Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  Donald Trump, the descendant of a wealthy real estate developer from New York City, drew support from less educated, poorer Americans. Trump’s magic formula, his understanding of how to win, came not from any experience in governance, nor even a great track record in business (he’s declared bankruptcy several times), but from his understanding and mastery of self-made marketing via reality television. Reality television’s formula is simple: keep people watching by giving them what they want, an endless soap opera, sustained drama, constant conflict, heroes, villains, and storylines that are easy to follow.

  His social media pontifications promote topics and themes that play to his audience’s preferences more than they describe actual policies or reality. The online herds that supported, promoted, and now sustain President Trump shared certain preferences: anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, nationalist rather than globalist, toughness in general but particularly against the Islamic State, low taxes, repeal of Obamacare, and even standing for the national anthem rather than kneeling. The more a narrative grows in popularity, the more Trump amplifies it. The more he champions what the audience likes, the more support he accrues from this preference bubble. Trump wins the crowd regardless of whether he wins anything for the crowd.

  Trump’s most popular themes leading up to the election were “emails,” “Lock her up,” and “Build that wall.” At rallies and on Twitter, Trump yelled about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, but none of his social media posts mentioned that the investigation ended twice, and that there were many varieties of emails—those involved in the Clinton investigation, those hacked from the DNC, others pilfered from John Podesta, former secretary of state Colin Powell, General Breedlove, those discovered in the Anthony Weiner investigation. Trump’s calls to arrest his political opponent continue to bring cheers from the crowd, but his supporters may not entirely know why she should be detained. Trump’s promise of a U.S. border wall—and, further, that Mexico will pay for it—by his own admission, in a privately disclosed phone call, represents good politics but bad policy. He is an expert at clickbait populist narratives, and repeats them whether or not they make sense or he actually intends to pursue them.

  Social media nationalism among the #IslamicState and the #TrumpTrain looks strikingly similar. A leading indicator of whether someone supports or is a member of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State has been the use of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, or jihadist black flags as a Twitter or Facebook profile picture. As early as 2012, a simple count of Facebook avatars hosting bin Laden/Zawahiri images, versus Zarqawi or ISIS flags, provided a general sense of the shift between al-Qaeda and the emerging Islamic State. Jihadi supporters post scriptures or quotes from their favorite leaders in their biographies. Each seeks to identify with a movement, so much so that J. M. Berger was able to conduct an online census of jihadis in 2015. Using only openly available information from Twitter, Berger showed growth in ISIS’s support, estimated which countries hosted the most online supporters of the Islamic State, noted the top hashtags signifying Islamic State support, and even detailed the communication patterns of those most sympathetic to the Islamic State. The Islamic State’s social media nationalism could thus be seen and measured.

  Social media nationalism for President Trump is more pronounced, overt, and apparent to anyone following him on Twitter. Avatars showing red hats emblazoned with the slogan MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are accompanied by the corresponding hashtag #MAGA. The social media biographies of Trump supporters self-identify with their nation, denoting themselves as Christian, conservative, or a proud citizen of their state, adding in the hashtags #BuildTheWall, #Emails, #LockHerUp, #GOP, and #Trump. Trump’s opposition employs the same tactics, his detractors deploying countervailing hashtags like #Resist, #ImpeachTrump, and #NotMyPresident. These social media nations share common information and opinions in their preference bubble to promote an ideology or person, real or imagined, above those in opposition to it.

  The death of al-Qaeda’s expertise due to clickbait populism was evident years before bin Laden’s death. The English-speaking Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki outpaced experienced al-Qaeda leaders by winning over jihadi digital audiences, which he did by delivering rapidly via cyberspace English-language zeal for the cause and justifications for violence to his supporters. Awlaki’s online popularity reached such heights that leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula considered stepping aside to allow Awlaki’s rise to the top of the group. Bin Laden never warmed to the idea, and correspondence uncovered in the Abbottabad compound after bin Laden’s killing showed al-Qaeda’s leader reluctant to endorse Awlaki and critical of his rapid social media rise.

  When Ayman al-Zawahiri recognized the fracture emerging in al-Qaeda’s ranks after bin Laden’s death, he immediately responded by trotting out veteran al-Qaeda ideologues offering expertise on jihadi Islam to support al-Qaeda’s worldview over that of the emerging Islamic State. Abu Qatada, an alleged ghostwriter on one of jihad’s first internet sites, spoke out in April 2014 as fissures between the two groups spilled into the open. He “denounced ISIS for ‘ignoring instructions’ from al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri,” and further noted that ISIS fighters had been “misled to fight a war that is not holy.”3 Qatada’s expertise represented nothing more than a blip in the jihadi social media ocean. I’d estimate that not a single ISIS member moved back into al-Qaeda’s orbit based on any veteran cleric’s offering theological insights. This same disrespect for Islamic expertise and arrogance among the new generation led my Twitter friend Omar Hammami to believe that after studying the Koran for only a handful of years and participating in the Somali jihad, he could craft an ideological vision for the future of all Muslims. His treatise was long, meandering, nonsensical, and yet a predictor of what was to come with the Islamic State’s choose-your-own-jihad philosophies.

  Instead of listening to Qatada and al-Qaeda’s top leaders, Islamic State supporters drifted to their group’s largely unknown emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Will McCants, who, in addition to his work on the Militant Ideology Atlas, authored a biography of Baghdadi. In it, he explained that Baghdadi took a name bestowed upon him by his followers, “‘Commander of the Believers,’ a title reserved for caliphs, the supreme spiritual and temporal rulers of the vast Muslim empire of the Middle Ages.”4 Before social media, declaring oneself a caliph might be blasphemy, but the Islamic State’s virtual caliphate approved of Baghdadi’s real-world claims. Baghdadi held some ideological credentials, but nothing compared with the traditional Islamic scholars al-Qaeda cited and coveted. Baghdadi and his followers furthered the justifications for his appointment to supreme jihadi leader by manufacturing a lineage tying him via bloodlines to the Prophet Muhammad himself. The more his followers said it, the more they believed it. The more they believed it, the more they’d say it.

  The Islamic State’s recruits didn’t care about Zawahiri’s thoughts on their future or listen to the clerics he deployed to scold them. Whereas al-Qaeda’s recruits were often well educated and ideologically purists, ISIS boys were more criminal than pious, less educated and more zealous; committed to winning territory more than governing it right. For Western foreign fighters, much of their Koranic learning came from blogs, YouTube sermons, short social media bursts on Facebook, Twitter, or Telegram professed by passionate self-made experts who blended selected quotes from Muhammad with stylized presentation.

  ISIS ideology justified any violence, garnering clicks and likes on social media. Enslaving women, beheading and murdering Shia Muslims in droves, or burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot could all be justified through the selective mixing of facts, scripture, and fantasy. Each of these acts would likely be rejected by the more ideologically pure bin Laden. At its peak, the Islamic State’s young international foreign fighters served as de facto mayors and administrators of towns from central Syria to central Iraq. Their qualifications for the job were nothing more than their ability to enact violently toward populations they were
not from and did not know or understand. The Islamic State’s disdain for traditional expertise gave them the audacity to conquer, and the naïveté to try and govern.

  The Islamic State’s revision of jihadi doctrine came at the same time as the strongest anti-intellectual current in American history. President Trump’s disdain for government elites and experts has its own hashtag: #TheSwamp. Most of his supporters heading into Election Day watched more television news than they read, and shared content with one another on Facebook and Twitter like never before. Their news sources were not the mainstream of educated elites. They substituted Fox & Friends for the New York Times and Breitbart for the Washington Post.

  Trump’s policy experts during the campaign were few, and those he selected were ones most Americans hadn’t heard of and no other campaign would have selected. George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, while now well known in the context of the Russia investigation, were complete unknowns to the foreign policy community. Trump’s policies and foci since assuming office have been at times deliberately against knowledge, research, and science. He has denied at times that Russia meddled in the U.S. election, despite the conclusions of his intelligence agencies, has withdrawn from international treaties and trade agreements, refutes climate change, called for investigations into voter fraud despite there being no evidence, and has even reignited conspiracies related to the connection between autism and vaccines.

  While it may be customary to appoint U.S. ambassadors unfamiliar with the countries they’re assigned to, Trump’s appointees in many cases have no expertise at all in the departments and government positions for which they’ve been nominated. Trump’s appointment to the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, doesn’t believe in climate change. His initial nominee to cover the Department of Agriculture’s science and research division, Sam Clovis, is an economist, not a scientist. (He withdrew because of his connection to the Russia investigation.) Ben Carson, a former presidential candidate and neurosurgeon, became the head of housing and urban development. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, has limited experience or credentials in education. The strangest of them all has been Trump’s nomination of Brett Talley, a thirty-six-year-old lawyer, for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge in Alabama. Talley has never tried a case, is a relatively fresh graduate of law school, and is best known for writing horror novels and ghost stories. A year after Trump’s election, the Associated Press analyzed his forty-three nominees in science-related positions and found that 60 percent held neither a master’s degree nor a doctorate in a science or health field.5

  For the ISIS boys, it was more important to have a caliphate than to do it right, more essential to pursue extreme violence than to effectively govern. For Trump supporters, it’s more important to win than be correct, more important to be tough than compromise and move forward. And for America’s liberal left, it’s more important to be sensitive, all-inclusive, and politically correct, rather than pragmatic about partnering with those who reject some of their views. Their disdain for Trump supporters further reinforces the country’s inability to reach compromise and achieve political progress.

  Preference bubbles create a world of audiences where social media users, in many cases, identify with people they don’t know over people they live with or see every day. We’ve seen the crowd not complement or compete with the core but seek to destroy it. Whoever gets the most likes is in charge; whoever gets the most shares is an expert. Preference bubbles, once they’ve destroyed the core, seek to use their preference to create a core more to their liking, specially selecting information, sources, and experts that support their preferred alternative reality rather than the real, physical world.

  Moreover, social media preference bubbles increasingly shape our physical world. Our shared social media values lead to shared appearance, dress, purchases, living arrangements, and social norms. Preference bubbles have already started to shape real countries, from the Arab Spring to the Islamic State to the unraveling of the European Union with Brexit to the dismantling of American global leadership. And this—this is where Russia comes in. They see a dream come true in the West’s migration into preference bubbles, an opportunity to use freedom of information, choice, and speech as wedges to turn cracks in Western populations into irreconcilable chasms.

  During the Cold War, Russian intelligence articulated four steps for ideological subversion: demoralization, destabilization, insurgency, and normalization. Those phases never took hold in the United States during that period, but the methodology instead became part of the system of information management in the new Russia. Beginning in the late 1990s and extending through today, Russia implemented information overload on its population. Over time, the free press in Russia met with steep resistance from the Kremlin, up to and including imprisonment or death. In parallel, the Kremlin co-opted existing news outlets, intimidated others, and even created alternative news outlets that fawn over Putin’s regime. When the active measures approach is applied on social media, this four-step process of ideological subversion moves at light speed. In the 1980s, Russian intelligence thought it would take active measures fifteen to twenty years—a generation—to achieve its effects. With social media, subversion now occurs in less than half that time.

  Russia’s method represents not an information war, but a war on information itself. The active measures goal of confusing fact and fiction is quite easy in the era of preference bubbles. To tumble democracy and subvert reality, the Kremlin can now—in just the same way it confused its domestic Russian audience—overwhelm American audiences with so much contradictory information that it becomes impossible to know what’s true. Even if a social media user knows something to be true, an endless stream of contradictory explanations creates persistent doubt. Contradictory information bombardments inundate the audience, exhaust their comprehension, and lead them to withdraw from the information space confused, bewildered, and ultimately apathetic. Bewildered audiences fall back on their feelings, their biases, those they trust, those sympathetic ears and eyes in their preference bubble. The second stage of ideological subversion—destabilization—has already been achieved in America through social media.

  The Kremlin doesn’t even have to gather a lot of information on those they target; preference bubbles do it for them. Russia didn’t create the Trump bubble or the Snowden groupies. Those bubbles created themselves and the Kremlin harnessed them. Each social media platform serves a purpose for active measures, and, through preference, Russia can help usher social media nations to information sources they’ve co-opted, repurposed, or even in some cases created to entice a useful audience. They use Twitter to infiltrate the preference bubble and reinforce useful narratives or spread new Kremlin ones. Facebook groups offer a circle of confirmation and implicit bias for saturating sympathetic audiences. Anonymous posting platforms like 4chan and Reddit offer the perfect platform for releasing kompromat, seeding ill-informed conspiracies suiting preference-bubble vulnerabilities, or rewriting history in support of false and alternative realities. LinkedIn is ideal for reconnaissance of foreign governments, defense contractors, and academia. Wikipedia is perfect for character assassination.

  Through precise social media assaults and smear campaigns, Russian active measures assist in the death of expertise that might challenge their advances. Explanations for events, such as the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, are challenged in every detail. How do you know? is always the first question. Anyone offering a truth must provide endless justifications. Sources of information, outlets, or witnesses offered as evidence are then badgered and challenged with follow-up questions. How do they know? is often the second subversive question, and this is shortly followed by a third challenge, How can they be sure? and finally, Why do you trust them? Each step of the way, question, question, question—just keep asking questions until the interrogation leaves the challenger battered.

  After challenging the observations of Kremlin challengers, Russ
ian trolls question their motives. Who stands to gain? they ask, suggesting that any act, statement, or explanation is designed only for self-serving purposes. There’s no such thing as absolute truth, only different shades of public relations designed to benefit the purveyor of the information. Following degradation of the source, there will be an endless offering of alternative explanations; this is commonly known as “whataboutism.” The trolls hound Kremlin adversaries with an infinite number of possibilities for any question, occurrence, or issue. The goal is to bombard the purveyor of truth with so many contradictory explanations that they must refute endless challenges to their information and provide evidence for why any and all challengers cannot be correct—an exhausting exercise leading many to surrender out of self-preservation.

  Shifts in political support and the international order stemming from social media preference bubbles have been swift and volatile. Democratic movements birthed by Arab Spring protests have not excelled in Tunisia, have been overtaken in Egypt, largely failed in Libya, and have been defeated in Syria. The Islamic State’s foreign mobilization, its creation of a caliphate, and its recent collapse spanned only four years. Republican support for Russia and Putin nearly tripled in only two or three years despite plummeting just a few years before with Edward Snowden’s 2013 arrival in Moscow. Putin and his propagandists figured out the power of preference-bubble subversion before everyone else, and now bad actors worldwide have adapted the technique.

  ***

  In the year and a half since President Trump’s election, the world’s authoritarians have rapidly adopted the Russian social media playbook for their own purposes. General Min Aung Hlaing powers Myanmar’s military slaughter of the minority Rohingya population. Justification for his atrocities and popular support for his actions come in large part from the spreading of social media falsehoods. “No such thing as Rohingya . . . it is fake news,” uttered an officer in Myanmar’s Rakhine state security. The Rohingya are a long-persecuted Muslim minority that has been run out of Myanmar’s western region. The New York Times at one point reported that roughly 90 percent of the information being spread about the Rohingya on Facebook was false.