The fresh weapons of disinformation

I invite you to reflect upon the past decade in South Africa, how our independently regulated media was compromised, the mushrooming of completely unregulated “media”, and how these triangulated with massive armies of Twitter and Facebook bots, trolls and fake profiles, coupled with State Capture, Bell Pottinger “black/grey/white ops” and how these very same tactics continue to evolve in support of the State Capture gang (and some new allies) fighting back.

And the so-called “narratives”. All too familiar. Think the old “Hawks Illegal Renditions”, the old “2nd IPID Report”, the old “Cato Manor hit-squad”, the ever-lasting “SARS rouge/rogue unit” propaganda, “fire pool” and that crap, and now the latest “Super Pravin of Canadian bank account fame is to blame for anything imaginable and more”, “CR money laundering”, blah, blah… oh, and all the “poison plots”.

Note terminology, like:

• Operatives;


• Disinformation;


• Money;


• Sleek systems;


• “Death Star”;


• Lucrative relationships;


• Websites;


• Race-baiting;


• Immigrant-bashing;


• Truth-bending;


• Political operatives;


• “Project Alamo”;


• “Leaked memos”;


• Strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth;


• Crowds of donors;


• Muddy the waters;


• Alternative facts;


• But they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture;


• “With the right kind of nudges”, people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking;


• War on the Press;


• Story was part of a co-ordinated effort by a coalition... to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage;


• “Dossiers”;


• “Journalistic integrity is dead. There is no such thing any more. So everything is about weaponisation of information”;


• Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether;


• When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content — no more or less credible than partisan propaganda;


• “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media”;


• “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers”;


• Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names... have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices;


• Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable;


• Candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these... news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm — instead of paying the sites directly — candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme... Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails;


• Thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag;


• Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cyber militias;


• “False flag operations”;


• Wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed;


• “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it”; and


• Paranoia.