Politics

“Fake news is just fake news, in the end. And you don’t even have to ask who started it, because he’s everywhere, always running his mouth and repeating the same lines.” The words feel hollow, almost like I’m talking to the void, but I keep going.

Once Trump kicked it into high gear, you couldn’t scroll or listen or sit in a bar without hearing the phrase. It was as if, with every heavy breath, he and the cage of wild-eyed loyalists he kept around him invented new ways to deflect or distract; it was a shield, and he wielded it like a five-year-old launching peas across a cafeteria table. Nothing stuck to him, not even the ugly stuff coming out of Fox News, the old standby. He’d just stamp his feet, shout “fake news,” and melt the question away.

Try to get anything real out of him, and you hit the wall. Ask about taxes, and he sidesteps. Ask how so many of his campaign crew ended up behind bars, or anything else that might dent the persona he fights to maintain, and the “fake news” card slams down on the table. It’s just playground games, “I know you are but what am I?” played out in endless reruns.

Now everyone’s saying it. “Fake news”—it’s become the lazy way out for anyone who can’t back themselves up, or who doesn’t want to explain why they believe what they believe. It’s easier to scoff and dismiss than to actually do the work, get into the grit of the thing, and argue your point with any semblance of self-respect. Even more ironic: while the world chokes on the term, the real stuff, the actual lies, have multiplied like rats in a basement. You can’t open a page without tripping over some twisted fact, some garbage headline, or some suit on TV needing a fact-checker to keep their statements in line.

But unlike ads, no agency is coming to slap their hands or demand the truth. No one’s holding the political class to the standards they set for everyone else. They can say what they want. It could all be fake, this post, even. Call it what you like.

But there’s a bigger game running, and “fake news” isn’t even the whole story. Thing is, it’s a distraction to think the problem ends there. Information Operations: that’s what matters. There are teams out there, whole armies, burning time and resources to mess with people’s heads. Not all of them are random loners or the garden-variety trolls. Sometimes it’s countries, sometimes it’s organized sabotage. Sometimes it’s just an aim to twist the world so no one knows what’s real at all.

And it doesn’t have to be a lie to do damage. Sometimes it’s just a slanted op-ed or a cleverly-worded ad; it doesn’t claim to be true, or not true. It just leans, heavy, toward a side. Pushes you off-balance. Makes you wonder why anything matters.

In the end, you could say this whole post is fake news. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. In the end, it all just blurs together, and nobody’s coming to untangle it for you.

It can also be in the form of curating legitimate content from trusted sources to promote a specific narrative. The new Demos report "Warring Songs: Information Operations in the Digital Age" goes into detail about the definition of Information Operations and some of the tactics they use. It looks at how we might tackle these techniques and tactics but first suggests we need to push past the narrative of only focusing on fake news. We will be expanding on this report later, but it is certainly worth a read. 

Dark Advertising

A term you will hear, if you scratch beneath the surface of fake news and information ops, is Dark Advertising. The name fits. What you find isn’t only the handiwork of “bad actors” or shadowy Information Operations. Dark Advertising runs deep: media, big business, academia, politics. All the usual suspects. All the big machines.

What is it, really? The clue’s in “dark.” It’s manipulation, tuned and sharpened to a blade’s edge. Digital ads, targeted direct like a sniper’s bullet. Always zeroed in on the vulnerable. The poor. The isolated. The people who believe, still, that the system could help them.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neill will tell you as much: “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises. They find inequality and feast on it.” It’s predation. She spells it out: wherever there’s need and ignorance, there’s a swarm of predatory ads. O’Neill’s focus, in this case, is academic advertising. For-profit and not-for-profit colleges alike, crawling over the desperate, peddling visions of a new life—a degree, a way out, a place in the world. All it takes is a signature on the dotted line and a mountain of student debt.

If you’re wondering who’s being hunted, here’s your answer: the “isolated,” the “stuck,” the ones “of low self-esteem,” “pregnant ladies,” “mothers on welfare,” people in “low-income jobs,” anyone “recently experienced a death,” or who “have been physically or mentally abused.” The list is longer; it always is.

What does it mean, really, when an academic institution turns predator? When their target is not “the best and brightest” but the broken and bruised, the ones who’ll make an emotional decision at their lowest point? That’s the real curriculum.

If even the education industry is this ruthless, what depths are Information Operations, politics, and big business plumbing? There’s no need to ask. You saw the Cambridge Analytica scandal; you remember how cold and calculated it was.

Legislation? Don’t get your hopes up.

If you believe the government—the same one that likes to talk about “online harms”—will pass laws to protect the average citizen, the vulnerable, the at-risk, consider the numbers: the Demos report breaks it down. Of 39 Information Operations analyzed, 34 aligned with a government; 24 targeting their own people with surgical precision.

So what’s really being regulated when these governments talk about curbing “harm?” Whose interests are at the core of online safety initiatives? Fake news, bullying, terrorism, fraud—they’re easy to target, easy to parade as a threat. But will these same governments tackle Information Operations and dark advertising, including the ones they run themselves, their own behavioral nudge units, their election machines? Is that really on the table?

Ask yourself, next time you see a headline about “protecting the public.” Ask what they’re defining as harm, and who writes the rules.

If fake news has done anything positive it has at least but people's minds to question some of what they read and hear. Moving people on from here to critical thinking and analysis is surely the next, very challenging, step.  

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