
Introduction to Data Driven Propaganda - mlb_hn
http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2017/November/Data-Driven-Propaganda/
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mlb_hn
I wrote this piece as I was leaving the Army, I was planning on letting it sit
in the archives for a while but I guess I’ll go ahead and explain what it’s
talking about.

1\. The Russian information operations are not about the American elections.
It’s been a sustained information warfare campaign for the last several years,
and the elections were part of it.

2\. The Russians are playing on existing differences in society. The key
difference between their modern campaign and traditional campaign is they have
population data to target their propaganda, so they can identify arbitrary
fracture lines in groups.

On a side note, this is the same technique that traditional human intelligence
uses, which the Russians are good at. Most people are generally good people
and don’t manipulate others intentionally, so if this is new to you the US
Army’s FM 2-22.3 covers about 20 different methods (non-exhaustive) of
manipulating individuals with this sort of information, intended for
interrogation. It covers playing on peoples’ fears, their ego, love, etc. The
Russians are just doing this on a wide scale, albeit it’s also the same thing
other advertisers do, just more widespread and coordinated.

3\. Undermining groups is not random. It’s using an evolutionary strategy of
undermining groups threatening to Russia’s interest rather than creating
groups out of thin air. Without having the data that they’re using for
analytics for identifying sub-populations, it’s rather hard to figure out what
group a given set of divisive propaganda is targeting. Also, it isn’t just the
bots or the social advertising. It’s full-spectrum.

4\. The Russians are not the only ones that are using these techniques.
However, they are more aggressive about it because Putin freaked out that the
US was going to try to overthrow him. They’re in a corner and acting out of
weakness, not strength. That being said, we’re not all that great about
responding to events in the world so there isn’t a guarantee we come out of
this with a good outcome.

I didn’t choose the top picture, the wording just frames it for why it was
relevant to the Army (keeping it apolitical).

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noahmbarr
What role did you have in military that you were asked to write this (very
impressive) piece?

~~~
mlb_hn
I was a human intelligence collector, although I'd also been running a small
cell out of South Korea doing analysis in the region in 2016.

The paper was in response to the July prompt of a quarterly contest, "Is the
Army too antiquated in how it fights the Information War?"
([http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/NCO-
Jour...](http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/NCO-Journal-
Writing-Excellence-Program/)). This piece went through several extra months of
trimming and editing and the program was subsequently discontinued.

