A War of Information

I'm pretty sure we've entered a new era of war, and that we're currently losing. I think the main reason we're losing is because most people don't even know we're in this new war, and then there's a substantial number of people who know, but just don't care.

This new war is being waged, not with bombs or bullets, but information. Unable to compete with conventional military means, Russia has invested disproportionately in attacking not just us, but Western democracy in general, by leveraging the freedom of the internet to hack public opinion in order to disrupt and warp our democratic processes.

France has its presidential election on Sunday. The race is between two candidates:

Emmanuel Macron, left-centrist
Marine Le Pen, anti-Muslim, nationalistic, and far-right

Macron has been in a commanding lead throughout the election. Yesterday, tens of thousands of files that had been hacked from the Macron campaign were released publicly. Conveniently, France has blackout laws that prohibit candidates from saying anything about the election in the days just prior, so Macron can't give a press conference about the hack or its contents. The reports note that Macron's campaign says that false information has been interweaved with actual files.

Russia is the prime suspect, but it's too early to say for sure. I don't believe as of this writing that Wikileaks has leaked the contents of the hack. According to their Twitter account, they are analyzing it for authenticity. If Wikileaks releases the info before the election tomorrow, that's going to look highly suspicious. The sheer volume of the information most likely prohibits any kind of thorough check in that short a period of time. What I found interesting this morning, though, was when I Googled "wikileaks macron" to see if they had leaked the info. Here's a screenshot of my search results, with the timestamp from my PC added:

Now this is very interesting. The top three news stories that pop up are from Breitbart (far right-wing media outlet), Sputnik International (state-run Russian propaganda site), and RT (another state-run Russian propaganda site). The first actual search result is from The Gateway Pundit, a far right-wing blog. All the top search results, both news and search, are from a mixture of far right-wing sources or straight-up Russian propaganda. 

The implication here is that Russia is actively working to boost these search results through Google. I've been noticing a lot more stories in my news results from Breitbart and RT over the last couple of months, but nothing as drastic as this particular search. This means that anyone searching for specific news or information about this particular topic is going to get fed a skewed version of the story.

I don't know what Google's doing about this, if anything. Their news feed has been one of their weaker services for a while. I don't know if they make some attempt to balance news sources, and thus become exploitable. From what I know of the company, they tend to be as laissez-faire as possible, just letting the free market of information and backtracked links figure things out. I'm sure they maintain blacklists of sites like child porn or terrorist groups, but for the most part I think they're probably pretty hands-off.

And it looks to me with these kinds of search results that the Russians are exploiting that. Just as the 9/11 attackers exploited our openness and freedoms, it seems the Russians are doing the same on the digital front, warping the open marketplace of ideas.

I don't know the answers about how to fix this. But it's obvious to me that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have a responsibility to step up their game. I don't necessarily want to see greater internet regulation, but if Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Presumably that doesn't include gross misinformation. But maybe it does. Maybe Google has an agnostic view of the quality of information.

But here's an article from the NY Times about Google and Facebook's response to fake news.

"The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users," Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement. "In this case, we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."

So Google seems to be saying they do care about the accuracy of the information they're serving up via search, though the language is a little vague. Presumably the results should return a mix of views, with highly-speculative sources being pushed down or tagged in some meaningful way. It's disturbing, though, that the Russians and the alt-right still seem to be effectively gaming the system so easily.

Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to the issue is also disturbing:

Facebook's decision to clarify its ad policy language is notable because Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive, has repeatedly fobbed off criticism that the company had an effect on how people voted. In a post on his Facebook page over the weekend, he said that 99 percent of what people see on the site is authentic, and only a tiny amount is fake news and hoaxes.
"Over all, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

So he doesn't even really see it as a problem. Like I said, I really don't want to see the government step in and have to regulate news sources. I do want to see our tech giants care about the integrity of their product and how it's used, as well as not helping to destroy the political and economic system in which they operate. That seems like a simple case of self-interest, if nothing else.

The public needs to increasingly care about the quality and integrity of the information they consume. So it's not just up to the corporations who's entire business is information, but among the electorate as well. Because if nobody cares, then we may have already lost.