Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  Social media, beyond preference bubbles, hurts users’ critical thinking skills by shortening attention spans. “In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds.”12 Social media requires us to evaluate thousands of pieces of information each day, a massive exponential increase from previous analog generations, and now this is further compounded by attention deficits that severely damage our ability to successfully parse fact from fiction.

  Addiction to devices leads to more consumption, but on top of that, it causes strange behavior outside the traditional social norms of in-person relationships. A University of Copenhagen study of more than a thousand Facebook users found that “the predominant uses of Facebook—that is, as a means to communicate and gain information about others, as habitual pastime—are affecting our well-being negatively on several dimensions.”13 The study documented how users suffer from “Facebook envy”—jealousy of one’s Facebook friends, based on observations of their enjoyable experiences. A separate study, led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, noted an alarming rise in “Facebook depression,” which occurs when “people who engage in a lot of social media use may feel they are not living up to the idealized portraits of life that other people tend to present in their profiles.”14 Dr. Brian Primack, who led the Pittsburgh study, added, “This would be concerning, because it would imply that there is a potential vicious circle: people who become depressed may turn to social media for support, but their excessive engagement with it might only serve to exacerbate their depression.” In social media, it seems, the more we learn about one another, the less we like one another.

  The notable uptick in Facebook depression from the Pittsburgh study mirrored an online survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab. The results of more than sixteen thousand men and women from eighteen countries confirmed the findings of the Copenhagen and Pittsburgh studies and noted three additional conclusions ripe for social media influence. “People use social media as a forum for gaining social validation,” Kaspersky noted. In addition, “people—men especially—become upset if they do not get the likes they hope for,” and “in striving to receive more likes on social media, people can put themselves and their loved ones at risk by disclosing private information.”15 These survey results confirm what social engineers already know: play to a target’s ego on social media and they’ll be a useful idiot for the influencer and betray their friends and family for a virtual, temporary high.

  I’m most concerned about the next generation, who now enter adolescence with a digital device strapped to their body—if they didn’t already have one by early childhood. The next generation will have more virtual experiences than real-world ones. They will write more than they read, take so many photos that they will never look at again and possibly talk more to artificial intelligence than to other humans. The next generation will be able to recall any information with their fingertips, but they’ll struggle in many ways to do anything of substance with what they access. Parents and elected leaders will have difficulty imparting wisdom that isn’t contradicted by what’s available on the internet and social media, some of which will be true and much of which will be false. It’s quite possible that they will trust technology and artificial relationships more than real-world relationships.

  Social media applications, in only a decade, have become an integral part of our life, offering many advantages. But they have created a destructive addiction and a collective anger that makes us, individually and as a society, worse off. How do we—democracies, corporations, and citizens—survive in this social media world?

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  I’ve offered some thoughts on how the U.S. government can protect Americans against Russian interference, but the threat to American democracy comes not from Russia but from America. The U.S. government will not save Americans from their preference bubbles, and since the election we’ve seen not just Russian active measures attempting to destroy our democracy but American active measures tearing down our institutions. It will take Americans fighting for their own democracy to fend off the social media manipulators, the hidden core, who seek to herd them and coalesce them into a movement outside of their control and only partly of their own design. Political and civil society must come together, leaders must emerge, and civil society must be rebuilt—on the ground, not online.

  If we are to rebuild the civil society Tocqueville brilliantly observed in 1835, citizens must again form real relationships, physical encounters, by participating in neighborhood associations, providing public service, campaigning for office, attending in-person classes, and creating and supporting business associations. Compassion for and connection with those who don’t look like you or talk like you comes from contact, not clicks or likes. Retired General Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation of a national service, beyond the military, would be an excellent way to bring citizens together through common cause and shared values. Ultimately, real-world physical relationships will be the only way to defeat the online troll armies tearing democracies apart.

  Social media companies sought to bring a great service to their users, and they did, but now they must help offset the unintended consequences of their products. Facebook, Twitter, and, to a lesser degree, other platforms have become the methods by which most Americans get their news, and much of it is false or manipulated truths. Facebook kicked off a new effort in 2018 to improve user experiences by reducing ads and news discussions in feeds and increasing content from friends and family. It remains to be seen whether “more cat pictures, less Trump talk” will bring audiences back to the platform, curb political animosity, and resolve differences. Democracies require a baseline of fact and fiction; otherwise, policy debate can’t really occur and preference bubbles will continue to diverge into parallel fake-news-pumping factories. Google and Facebook initially sought to correct this problem by fact-checking news articles, but this approach quickly failed. Social media companies instead should work together to rate news outlets rather than fact-check each article.

  My colleagues and I have offered for more than a year that the equivalent of Consumer Reports should be created for social media feeds.16 Information Consumer Reports would be an independent, nongovernmental rating agency that evaluates news outlets across all types of media during a rating period. Outlets would receive marks based on their performance as assessed on two principal axes: fact versus fiction in the content it produces, and subjective opinion versus objective reporting. (The rating would then display as an icon alongside news links displayed in internet search engines and social media news feeds. The icon would provide the consumer with a virtual nutrition label for the outlet, one that, when clicked, takes the consumer to a web page where they can read for themselves why the news outlet received the rating it did as well as background on its funding, ownership, track record, retractions, and awards.

  Such a rating system would not infringe on freedom of speech or the press, and it would rate both mainstream and alternative news sources. Those performing well, the ones focused most on reporting and facts, would likely garner more clicks, advertising, and subscriptions. Those assessed as poor would lose audience over time. Most important, this would put the responsibility on the consumer. If they read excessive fake news, they’ve no one to blame but themselves for being misled. Facebook, Google, and a handful of media outlets, in the year after the discoveries of fake news dominance, seemed primed to create such a system. But Facebook instead chose to put the evaluation to its users, asking the public to rate news outlets based on trust.17 Having watched the public—the crowd—in recent years, I think it’s equally likely that in this scenario, clickbait populism will reinforce rather than negate those outlets peddling less than factual information. The outlets with the most readers will likely rate those same outlets as most trustworthy, another version of tyranny by the majority, where confirmation bias can lead to alternative virtual worlds. Only time will tell whether
the new Facebook system works, and, to Facebook’s credit, at least it’s trying something.

  Social media companies can also slow the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation by ensuring the authenticity of accounts. Account anonymity may be of value at times, but social media companies must ensure that real people create accounts and can be traced as real sources of information. The costs to society of social bots far outweigh any benefits, and all social media platforms should end the creation and proliferation of automated, false personas. Twitter remains the most devastatingly negligent platform in this regard. It will have challenges making this policy adjustment, as its platform’s design naturally comes with such vulnerabilities, and the company’s value is tied to its volume of accounts. The killing of bots would put a huge strain on its finances. What if a celebrity, or an advertiser paying a celebrity to promote on Twitter, awoke to find that a third or more of their followers had disappeared overnight as a result of bot removals? Finally, social media companies design their applications to be addictive, but they must begin looking forward and ask whether their products have their users’ best interests in mind. Increasing shares and advertising revenues makes sense only if the democracies and societies that allow these social media companies to operate remain standing.

  Western democracies can also learn from one another—especially from those countries closer to the Kremlin that have built up resilience to propaganda. Finland fought Soviet disinformation for years, and Russian resurgence in this space led the Finns to develop a coordinated plan and trained personnel to deflect propaganda. They’ve also invested heavily in good public education, equipping their citizens not only to assess incoming information but also to recognize falsehoods because they understand how their own government institutions and processes work.18 Americans enraged by WikiLeaks dumps, shouting claims of corruption or collusion, actually know little about the operation of the branches of government and the electoral process. Civics classes alone could enable Americans to better spot and ignore falsehoods, but in today’s America, I imagine agreement on what should be taught during the class might be unachievable.

  The Italian Ministry of Education, in preparation for its 2018 elections, joined forces with national broadcasters and digital companies “to train a generation of students steeped in social media how to recognize fake news and conspiracy theories online.” Jason Horowitz of the New York Times described how students “will receive a list of what amounts to a new set of Ten Commandments. Among them: Thou shalt not share unverified news; thou shall ask for sources and evidence; thou shall remember that the internet and social networks can be manipulated.”19 Civil and political society can do much to ensure the integrity of institutions, restore a baseline of fact and fiction, and slow the divergence of preference bubbles, but ultimately it will be citizens, not governments, that save democracy and themselves from the new social media world.

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  Corporations have hurried to defend against hackers, and they must now extend those concerns to propagandists. Western companies should immediately develop response playbooks not just for cyberattacks but also for smear campaigns. Any company relying on customer trust in its brand will be particularly vulnerable to the spread of falsehoods via social media by nation-states, rival corporations, and protesters. When hacks occur, companies should assess not only what was lost, but how that information might be employed in a public smear campaign and how to inoculate themselves and their customers from the damage.

  The quest for compromising materials to use against adversaries will make banks and law firms particularly hot targets. These sectors and their third-party data providers hold vast secrets for their clients that will be preferred pickings for those seeking to launch an information attack on an adversary. The Panama and Paradise Papers and the Sony breach are obvious examples of the dangers of maintaining potential kompromat on clients. Preparing against kompromat theft is twofold. Banks and law firms need to conduct more vigorous risk assessments of their clients to better understand how likely they are to be targeted in smear campaigns using private information. Taking on risky clients, ones targeted by foreign governments or interwoven into dark money networks, will likely make firms susceptible to increased hacker and insider-threat activity. This bleeds over to third-party data providers of firms operating in the darker worlds of politics and shady aspects of money laundering. Each company transferring data in and out of targeted hubs of kompromat is at risk of being an entry point for hackers seeking the secrets of the powerful.

  Insider threats continue to grow as the greatest risk for data compromise and brand defamation. Monitoring internal threats and implementing controls should be a top priority as theft of secrets becomes the most damaging dimension of information warfare. Most companies have increased their technical monitoring, but, as I’ve discussed in this book, the human dimension—behavioral indicators—will be key in understanding when employees turn on their bosses and dump confidential information onto the internet.

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  Social media users can take several steps to survive in the modern social media world. First, and above all, ask whether the benefits of using social media outweigh the costs, and even if the answer to that question is yes, try to use social media less. Adam Alter proposed a solution for moderating social media and mobile phone use in Irresistible. The smartphone app Moment measures how much time a user spends sending emails, web browsing, using social media apps or making phone calls. I began using it and realized I average about the same amount of screen time each day as most users: three hours. My daily Moment update has helped me reduce my usage considerably in only a few months. Even before Moment, I’d undertaken social media blackouts at times, and the effects were almost immediate and positive. I feel as if I’ve got more time to accomplish tasks, my days feel longer and less frantic, and within a week I can generally concentrate more and feel significantly happier.

  As social media users, we must all work individually to pop our preference bubbles. When we like something, we must always ask ourselves, Do I like or retweet this image or news story because I believe in it and support it, or because I want to maintain my status in my social media crowd? Clickbait populism can be a good thing collectively and individually, if users are doing it for the right reason, but as users, do we know why we are going along with the crowd? As Tocqueville noted, it’s hard to challenge the majority, but it’s necessary for the good of democratic society. When we click, like, and retweet, we must know why we are doing it.

  Along those same lines, we must prevent the dangerous hardening of our bubbles. Trolls, those people who oppose our preferences, must be heard—don’t block them. I let my trolls challenge me for a few reasons. Their challenges help me improve my arguments and sharpen my thinking. They provide me with needed reconnaissance for my enemies: the more I watch them, the more I can mess with them later. Also, trolls grow stronger outside my bubble than inside it—where I can challenge them. Above all, I like to keep my enemies close; that way, when I’m betrayed, I know who my opponents are inside and outside my digital tribe. I leave all my social media trolls in play, even when they make me angry. With one exception: those spouting racist, bigoted, and hateful speech that hurts my real friends and family must go.

  Young people, in many ways, have figured out what their parents haven’t regarding social media. Cornell University’s Social Media Lab found that its students preferred Snapchat to its forerunners Facebook and Twitter because of the platform’s “ephemerality”—their messages were temporary, not permanent, for all to see. Young college students can lower their inhibitions on Snapchat without worrying about their content being dumped in the open for public consumption. One student, Chang, noted, “The network is a lot smaller, and a lot closer. . . . On larger platforms, you have this large diverse group of friends. On Snapchat, it’s very few and it’s very selected. It would be your closest friends rather than a larger network of professors and other students that you me
t once in a class.”20 The younger generation’s addiction might be worse, but they’ve learned from their parents about what can happen when you post something on Facebook or Twitter that you grow to regret. Maybe parents can learn from their kids and migrate to a more fulfilling platform like Snapchat, which brings together real friends and has design features that mitigate the spread of disinformation in ways Facebook and Twitter cannot.

  We need experts in industry, government, and civil society to advance our nation. Everyone’s an expert in something, just not in everything. We must respect and promote expertise, and each of us can do this individually by knowing when we’re experts and when we’re not, by separating our passions from our profession. We must also understand when our experts are suited to discuss a topic and when they are no longer in their particular domain.

  We must be sure to pick experts who are good critical thinkers. I’ve learned to evaluate them on three criteria. First, good critical thinkers have experience in their field and in the topics they discuss. Experience comes from years spent pursuing the discipline as well as certifications they’ve attained—doctorates, graduate degrees, and so on. Certifications have limitations, though. Not all are created equal—many highly certified experts have made dubious claims, and many who don’t have credentials produce amazing insights. This leads to the second criterion: good critical thinkers have made many observations in their discipline or topic. They’ve conducted and published in-person research and study, served in organizations involved in fieldwork, and seen a variety of cases in the discipline for which they pontificate. Third, experts need to have gone through a deliberate process of analysis to arrive at their conclusions. They’ve taken a large number of samples, data, and observations and put that information into a structured evaluation approach, oftentimes assisted by technology and employing well-tested theories, to arrive at insights not easily discerned by a layperson.