Influence Operations: Unmasking the Digital

Influence Operations: Unmasking the Digital | Daily Tribune

Fake news, trolls and online harassment or hate are all familiar evils of our digital era that have victimized countless Filipinos.

The majority of Filipinos, in fact, now believe that fake news is a pandemic-like scourge and find it difficult to spot, according to a recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey.

So concerning is the fake news scourge that this dispensation is seriously containing it by penalizing troll farms, prosecuting online harassers and abusers, and surveilling suspected online influencers.

Fake news, trolls and online harassment are tools used by shadowy bad actors in the larger deception schemes called “influence operations.”

And, the sooner we familiarize ourselves with these diabolic schemes the earlier we can recover our personal and socio-political sanity from what information experts call our present “online disinformation disorder.”

At the same time, familiarizing ourselves with “influence operations” enables us to understand the sudden spike in misinformation or disinformation in the aftermath of autocrat Duterte’s arrest and subsequent International Criminal Court (ICC) detention.

Generally, “influence operations” is the 21st century buzzword for the age-old purposeful manipulation of people. An older generation would know it as “the battle for hearts and minds.”

But insofar as it relates to our current politics, most experts agree the “propagation of manipulative overarching political narratives is central to” current influence operations.

Now, influence operations are often confused with misinformation and disinformation since it makes use of both deception tactics.

Manipulative misinformation means the creation and spread of false and misleading information, either deliberately or accidentally shared on social media platforms, about people and government institutions.

A recent example of a deliberate misinformation campaign targeting an institution was last week’s attack on the Supreme Court.

The High Court had to forcefully disavow a fabricated claim that it had received a petition bearing some 16 million signatures calling for the resignation of the President.

Many other misinformation and disinformation tactics abound, some subtly false, some hilariously false. You can easily find the tampering every time you go on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok.

Influence operations, however, are specifically about purposeful projects to skew how people see recent political events, often in the form of “hyper-partisan narratives offering wildly different interpretations of political issues and events.”

And, these cunning deceptions use the latest advances in digital technology and are far more precise in their targeting, faster too and dodgier.

Last week, for instance, a news outfit reported that hours before the autocrat’s family and lawyers claimed his arrest was a “kidnapping,” 200 Facebook pages had already posted identical texts accusing law enforcers of abducting Duterte.

The identical messages were posted within the 12-hour window between Duterte’s Tuesday morning arrest and his late-night flight out to The Hague.

The “kidnapping” messaging blitz, concluded the news outfit, showed “hallmarks of a coordinated influence operation based on (the) timing and similarity of posts.”

While the above stunning influence operation isn’t now unusual, not all influence operations use false or inaccurate narratives, however.

“There are influence operations that do not even make definitive claims about an issue. Some types of influence operations merely express an opinion or commentary, but in a manner designed to sow confusion among the public, attack a personality or institution, or corrupt the public discourse,” pointed out one fake news analysis.

Anyway, in our current state of political warfare, influence operations are really about using “weapons that are not weapons” to mess up Filipinos’ minds and these weapons easily reach into military and police barracks, classrooms, boardrooms and living rooms.

Political power, in short, no longer comes just from guns, goons and gold. It employs computers, algorithms, robots, and artificial intelligence, all with the avowed intent of dislodging a political adversary with no shots fired or having to employ corruption and violence.