A Tale as Old as Time: Keep Calm and Carry On

The world has watched for years as the British people have irrevocably damaged their national brand and reputational security through the evolution of Brexit. It is through this same country, however, one of the first to be the target of computational propaganda (Commons Select Committee, 2018), that a lesson exists for all democracies: keep calm and carry on. The issue of state-sponsored disinformation is far from new, a point raised constantly during the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy (2019). Since the innovation of Marconi’s radio, state actors have utilized broadcast and information communication technologies to communicate, inform, and persuade. Whether it be propaganda, public diplomacy, psychological operations, or disinformation more broadly, governments consistently try to influence audiences for the purpose of political advantage.

While some may suggest state-sponsored disinformation is new, history tells a different story. International law stretching back to League of Nations (1936) illustrates how political and legal bodies attempted to curtail disinformation efforts taking place at the dawn of the 20th century. Well into the post-World War II era, such laws continued to be codified, namely by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Kearney, 2007) and the U.N. General Assembly’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). It cannot be denied that mass communication technologies have long held the power to induce public fear, anxiety, and panic. Orson Welles’ broadcast of The War of the Worlds caused overt public panic across North America and, in subsequent broadcasts, South America. However, facing the fear and panic that was no doubt instilled by Nazi and Soviet propaganda, what was the ultimate behavior of our democratic predecessors? The greatest generation of Americans, Brits, and Frenchmen fought their primal tendencies to panic; they kept calm and carried on. They worked collectively to meet Nazi and Russian propaganda head on with the impressive development of extensive counter-information broadcast networks such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. The Allied countries remained calm, carried on, and did collectively what was necessary to meet the threat posed by their adversary.

The notion of grand narrative resonance, or a lack there of, might help explain the West’s struggle to tackle disinformation today. Yes, the narratives of the Allied countries may have changed since 1945 and 1991, but why is this viewed as bad? Oceans rise, empires fall, and narratives change. There once was a narrative of global British hegemony, but the then-American colonies had a different story to tell. There was once a narrative of European colonialism on the African continent, but inch by inch and year by year this grand narrative has been challenged over the past two centuries. The only constant is change; and the reason our democratic predecessors were able to take on adversarial propaganda of the 20th century–i.e. state-sponsored disinformation–was because of their willingness and competitive ability to adapt to change, stay ahead of the curve, and use communication ingenuity to craft narratives that were stronger than the panic and chaos bred by propaganda.

Democracies today are once again seeing the rise of grand narratives of nationalism and populism, which instill primal instincts of tribal sovereignty and fear of the foreign. Rather than using public relations, advertising, and marketing strategies to develop stronger narratives of liberal cooperation, as the Allied countries did over half a century ago, the West is succumbing to the panic induced by today’s rendition of state-sponsored disinformation, i.e. computational propaganda (Woolley & Howard, 2017). Millions of dollars, man hours, and airtime has been spent debating the Mueller investigation and President Trump’s collusion with Russia. Likewise, billions of pounds, man hours, and airtime has been spent debating Brexit and the means to execute Article 50. In the truest sense of von Clausewitz’s trinity of warfare, (Bassford, 2019) or foundational strategies of combat dating back to the Napoleonic Wars, our adversaries have made their jobs easier by having us fight and weaken ourselves internally before we address them externally. As independent nation-states, Western democracies have been more occupied over the past half-decade putting out the social and political fires caused by state-sponsored disinformation than working geopolitically to deter the metaphorical arsonists responsible for starting the fires.

A network is more than the sum of its parts: the United States is stronger than 50 individual states; the European Union is stronger than its 28 individual members; the United Kingdom is stronger than its four independent realms; the 5 Eyes Intelligence alliance (Central Security Service, 2019) is stronger than its member states; and NATO is stronger than its 29 member states. These bodies must find a way to stop infighting, both domestically and among allied countries; the answer to doing so is by keeping calm and carrying on. Inflammatory aggression will beget inflammatory aggression; recognizing that what Western democracies are going through today is the same as what the Greatest Generation faced three-quarters of a century ago must inspire them to learn from the past. The blueprint to defeating disinformation and propaganda exists, it must merely be adapted to fit digital information ecologies.

Though the natural inclination when panic sets in is to seek immediate solutions, there is no immediate solution to state-sponsored disinformation and computational propaganda. Not unlike a Chinese finger trap, panic induces social stress, which constricts movement toward progress, which counters the desired result. Scientific research is inherently slow and teaching and training a mixed society of digital natives and digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001) is a multi-decade long process. Neither of these two already-slow solutions bear any impact on the politics and legal processes of adopting, implementing, and evaluating the policy necessary to support such research, training, and education. As a collective group, democracies much train themselves to keep calm and carry on while informed research and education has time to progress.

The good news is, such research and education is well underway; a fast-growing number of institutions are conducting research on identifying, tracking, and countering state-sponsored disinformation. Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project (2019) leads such efforts in the academic sector, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab (2019) in the non-profit sector, and the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (2019) in the military and security sector. While these organizations are spearheading the future of research in the application of algorithmic targeting and automation to cognitive and psycho-social manipulation, they are but a handful among a host of organizations deserving of attention and support.

Further, research does not exist in a vacuum; the merits of research offer insight and contributions to the process of educating populations on how to avoid disinformation. Scholars at Lund University and colleagues recently worked with the Swedish Government to develop a training manual for Swedish communication personnel to counter disinformation leading up to Sweden’s 2018 elections. Showing success, the education manual has been reformatted, now the RESIST Counter-Disinformation Toolkit (Department of Strategic Communication, 2019) and exported to the United Kingdom and its Government Communication Service. Insights from this toolkit and its development have also helped the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threat’s elections team to develop and implement a disinformation rapid alert system (European Commission, 2018) prior to the 2019 E.U. parliamentary elections.

The co-hosts of the 2019 Milton Wolf Seminar put on a wonderful and stimulating event in Vienna. There were, however, two areas of concern I had. First, discussion at the 2019 seminar was centered almost exclusively on the threat of Russian-sponsored disinformation, which subtle nods to the work of China in this area. While Russia and China may be leading the pack, they are far from the only revisionist countries interested in using asymmetric means to destabilize the international political arena. Iran and Myanmar are just as active in the disinformation ecosystem as are Russia and China (Stubbs & Bing, 2018). Indeed, a report (Freedom House, 2017) suggests state actors employing such social media-centric strategies could be as large as 30, including Turkey, Venezuela, and the Philippines. Focusing solely on Russia and its grand scheme for global election meddling is as much a problem as is public obsession with Trump’s collusion with Russia or how to execute Article 50. Fixating on one actor blinds Western democracies to the reality of who is using state-sponsored disinformation, to what extent, and to what success. Venues for intellectual discussion like the Milton Wolf Seminar must be willing to look beyond the Russian-centric model of state-sponsored disinformation and consider the context of other revisionist states if any real progress is to be made devising practical and effective solutions to state-sponsored disinformation.

Second, the co-hosts of the seminar made impressive headway on getting an extensive and diverse group of people to attend and present at the 2019 meeting in Vienna. Attendees comprised experts in academia, foreign ministries, intergovernmental organizations, law, journalism and the mass media, think tanks, and non-profits. That being said, two key intellectual backgrounds were vicariously absent: the STEM sciences and military sciences/strategic studies. Computational propaganda, i.e. state-sponsored disinformation in its modern form, is a function of cyber infrastructure. That is, it operates off of data collection, automated content curation, algorithmic analysis, and micro-targeting (Byrne & Oehlenschalger, 2019). In spite of the seminar’s interest in “elusive solutions to agonizing struggles,” disinformation cannot be addressed without fully invested contributions from, and collaboration with, the computer science and computer engineering fields. The reality is, disinformation today exists in technical domains, and computer scientists and engineers must be included for progress to be made.

Further, governments have made rapid efforts in the past decade to bulk up their cyber capabilities, both offensively and defensively. The United States, for example, established U.S. Cyber Command (2019), reactivated the U.S. Navy’s 10th Fleet to house Fleet Cyber Command (2019), and the State Department recently restructured its Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2013) into the Global Engagement Center (2019). Each of these efforts has afforded the United States greater latitude to tackle state-sponsored disinformation, both in STEM and other technical capacities as well as more social science and communication science-based capacities. Hybrid threats require hybrid solutions, and where American efforts have been a step forward, such attempts are merely the beginning of what needs to be done. Venues like the Milton Wolf Seminar can be a place to merge the perspectives of strategic military initiatives with the parallel work and progress being pursued in the civil sector.

By and large, politicians and policy makers want answers, recommendations, and solutions to disinformation, and they want them today. The reality is the two commodities most needed to find answers, make informed recommendations, and develop solutions, i.e. time and patience, are the last two things that are ever available in the context of pressing national security and societal concerns. In the past century, western democracies have survived two of the largest and most devastating wars in history, and each time they did so coming from behind. In whatever wisdom is inherently imbued in the structure and makeup of our democracies and our republics, we must use that wisdom again to find the strength to develop narratives that outperform those our adversaries seek to disseminate. This will only be achieved through thorough research, effective training, and fundamental changes to our education model spanning years and, more likely, decades. And for these outcomes to become a reality, democratic societies must take the moral high-ground in the face of persuasive and psychological incitement; we must emulate the ideology and swagger, if you will, of Britannia of old. We must keep calm and we must carry on in spite of very real and strong inclinations to the contrary.

References 

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