Understanding societal manipulation through social media
The ‘deep state’ in the United States appears to have almost perfected authoritarianism under the guise of democracy by the time the Internet and social media were invented.
It had obtained control over the vast majority of media and cultural institutions, in the United States in particular but also in many countries across the world. Operation Mockingbird, exposed by the Church Committee in a last gasp of democratic transparency in the 1970s, is the best-known instance of a large-scale project to control the US media. But the evidence suggests that the influence operations were far more extensive.
The innovation of the internet and social media has now created a means to expand, extend, and cement such systems of control across the globe.
At the core of this system is one very simple principle: you can say whatever you want, so long as it has no substantive negative effect on the interests of those in power.
The cunning ‘genius’ of this is that it creates an authoritarian society that is far more flexible and robust than one that tries to suppress and ban speech. The very act of direct suppression creates an environment that ultimately can destroy the overtly authoritarian system, either organically from within or by providing fertile soil for external manipulation. That is why countries like Russia and China, powerful as they are in other respects, are still so much more vulnerable to instability driven by instigated dissent than the United States. We are told this is because they are substantively less democratic, but in reality it is because their mechanisms of authoritarianism are more overtly based on power and control.
Those familiar with the movie The Matrix may remember the scene when the main protagonist Neo – faced with agents of the system who are trying to recruit him through coercion – demands the phone call to which he believes he is legally entitled. The response of the agent is chilling: “What use is a phone call, when you are unable to speak…?”
In China and Russia you are likely to be denied the proverbial phone call: certain social media platforms are blocked, certain statements may get you into trouble with the authorities. In the United States and on its social media platforms you can often say what you want, but if it is really a threat to power: no-one will hear you.
The situation today
The analogous situation in much of the world today is similar: the majority of those reading this post have unprecedented freedom of expression and publication. But what use is that when the platforms on which we speak and write can ensure that (almost) no-one hears us? And, conversely, can ensure that their chosen voices and opinions flood our ‘feeds’ and consciousness.
It is for this reason that consistent or systemic virality of particular individuals or narratives becomes an immediate red flag. In three cases I have written about so far – Tucker Carlson, Jiang Xueqin and Mehdi Hasan – their virality was the first sign that something was amiss. In each of these cases, when investigated further, the individuals turned out to have likely connections to the deep state power structure that would be controlling these systems: Western intelligence agencies being the core institutions responsible. The supposed anti-establishment, even anti-deep state, positioning of these characters is intended to distract from that but also to occupy the critical space in which resistance to these dynamics could be mobilised.
And of course there are dozens of other examples. I will continue to write about some of these because they are important for understanding the details and complexities of how these strategies work.
For example, the systemic aspect of virality is important. It is probabilistically possible that a genuinely dissident voice might go viral, and it would be defeatist to assume that is always impossible. In other words, just because a critical voice goes viral once or twice that does not mean they are necessarily being amplified by those who can tweak the system – and are therefore not the critics they appear to be.
But going viral when you are criticising those who wield power will quickly draw attention and algorithmic suppression (‘deboosting’ and deamplification). If somehow an individual or collaboration manages to keep breaking through the algorithmic suppression, they are deplatformed, as in the cases like African Stream I wrote about here.1
Beyond bots and simple algorithms
Most people still think of social media manipulation as happening through ‘bot armies’ or algorithms that ‘herd’ people into epistemic bubbles where every opinion they are exposed to is similar. Both those factors still play a role but they are relatively unimportant now.
The most important thing you need to understand is that the most powerful present-day social media manipulation is carried out via amplification and deamplification of real content.
I have written before about how this is the most dangerous tool in manipulating public sentiment for elections. There are two main dimensions of this: promoting narratives and promoting individuals.
Narrative promotion
Imagine in an election the CIA wants to increase the votes for Party Z. It obtains direct cooperation or direct access to the systems of Meta (YouTube, Instagram), TikTok and Twitter (X). It adds some lines of code that instruct the algorithms to amplify content that contains positive sentiment about Z and negative sentiment about the other parties. Similarly, the algorithm is coded to deamplify (‘deboost’) negative content about Z and positive content about the other parties. Only if there isn’t enough of the kind of content the CIA wants to amplify will it be necessary to actually create through paid influencers, agents or bots. This kind of narrative promotion can be used for almost any kind of issue – including aspects of wars. (I will write about what’s been happening with the Iran war soon).
Promoting operatives
Promoting operatives this way is also remarkably simple: the key factor that needs to be manipulated is views. Even if someone’s content is fairly average, if you show it to 10million people there is a high chance of them getting thousands of followers as a result. Amplify any positive sentiment about the content, throw a few other operatives and bots into the mix, and very quickly you can create a viral phenomenon like Jiang Xueqin. This kind of strategy is even easier when someone already has a base in traditional media and a large following from that: like Tucker Carlson or Mehdi Hasan. There is much more real content to work with and much less chance of the amplification being detectable.
All the major social media platforms are headquartered in the United States. Alan McLeod of Mint Press has documented how dozens, maybe hundreds, of ‘former’ US and UK intelligence operatives have been employed by these companies. It is obvious, therefore, that the only powers likely to be able to implement this kind of manipulation are countries in the Five Eyes intelligence network with the United States at its centre.2
How to combat and break through this manipulation is a difficult challenge. I believe it can be done. But getting the majority of people to understand the manipulation would actually be the bigger victory: if people understand how the manipulation works then it quickly starts to lose influence. Information is power and every person counts. Spread the word.
1 Another recent example is a channel called ‘Russians with Attitude’ which has just been deplatformed by Patreon. RWA has been overtly pro-Russian, but also often far more balanced than any Western media outlet I have watched. To try and get an accurate picture of what is going on in the Russia-Ukraine war, I rarely bother with mainstream media outlets which almost entirely peddle US deep state propaganda in Ukraine. Instead I compare and contrast pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian social media channels; RWA has been one of the best and often admits to significant strategic losses or defeats on the Russian side.
2 The global tentacles of the Five Eyes network were exposed by Edward Snowden, including the tapping of global fibre-optic cables for mass surveillance.
