the Arab world not perform well, but as soon as their connections to or support from America surfaced, their credibility among the diaspora audiences the West sought to influence dropped precipitously. To top it all off, American politicians who believe Islam itself is the root cause of terrorism bristled at the idea of backing any cleric.