Social Engineering by Robert W. Gehl & Sean Lawson

Author:Robert W. Gehl & Sean Lawson [Gehl, Robert & Lawson, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

An individual who followed or liked one of the Black-community-targeted IRA Pages would have been exposed to content from dozens more, as well as carefully curated authentic Black media content that was ideologically or thematically aligned with the Internet Research Agency messaging.45

Once someone engaged with this networked mixture of real and pretext people, the IRA would interpersonally interact with them, with personas that “were spontaneous and responsive, engaging with real users (famous influencers and media, as well as regular people), participating in real-time conversations, creating polls, and playing hashtag games. These personas developed relationships with American citizens.”46

Here, the desire to get American culture right is part of the larger bullshitting process. Successful play at a hashtag game, where social media users post responses to prompts, often in a playful, culturally adept manner, means the IRA got their cultural references right. With that achieved, and with a bit more sociability, the Russian bullshitter could post just about anything and have it seem at least somewhat credible. After all, it came from a persona who was vetted as a real American.

None of this is to deny the fact that the IRA was, at the end of the day, indifferent towards the truth. One example is “narrative switching,” or the sometimes sudden shifts in topics even on the same accounts. “The IRA not only switched from banal to pro-Russian views but also switched abruptly between different political positions according to current Russian operational priorities, or even just to create confusion.”47 In other words, the IRA tried lots of different topics over time, even with the same account, in an attempt to see what bullshit would work best. And when Internet Research Agency employees were engaged in staged “debates” among themselves, played out in news comment fields, they used a very basic heuristic: “We don’t talk, because we can see for ourselves what the others are writing, but in fact you don’t even have to really read it, because it’s all nonsense. . . . And how you write doesn’t matter; you can praise or scold.”48

As for Cambridge Analytica, their use of bullshit is more intricate than the Russian effort. Perhaps this is in part due to the company employees’ deeper understanding of American culture. It is also due to the fact that Cambridge Analytica’s work blurred the boundaries between pretexting, trashing, bullshitting, and penetrating in its iteration of masspersonal social engineering.

We do not know as much as we would like about the actual messaging and interactions between Cambridge Analytica and its targets from public reporting. Part of the reason, of course, is that the messages were targeted as “dark ads” visible only to certain narrow segments of people via social media, and social media corporations, including Facebook, are not providing details about these ads. If you were not part of these segments—the vast majority of us were not—then you very likely never saw any of Cambridge Analytica’s messages.49 But the ads and campaigns we know about are quite impressive examples of bullshit. One of the few we can still access is an ad the company ran in Politico.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.