by Clint Watts
Tocqueville wrote the definition of active measures more than 150 years before it was conceived. America touts its freedom and independence, but he noted, “I know no country in which, generally speaking, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.” He explained that “the majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it, not that he stands in fear of an inquisition, but he must face all kinds of unpleasantness in every day persecution. A career in politics is closed to him for he has offended the only power that holds the keys.”
Tocqueville concluded that the most educated and the most intelligent, those possibly best suited to lead the United States, had two choices: to toil away in intellectual circles to study the country’s problems (i.e., academics), or move into the private sector and become wealthy (i.e., tycoons).
Democracy dies in preference bubbles. That’s it, there’s no way for Americans to communicate, debate, compromise, and thrive as these bubbles diverge and insulate themselves from challengers. The United States, if it stays on this trajectory, ultimately may not endure. I’ve explored social media preference bubbles in great detail, but they drive physical-world preference bubbles as well. We all increasingly live in places where we walk like, talk like, and look like one another. Members of the same social media preference bubbles move to places where they can reside with like-minded people who share the values, ethnicity, identity, and lifestyle of their social media nationalism. The Islamic State, while seen as an extreme in the West, provides an early example of this phenomenon. Social-media-induced fantasies led young Muslims, entire families of women and children, to voluntarily move to a war zone in Syria and Iraq—the digital tail wagged the physical dog.
Social media preference bubbles will continue to grow, expand, and merge with like-minded bubbles regionally and globally. Then they will harden by altering the real world to their liking. In November 2017, the Economist showed how Americans have become more politically polarized in the social media era. The number of those in the center of American politics, where policy compromise occurs, has dropped by nearly half since the dawn of social media.6 It’s not a coincidence that an American social media bubble advocates for a wall between the United States and Mexico—an actual physical bubble around the United States.
The liberal left cheers when Donald Trump blocks them on Twitter. They don’t realize that his block isn’t as much about protecting his ego, but about sealing off his base from any charismatic counterarguments that might chip away at his popular support. Trump’s Twitter challengers perhaps believe they are spotting and blocking Russian bots and trolls. In some cases they are, but in many cases they’re simply blocking an aggressive member of Trump’s base. The net effect on both sides is the same: increasingly divergent political poles, which makes policy compromise less likely and the future of democracy uncertain.
Traditionally in America, winners in elections may sow divisions on their way to victory, but after securing their position, officials move to unite Americans under a common banner, paving over divisions for the good of the country. This tradition has been abandoned in a preference-bubble world where each party and candidate remains incentivized, through gerrymandering and clickbait populism, to harden his or her voting bubble rather than bridge the divides in the electorate.
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Tocqueville noted that capitalism created many of the social connections, the civil society fabric, that bridged American communities. Western businesses now suffer the consequences of negative influence campaigns. Dysfunctional democracies, which regulate these companies, sit idly by, uncertain how to help. My colleagues and I observed Russian active measures creating unease in foreign markets by advancing conspiracies. On one occasion, Russia’s overt outlets and troll farms pushed a bogus terrorist attack conspiracy at Disneyland Paris, sending the company’s stock price tumbling. Around Thanksgiving, the Twitter accounts tied to the Internet Research Agency tried to advance a conspiracy involving Walmart turkeys allegedly injected with poison. Russia’s sporadic targeting of Western companies now provides the playbook for other nefarious social media influencers to target corporations.
Cyberattacks in support of influence campaigns will be particularly troubling for corporations. Hacks to secure kompromat will center around entities holding damaging secrets, namely banks and law firms, where transactions and confidential discussions take place. Corporate cybersecurity won’t have to just protect against hackers seeking to steal money or intellectual property, but increasingly will need to protect their brand and trust with customers who can be lost to negative information campaigns powered by stolen communications. Insider threats in the form of disgruntled employees and foreign spies pilfering confidential documents, recording private conversations, and stealing potentially inflammatory emails will be of equal or greater concern to corporations than armies of hackers around the globe.
Social media companies should be in a complete panic. Trust in their platforms tumbled after the presidential election, and as more social media manipulators migrate to their platforms, governments will push to regulate them. The giants, particularly Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the ever-growing Instagram, may be destroyed by the nations, terrorists, and rapidly growing political manipulators frequenting their platforms for nefarious gain. Preference bubbles will continue to sour the average user experience and turn off those seeking a civil discourse between friends and families. These will likely be the same people with the money and resources to purchase the higher-end products advertised on their platforms.
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In 2008, when I was an expectant father, I sat at lunch with a friend who was also awaiting the arrival of his first child. He told me that his family planned to take a series of precautions to reduce the risk that their child would have autism. They would insist on spreading out the vaccinations their child received in his or her first year and would verify that the shots were individually sealed, packaged one by one rather than pulled from a bulk vat of serum. Individually drawn and wrapped shots have fewer heavy metals, and if immunizations were spread out over many months, a child would not at any point receive large batches of injections that might tumble them down the path toward autism, my colleague told me. He had spent a great deal of time reading about this and had spoken to friends about it as well.
I did my own internet queries and decided to do the same—there was a lot of research at that time suggesting that this really could work. I planned my daughter’s vaccination schedule and demanded that doctors and nurses use pre-drawn, single-serving shots. The doctors and nurses had heard the hysteria from others as well. When I launched into my concerns, they simply obliged. Pepper, my daughter, received immunizations in increments, all in the hope that she wouldn’t develop autism. I believed I was doing right by my child.
Pepper was a good-spirited baby who never slept more than a few hours during the first year. She ate well and played on her own and, aside from keeping her parents up all night, was a delightful child. Pepper seemed to be on track by her first birthday, with no significant issues during medical checkups, at each of which, spaced apart over many visits, she received shots. Pepper rolled when she was supposed to, crawled like other babies, and completed her first steps right on schedule for a healthy kid. Except that, only a few days after she started walking, she began lifting her heel off the ground, tiptoeing across the kitchen and living room. I put socks on her feet, thinking the floor might be too cold. But socks didn’t change her gait; she walked, just on her tiptoes.
Her funny first steps weren’t the only concern. Pepper didn’t respond to her name, either. At the one-year mark, I could shout her name in a room and her head wouldn’t turn. Even if I clapped my hands as hard as possible right next to her ear, she wouldn’t even flinch. Then, at other moments, when she heard running water from an appliance or when I drew her bathwater, she’d twist her ear to her shoulder, trying t
o block out the noise. I’d put Pepper down to bed and then frantically Google causes for what I was observing. She might be deaf, and her tiptoeing could be cerebral palsy. I was fraught with worry, and took her to the doctor for a hearing test. An echocardiogram showed her ears to be clear and fully functioning. The doctors said she should be able to hear just fine.
My Google searches had also pointed to autism. Pepper’s symptoms—tiptoeing, delayed speech, unresponsiveness—were also included in the indicators for autism I’d read in articles. But I told myself that was less likely, because I’d taken the extra step of getting her shots spread out and taken precautions to keep her healthy. Each month, Pepper seemed more in her own world—happy, but tired and falling behind other kids developmentally. I didn’t know why she was struggling, but doctors kept reiterating that it was too soon to jump to the worst-case scenario. “Some kids develop slower than others,” they’d say, and Pepper, like many kids before her, might snap forward one day and catch up with normal kids her age. “This happens all the time.”
The first gate for assessing children with autism comes at the eighteen-month mark. The exam is called M-CHAT, and it employs a multipoint assessment to determine whether children have developmental difficulties. I packed the car for the short ride to Pepper’s eighteen-month appointment, came back in, and gently put my hands on each side of her face. I looked into her big, beautiful blue eyes and said to Pepper, “All right. No autism, Pepper.” With fingers crossed, we set off for the doctor’s appointment, and a few minutes later we were in the middle of the exam.
Pepper failed the M-CHAT miserably. She was unresponsive and in her own world. Her cognitive abilities were extremely limited. Both her gross motor skills and her fine motor skills were poor. Despite her failing on nearly every indicator, the doctor seemed to want to kick the can down the road. “I don’t know; she could still wake up tomorrow and start improving.” But Pepper had done so terribly, and I stared in shock at the doctor, who seemed to be downplaying the assessment. I demanded a referral from him and, after some aggressive prodding, he reluctantly moved us on for another developmental assessment. About two months later, after we negotiated the complex web of medical referrals, Pepper arrived at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, where, fortunately, we encountered the world’s best doctors in autism research. The team of doctors put Pepper through a rigorous exam. They held back their comments on exam day, but their faces couldn’t hide what we all knew. A couple of weeks later, we returned to the hospital and received the diagnosis. Pepper had autism, and they recommended we start her developmental therapy right away.
“You need to give her vaccinations,” the senior doctor, head of the autism group, told me as one of his pieces of guidance after Pepper was assessed with autism. “We’ve studied this extensively and, despite what you might hear, we’ve not found any link between vaccinations and autism.” He looked me straight in the eyes and assured me that I’d be doing Pepper more harm than good by denying her the immunizations she needed against other diseases. Another doctor followed with more advice, noting that there were many claims about diets curing autism or some of its symptoms. The research teams were still exploring these diets and testing their merits, but at that time, their research team had not yet found any dietary treatment that could cure autism. “When we find anything that we think will improve or help Pepper, we will immediately let you know.”
The vaccination link to autism was completely unfounded. My preemptive steps to decrease the chances of my daughter having autism did nothing to stop it. Nearly a decade later, I’m quite convinced that Pepper had autism the day she was born. I gave her the required vaccinations, but through a regimen of fear. Above all, I had fallen for “fake news.”
Everyone falls for fake news sometimes, and if people say they don’t, they either are lying to themselves, lack the humility to admit it, or still don’t realize they’ve been duped. The vaccine-autism conspiracy continues on the internet and social media today. I’ve even seen it coming from Russian trolls infiltrating American audiences. Autism is something everyone hopes to avoid, regardless of political affiliation. If a troll can hook someone on an autism conspiracy, it’ll be even easier to hook them on a social or political conspiracy. But why did I fall for fake news? I research social media and study this stuff, and yet I still convinced myself to space out my daughter’s vaccinations and demand single packaged shots, just in case vaccinations caused autism.
I had created my own fake news back when I socially engineered prank calls at West Point as a cadet, and later I fell for fake news in trying to care for my daughter. I fell for the vaccine-autism conspiracy due to my preference bubble: my friend was the source, and I wanted to believe I could avoid autism by my own initiative. I suffered terribly from my implicit bias. Moreover, my friend and I both shared anxiety about increases in autism diagnoses and, as upcoming first-time parents, we both were more likely to spread the emotionally potent conspiracy.7
Social media has only made the danger of falling for fake news worse. Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News provides superior analysis on social media’s spread of false stories and rumors, and why I and everyone else can fall for fake news, particularly when we get emotional. His team analyzed a week of Facebook content during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, a polarizing, competitive, and emotional period. They compared right, left, and center media outlets reporting political stories that were being shared across communities and found two categories of content that did well: misleading or false stories and memes expressing partisan opinions.8 Fake news outperformed real news, and visual expressions shareable on social media outpaced reporting—smaller bits of false content were seen more than longer pieces of factual content. The more people clicked on false information and shared false information, the more social media companies piped that type of content into their news feeds and those of their social media connections. Users’ social media preferences and the desire of social media companies to fulfill those preferences created an entirely false reality. Even scarier, the artificial social reality selected by each social media user differs from any other. Each individual creates his or her own tailored perception of the world, with varying degrees of reality.
Social media can make a threat feel urgent in an unprecedented way. It instills in people a desperate need to access information through “breaking news,” a term that heightens their fear and weakens their filter for falsehoods. Furthermore, the frequency of news sharing on social media further degrades a user’s ability to block out falsehoods. That which one sees first and sees the most will be most believed. R. H. Knapp, who studied wartime rumors and propaganda, noted this phenomenon in 1944: “Once rumors are current, they have a way of carrying the public with them. . . . The more a rumor is told, the greater its plausibility.”9 Computational propaganda—the use of social bots by Russians and other political propagandists—provides a mechanism for broadcasting rapidly and repeatedly; the behavior that Knapp observed in the 1940s is exponentially more prevalent. Repetitive community sharing of confirmatory social media posts further distorts reality. Silverman notes, in research for Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism: “With the emergence of digital social networks, our instant evaluation of a rumor can now be followed by a remarkably powerful act of push-button propagation. Once we decide that a rumor is worth propagating, we can do so immediately and to great effect.”10
Social media applications and audience herding assist in the amplification of false rumors, but Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, two professors of rumor psychology, noted that well-crafted “rumors are believed to the extent that they (a) agree with recipients’ attitudes (especially rumor-specific attitudes), (b) come from a credible source, (c) are heard or read several times, and (d) are not accompanied by a rebuttal.”11 The formula is simple for social engineers infiltrating preference bubbles: pick an audience, aggregate their preferences, create a story to suit audience preferences that matches a
n influence objective, add a source verifying a piece of the conspiracy, and then insert the content into social media and amplify it with social bots. If it’s well crafted, the audience will “like” it, retweet it, and digitally share it with their social media tribe and even block out rebuttals to the false story.
The smartest propagandists and shrewdest ideological pragmatists, those engaging in social inception, will create their own news outlets and academic think tanks to manufacture the facts, research, and confirmatory science necessary to advance their agenda. Fake news is a fuel used by social media manipulators to power preference bubbles that will ultimately create serious dangers for all of society. Today’s preference bubbles, which abhor compromise and debate, will use manufactured falsehoods not only to confirm their preferred beliefs but to stop the advancement of society as a whole. The alternative realities they create will slow down technological improvements, impede advances in medicine, and prevent the protection of our environment.
The fake news epidemic harms society as a whole, but social media itself may also be damaging the citizens addicted to it. Adam Alter’s 2017 book Irresistible explains in great detail the dangers of internet addiction, and particularly social media addiction. The statistics are remarkable, and the implications obvious: “In 2008, adults spent an average of eighteen minutes on their phones per day; in 2015, they were spending two hours and forty-eight minutes per day. This shift to mobile devices is dangerous, because a device that travels with you is always a better vehicle for addiction.” Alter then zeroes in on social media, noting, “Up to 59 percent of people say they’re dependent on social media sites and that their reliance on these sites ultimately makes them unhappy.” Why would we continue to use social media so much when it makes us feel so bad?