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Media guide, part 8

Propaganda and misinformation is widespread. How do you counteract the efforts of manipulation? This part looks at one particular technique.

Inoculation

Let's begin with this interview with Dr. John Banas (there's a video as well as a transcription):

Resistance through inoculation

I'll resist the temptation to call him Mr. Bananas because making fun of folk's names is just too good an illustration of one of the "propaganda techniques" (though I think it's more appropriately described as a rhetorical device) which they rightly teach us to look out for. In the interview they discuss a strategy for making people resistant against persuasion by propaganda, called inoculation. One might wrongly assume that the word's etymology has something to do with losing ones eyes, blinding oneself to the facts of the world, but no, the metaphor has to do with vaccination. You take a vaccine against disinformation by exposing yourself to a small and harmless dose of it.

The way it works is that you stir up the vulnerable subject by informing them that someone is about to persuade them with some propaganda or disinformation that they may be succeptible to accept. This persuasion is supposedly like a viral attack. And you also tell them in advance what those talking points and slogans will be, and what's wrong about them.

Banas is a little diffuse about what disinformation he is thinking about, except that some of it concerns conspiracy theories, some wild misconceptions about vaccination (not the metaphorical kind this time), and that sometimes foreign actors may be to blame for disinformation campaigns.

There is a curious passage in the interview where Banas talks about the film Loose change, final cut, which is about the 9/11 events from the position of the 9/11 Truth movement. Actually the film is not particularly emotionally manipulative, nor does it promote any explanation of what happened, it's just full of puzzling facts and witness testimonies that were quickly forgotten in the official narrative.

One of Banas' students asked him if he'd be willing to watch the film and give his opinion as a persuasion scholar, so he did.

And I watched it and it did blow my mind because I wasn't persuaded so much as I had a lot of questions.

They also watched the film in class and had a discussion.

And then I just asked people, well, what do you think? And to my horror, right? They were like, wow, I didn't know that, you know?

The students had questions and wanted to know more. Banas had thought the film would make his students confused. But instead:

I didn't think it would move them off their attitude positions. To my horror, it did. It did a lot.

I think this account of watching the film says something not only about the potential blind spots of a persuasion scholar, but also about the inoculation method of coping with persuasion efforts. For sure there are nuts in the 9/11 Truth movement, and some hypotheses about what happened and why may not hold up to scrutiny, but the official version and the 9/11 commission's report certainly has flaws and omissions. Inoculation in the etymologically false sense of covering your eyes may be a defense against having to adjust your world view to entertain the possibility that your government misled you.

Robert Anton Wilson suggested a few practical excersises in his brilliant self-help book Prometheus Rising. Their purpose is to expand your mental horizon by trying to perceive the world through the reality tunnel of someone else. You could try for a month to explain everything going on around you as a Cristian conservative would, then try the perspective of a Liberal, or as an occultist, then as a rational materialist. Donella Meadows proposed a similar mental flexibility and skepticism as the highest goal in Thinking in Systems. Be prepared to question what you think is true! Being ready to have one's ideas challenged doesn't mean that you change your mind all the time. We know how hard it is to question fundamental beliefs. As many persuasion scholars point out, conspiracy theories, once you subscribe to them, are very hard to unsubscribe to.

More virology

The idea of inoculation as a means of mental resistance to propaganda goes back to the 1960's and has been applied not only to making individuals resist disinformation, but also in marketing of products.

Beth Goldberg at Jigsaw (a unit within Google that explores threats to open societies) writes:

Psychological inoculation works by helping people build “mental antibodies” by briefly exposing them to a weakened persuasive message and thoroughly refuting it. The goal is to help individuals better recognize and resist similar misleading messages when they encounter them in the future.

Jigsaw Explains Inoculation

Supposedly the arguments presented in an inoculation message must appear to have some merit, sufficiently to motivate the subject to maintain their current attitudes and beliefs, but weak enough that the receiver is able to think of a refutation.

Moreover, Goldberg writes:

It is possible to inoculate against a common misinformation technique like using fake experts, or a "meta-narrative" such as scapegoating, rather than a specific misinformation claim. ... inoculating against techniques rather than claims creates broader, more transferable immunity.

An additional advantage is that it allows inoculation messages to be apolitical.

Jigsaw on Inoculation

This is apparently a fertile field of academic research. Inoculation has been tried in controlled settings where it has been shown to be effective. Current research addresses questions such as how long does the effect last, how well does it work outside the laboratory setting, and how efficient is it for different groups of the population.

Propwatch on inoculation

There are even games that try to vax players against misinformation:

Behavioral Scientist: Inoculation Against Misinformation

But what view do these inoculators really have of the people they are trying to treat? World views are seen as healthy or sick. Get a jab against the evil forces that try to persuade you to believe some nonsense! It all appears very instrumental and mechanistic. And that by itself isn't necessarily bad or wrong.

The efforts seem to pull in a sound direction of increased awareness of manipulation. But notice that inoculation is just a technique used to dispel erroneous beliefs before they take root. When you believe something it is very hard to reconsider your belief. Maybe the technique could be misused to cement extant misconceptions. It appears to be a tool against propaganda, but might it not also be used to reinforce any perception the inoculator chooses to reinforce?

This brings us to something truly sinister.

Your brain as a battle field

Ben Norton at the GrayZone writes about NATO's plans to expand warfare to a new domain. No longer restricted to air, land, sea, space, and cyber, the new domain is the human and cognitive domain. I will summarise and quote extensively from this important article.

Behind NATO's 'cognitive warfare'

Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”

Norton quotes a recent NATO-sponsored report.

With entire civilian populations in NATO’s crosshairs, the report emphasized that Western militaries must work more closely with academia to weaponize social sciences and human sciences and help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities.

Ok, so maybe the inoculation technique and similar inventions will be useful in more ways.

The report also took a paranoid turn and

... warned of “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.” The study makes it clear that those “competitors” purportedly exploiting the consciousness of Western dissidents are China and Russia.

From a press release of NATO's Innovation Challenge 2021 hosted by Canada:

“Cognitive warfare positions the mind as a battle space and contested domain. Its objective is to sow dissonance, instigate conflicting narratives, polarize opinion, and radicalize groups. Cognitive warfare can motivate people to act in ways that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.”

This is not only about defense against the action of other states, there are plans to develop these techniques for offensive purposes.

Norton also quotes cognitive warfare researcher du Cluzel. Cognitive warfare starts with hyper-connectivity, the fact that everyone has a cell phone. It starts with information, but goes beyond it by using collected data. Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and digital addiction can be combined and leveraged in order "to know you and use that knowledge to change the way you think," according to du Cluzel.

Cognitive warfare is not merely a fight against _what_ we think, it's a fight against the _way_ we think, du Cluzel says.

It’s much more powerful and it goes way beyond the information [warfare] and psyops.

According to a report published in January 2021 by NATO Innovation Hub,

... anyone could be a target of these cognitive warfare operations: “Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital,” the report ominously added.

So, if you see that the military is hiring expertise in anthropology, ethnography, history, or psychology, then you know what it's all about. Except that it might not be transparent where the money is coming from if a sudden resuscitation should overwhelm the atrophied faculties of Arts and Humanities.

As with other advanced weapons systems, one wonders if there will not be an arms race. We understand how dangerous bio-weapons are. Release a disease in enemy land and there is no way to contain it and stop it from spreading back home. Similar effects seem likely with cognitive warfare in a connected world. Destroy a foreign population's critical thinking capabilities by posting stupid memes (as if it were that simple), and the memes will spread back home and cause as much damage there. Or, more likely, if the cognitive warfare campaign has any intended effect it may also have unforeseen consequences that play out over longer time and might not be to the benefit of the attacker.

Shame on anyone who wants to destroy our critical thinking abilities! It won't be easy. (I'm not sure if I'm joking or not, given the prevalent group think in our hyper-connected societies and apparent malleability of people's world views.)