Everyone is focusing on the Maginot Line metaphor, and possible historical inaccuracies in what the author wrote. However, the important word from the title is not "Maginot", it's "Digital".
In reading the author's assessments of a wide range of topics, including free speech, digital militarization, and more, I found that there was actually quite a lot of valuable takeaways from their perspective, even for the reader that doesn't agree with 100% of the content.
However, if you are finding yourself roadblocked by the comparison to the Maginot Line, I encourage you to disregard this portion of the text and skip past it; the loss of the metaphor is not fatal to the rest of the content.
> War is a state of armed conflict between states, governments, societies and informal paramilitary groups, such as mercenaries, insurgents and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces.
It's a war[0] for sure, only not led with physical armament[1], thus without an obvious "mortality" part, although I've seen people and relationships destroyed due to those underhanded manipulations[2]; but every single word in the definition applies to the current global situation in an immaterial and digital context, with economic, physical, and psychological casualties (from alteration/destruction of rational thinking to downright PTSD).
Democracy is being gradually infected, corrupted, exploited, and ultimately destroyed by the dwindling costs of propaganda through weaponisation of modern information channels.
Key pull quote rather than arguing over the historical Maginot line:
"This particular manifestation of ongoing conflict was something the social networks didn’t expect. Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle."
I think using the Maginot line as a metaphor here is actually correct. Preventing an adversary from doing X means the adversary does Y instead. That doesn't mean spending time and money on prevent X is bad, it just means no matter how much planning you will always be unprepared. Develop flexible plans and general capabilities.
Given the choice between protecting ICT networks and protecting social networks, I'm glad we focused on ICT networks. That isn't the same as being invulnerable.
The thing that worries me even more is that more and more diverse types of content will be susceptible to algorithmic amplification in more and more sophisticated ways. Right now it's still relatively easy to tell what is a bot and what isn't because it's hard to generate credible text and video (and many other kinds of) content, but that's rapidly changing. It's a game of cat and mouse clicks.
This pervades every single sphere of life. Soon, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish the truthfulness of digital representations. In Baudrillard's words, I suspect that big data is becoming hyperreal. It is not that data is misrepresenting reality, but that it is actively influencing it, changing it to fit its representations.
Furthermore (and somewhat orthogonal), distinguishing fake content is getting harder because you don't even necessarily need bots (technological capital). If I started a restaurant and I wanted to acquire the maximal amount of attention and I had no moral qualms, I could hire 10,000 MTurks (or MTurk-equivalents) to write reviews for me on Yelp, and it will drive a positive feedback loop of legitimate good reviews. (This is exactly what's happening with Amazon rankings and reviews.) Amplification isn't just algorithmic, it can be produced by the application of many different kinds of capital.
We need to work on our assumptions - why human content is supposed to be good and bot content is supposed to be misleading? We assume that people have good intentions - but, as you notice, this easily breaks if evil organizations can pay people to create the content.
In the past page rank was (partially) solving this content problem - but now http pages are not the important nodes any more.
I would welcome new developments in page rank like algos - but more localized, because smaller networks are easier to police and evolve.
>I would welcome new developments in page rank like algos
PageRank-like algorithms are not the solution, they are the problem. They reward popularity with more popularity, enabling viral content, encouraging stuff like link spam and outrage click-bait. Worst of all, they normalized the idea that what you see in search results (and later - timelines, feeds) shouldn't be based on your query and author's page content, but rather on what everyone else wants to see.
there are lots of current day Internet-scale problems where, in order to solve them, someone is going to have to figure out how to overcome people’s natural tendency to mistake popularity for quality. This falsehood compromises all kinds of rankings, from search results to Yelp and Amazon reviews to tweets. Even here on HN, “number of upvotes” (popularity) unsatisfactorily attempts to declare something about a comment’s quality.
I think part of the problem is that in many circumstances, such as Yelp and Amazon reviews, popularity is the best proxy for quality that is currently available. Perhaps if other ways for people to quickly distinguish quality were developed then people would start making better decisions.
I think that there may be a philosophical issue here: not everyone agrees on what ‘good’ is (maybe noöne agrees!): I may derive much joy from Y but you find it derivative and lame; you may love X but I hate it; he may enjoy passing around Russian agitprop memes. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think neither ‘the majority of people in this bubble in San Francisco like this’ nor ‘ the majority of people on earth like this’ is a terribly useful, not to mention correct, criterion.
The following is a paraphrase from a Quora answer. Sadly, the source has since left Quora and I've been unable to locate it. Here's what I have from memory.
French military planners did not believe that the Ardennes was impenetrable. Tanks were used in WW1 and they were considered a grave threat, the whole point of the Line was to defend against a mechanized assault force. The battle plans they drew up had a variation extending the Line to cover the forest. It was dropped when a deal was reached with Belgium so that they could cover that part of the defense. Years later the deal was forgotten and so the forest wasn't defended.
A French division was stationed at the forest but it was recalled for cost concerns. It wasn't a failure of military planning, it was a failure of the government to follow through.
The problem with fighting disinformation is that it requires an entity that has the authority to stamp something as true or untrue. This entity will be made of humans and therefore susceptible to disinformation in the same way as the people it is intended to protect and also prone to abuse of its power. If it's between the order of one centralized authority determining truth (China) and the chaos of thousands of competing entities, I'll take the chaos.
Then you have the problem of who gets to decide who gets to be a ministry of truth. The entity with that power is now the one centralized ministry of truth.
Well, that's just one possibility in a space of many.
The core of the point is this, reiterating from the article: obviously a ministry of truth is bad. But isn't the chaos just as bad, since it is susceptible to be dominated by an "implicit" equivalent of the ministry of truth?
To what extent are people really deciding for themselves when they think they're deciding for themselves? If freedom is our highest ideal, how do we empower the maximal amount of people to make decisions for themselves without these influences?
> To what extent are people really deciding for themselves when they think they're deciding for themselves?
To no extent. All decisions are made with some outside influence. This is true now and has always been true. Unless you live as a hermit your thoughts are influenced by other members of society.
> If freedom is our highest ideal, how do we empower the maximal amount of people to make decisions for themselves without these influences?
We don't. How can you eliminate outside influence if you are under outside influence yourself?
I'd say it's a combination of things. Partly the fact they actually have humans reviewing material and performing at least a modicum of veracity verification. BUT, this happens over time. So yes, while Wikipedia is a target of mis/dis-information, a lot of it is eventually cleaned up, and where there's back-and-forth changes, this is pointed out, meaning readers are warned to take the info with a grain of salt. Incorrect changes may persist for days, months or even years on Wikipedia. However, the Wikipedia approach doesn't scale that well for time-sensitive information. In the week before an election, there may not be sufficient time to review and verify all information published. And even though the record may eventually be corrected, the damage is done and the correction becomes almost moot.
Wikipedia is struggling hard against misinformation, POV-pushing and edit wars on almost every controversial topic - the big ones being politics(American, Eastern European, Israel/Palestine) and medicine(gmos, pseudoscience healing, etc)
These are places where the fighting is so common, admins are allowed to ban on a hair trigger. This doesn't really lead to "high quality" - instead it leads to massive gamesmanship as people try to smear each other and get the "other side" banned so they can freely edit the topics to their content. Just click through some of the cases to see the issues leading to them(beware, this is an endless black hole of drama).
>The problem with fighting disinformation is that it requires an entity that has the authority to stamp something as true or untrue.
Any real solution to the problem of disinformation has to work through giving individuals better tools, more visibility and more control over the information they are exposed to.
> If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.
Why do we and the author seem to keep dancing around the fact that Facebook must be refusing to garbage collect bogus nodes on their own social network?
The company presumably still has access to its own social graph, to reams of data from site/app/like button/audio/webcam/key&mouse events, and whatever else it purchases from third parties. How in the world can a troll farm employee proxied through a hacked router in Branson evade detection? An employee who isn't cross-referenced in photographs, videos, phone calls, PMs, contacts, browsing patterns, games, purchase histories, smart tv ad beacons, and whatever else Facebook sniffs up?
In light of that, the article seems like a distraction. While I don't know how to get social media companies to garbage-collect their graphs I know if they did it would diminish the fragility of the system. If that raises the cost of subsequent information attacks such that they must happen in a different domain that the social graph, that's not a Maginot Line. It's an improvement.
Edit: same logic applies to the input coming in from ads. Facebook presumably has just as rich data on the organizations buying them as it does on its userbase. Prune the fronts and information attacks move again to a different domain.
People are generally gullible. Most people fear originality, strive to maintain commitment, and conform to a group narrative. These are all irrational noncognitive behaviors strongly aligned to perceptions of security. It’s hard to fix stupid.
Before people obtained most of their news from social media they were getting it from pseudo journalism comedy television. The primary motivation of the supplier then was advertising revenue just as it is of social media now.
A little presumptuous to say group narratives and commitment are stupid. These are components of shared understandings of reality, which is what allows society to function and people to communicate.
It's not stupid at all, it's just no longer appropriate. For most of human existence, being cast out of the group meant almost certain death within weeks.
Just as today I suspect this is true for most people but there are some who will always figure it out and make it through. For people capable of figuring things out independence is more an opportunity than a death sentence.
Competition and survivability are great economic indicators of health. As far as self-indicative criteria the difference between independence and insanity is simply deliberation with which a decision is made based upon supporting evidence.
Some people who were regarded as crackpots to be ignored:
* Alfred Wegener (plate techtonics)
* Ernest Duchesne (antibiotics)
* Alfred Russel Wallace (evolution)
* Galileo Galilei (astronomy)
* Marc Andreessen (internet commercialization)
I believe the appropriate term for this sort of behavior is personal exceptionalism.
The article first says that "Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem", implying that false information is not the problem, and then "the human mind is the territory" - if you're fighting over peoples' minds, and using factually true information, then what is the problem? That sounds like logical persuasion to me.
(obviously, I'm missing some nuance - I was hoping that a more intelligent HN denizen would be kind enough to point it out to me)
> if you're fighting over peoples' minds, and using factually true information, then what is the problem? That sounds like logical persuasion to me.
The problem is that facts are almost entirely irrelevant in this fight. For most humans, truth only matters where the impact of being wrong is immediately and painfully visible. In all other cases, beliefs are primarily social objects - means for maintaining relationships with people, participating in groups, and signalling values[0]. Beyond false information, a lot of words are put on-line to mess up with people's epistemology - the framework we use to determine what beliefs are accurate. The most visible result is people ignoring facts staring them in the face, having a million excuses to believe what they want to believe.
You can't win a war with facts, when people don't agree on the most basic concept that facts should determine their beliefs.
--
[0] - If you don't believe this, consider all the many little things that you know your family & friends are wrong about, but that you deemed not important enough to correct those people on.
> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters.
The author seems to fully have bought into the anti-Trump narrative that the only problem about the bots is that they were /Russian/ bots, and things would turn out all right if only the US developed a reliable mechanism to keep them foreigners (Russian bots, ISIS recruiters...) out of its internet; I'm not sure if the usage of the term "digital illegals" here is to be taken as a sign of self-awareness just how much this mentality mirrors "build the wall" and Brexit and what-not.
Is there any reason to assume that there isn't plenty of potential and will within the borders of the US to attack its society's ability to "operate with a shared epistemology"? I remember debates between internet creationists and evolutionists back in the '90s, and they looked exactly the same as red-blue debates look nowadays: every side had access to its own endless stream of well-written sources constituting a backdrop against which their own worldview was obviously true and the opposition's worldview was obviously false, and each side treated constructing another such prop that would contribute to the picture that their interpretation is the only reasonable one as a pro-social act regardless of how unsound or badly argued it was. This is the era for which the phrase that "arguments are soldiers" was quipped. I take it nobody
contends that PZ Myers or Ken Ham were Russian plants, but all the qualities of the present situation were already there back when they were the biggest fish of memetic warfare. And this was made possible just by academics with a lot of time vs. small-time evangelical tax evasion bucks; we still only have a sketchy understanding of how much the public epistemology was polluted by American corporate interests.
There's some interesting analysis in here but overall, I think it's focused on the wrong points. I don't want to ignore the danger posed by propaganda committees like those described in the article, but the author’s dismissal of bots/automation in this space as passé seems totally wrong. She writes: "bots are of increasingly minimal value...". Sure, in 2018, this is true for simple bots, but I doubt bots have said their final word. AI could power bots that are massively more sophisticated than their cousins that spam retweets, not to mention better at slipping through filters designed to catch them. Such next-gen bots might be able to read an article or view an image, decide what it’s about, formulate an "opinion" on it, then generate some sort of response - maybe a comment that's passable for (at least Internet-level) real human discourse.
Imagine such a bot on reddit, for instance. Imagine it's the stereotypical Russian bot, trolling the internet to sow discontent in the West. It might upvote anything about racial strife or immigration issues. It might show up in the comments to support Euro-skeptic candidates in the EU. It would pipe up about the Deep State in the US. Now imagine there's hundreds of thousands of similar bots, across a variety of sites. They would be able to control online discourse to a huge extent and dictate the media/opinion diet of millions of people. An army of these bots would be more powerful than any current propaganda arms, even those with State-level support.
Nothing new here. Ideologies are mind viruses that infect their hosts and their goal has ever been to build an organization to perpetuate themselves and fight off any competing ideologies that pose a threat. Humans are expendable.
What I want to see is a systematic epidemeological study of ideologies. Including Liberal Democracy.
I see at least one market opportunity here: the social graph has, presently, assigned stronger weight to authenticatable news sources. Perhaps those news sources should start authenticated their sources? Not the HUMINT stuff, but video frames and audio segments should be cryptographically signed by the device that produced them, so you can match the camera footage to the camera, it's geolocation, etc.
> Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters.
JFC. They want more unchecked state surveillance of its own citizens?
Everything would have played out exactly the same even with no Russian interference. There are some big value clashes going on in America, and since there is no established way to make is-ought leaps, facts are not of critical importance in resolving these. Not that reality favors either side anyway.
I think the Russian interference increased the gain in the echo chambers, which made things worse, but not qualitatively different. (Though enough gain can make things qualitatively different, once the gain exceeds unity...)
> Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases
I disagree with those ideas. Until now they look like made-up excuses for problems that have local origin, not external origin.
By claiming that these problems are external we do not only create a division and misunderstanding in the local politics.
We also create a non-existing virtual enemy that will cost a lot of resources. And this might be the actual goal of this article: to get military funding for these projects.
On the other hand there are companies and political organisations directly working to promote a certain idea, and to attack opposing ideas. This is independent of origin of country. These groups can be easily identified as they try to even forbid those ideas, and avoid reasonable public discussions. Discussions that can actually settle the disputes or even give better understanding of the underlying problems.
Certain big companies do not want that. Because their funding and income are directly related to how much products or shit they can sell the public. Criticism of those organisations is usually stopped by buying out media, even science media. And by paying expert to come up with certain conclusions.
The political organisations, or even political agencies try to implement a certain policy. Those are actually two different groups, but the agencies often like to support certain political organisation.
They want to create an "enemy" from everyone that does not support their political idea. This does not matter on what side of politics you are. From: "They are gonna take our guns and freedom" to "all white men are racists".
The general idea is to create an enemy based on fear. The article also does it a bit similar. It is something that I rather step away from, because it does not really identify the problem.
The political groups that create "enemies" to promote certain ideas, just need to talk with each other. Putting internet barriers between them does not help. Both sides are humans. Opposing people talking with each other, in a friendly way, can even create friendships.
Then we have the last group. Agencies that want to support certain political groups to push certain political policies. There are a lot of them, even within a country. The oil-companies want to downplay climate problems. The military wants to push for more wars, maybe for strategic reasons. The CIA wants to push for regime changes, maybe to install their puppet. The Israelis want to stop discussions about Palestine. The Russians want to keep Crimea. But there are much more agencies. Even Billionaires that do their own little policies, like Soros publicly sponsoring immigration.
Each of these agencies have their own goals, and we like to defend against them. Is each agency really working for our interest or for their own? In a democracy we like to choose and have full information.
So the problem is not separated by state. Blockage of information will even prevent us from seeing what is really going on. It will even allow for increased corruption.
If you look what is really going into the problems that are reported, it is unfair politics, and the lack of good unbiased information.
Mh, war needs big resources, especially if parties involved want to win against big enemies and they have to fight for long time. In other words I do not think "terrorist"&c exists on their own. Sure lone wolves can do act autonomously without organizations but actual "info war" and "physical war" are backed by someone with big money and power.
This uses a very common, very oft quoted, but also very wrong myth about why the Maginot line was created and what its purpose was.
Its purpose was not to stop a German attack head on, it was not to defend the entire course of territory that needed to be defended. It was instead designed so that the numerically inferior French army could free up as many troops as possible to meet the expected German invasion in the north. There is a reason all of the best French and British troops were positioned to meet the expected German invasion through Belgium and not anywhere near the Maginot Line.
When compared to its actual purpose the Maginot Line performed perfectly well. The Germans did not try and attack it, they instead attacked to the north, just not quite as "north" as the Allies hoped.
The Maginot line was never intended to be impenetrable. Its purpose was to slow the Germans down if they decided to attack along the French/German border, and to force them to go through Belgium again like they did in WW1.
In reading the author's assessments of a wide range of topics, including free speech, digital militarization, and more, I found that there was actually quite a lot of valuable takeaways from their perspective, even for the reader that doesn't agree with 100% of the content.
However, if you are finding yourself roadblocked by the comparison to the Maginot Line, I encourage you to disregard this portion of the text and skip past it; the loss of the metaphor is not fatal to the rest of the content.