You are a soldier in an information war. Increasingly, politics are becoming participatory affairs played out in the public sphere through media and social media. Their goal is to command your attention, whether it is through outrage, consent, action, or complacency. They rely on algorithms to boost manufactured narratives. But those algorithms depend on your attention and participation. You are not a bystander in this war. You are not a consumer in this market. You are a soldier. You are a merchant. You are the lifeblood of propaganda. This is how you can fight back.

The algorithm is the primary audience of any story

• How the New York Times A/B tests their headlines

The algorithm is us

• Engagement, user satisfaction, and the amplification of divisive content on social media
• The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Attention is the most finite and valuable resource left. It is also the last resource you still control.

• Calm Technology, Amber Case, O’Reilly Media, 2016

Mis- and dis-information is used by all sides

I will refer to this as “malinformation”.

The problem is deeper on the radical right

• When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries

But it’s not exclusive to the right

• https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/29/24116156/ai-generated-dnc-lara-trump-song-parody

All effective malinformation is built around a kernel of truth

• Debunking Fake News and Fake Science

Propagandists prey on cognitive bias

• Engineering Belief: How Rhetorical Structure Activates Cognitive Bias in Propaganda and Disinformation

Every evil stands alone. New evils are meant to overwhelm you, not distract you.

The goal of bad faith actors is to keep you emotionally exhausted. This is different from attempts at deflection. Fascists do not distract to draw attention away, because fascists are not concerned with consequences. They distract to keep you exhausted and to generate a distinct form of “truth.”

• A Brief History of Fascist Lies, Federico Finchelstein, University of California Press, 2020

You cannot reason with those who do not value reason.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

― Jean-Paul Sartre

• “Don’t confuse me with facts”—how right wing populism affects trust in agencies advocating anthropogenic climate change as a reality

Malinformation actors do not care about hypocrisy, inconsistency or embarrassment.

Nor does their audience. They only care about winning.

• Limitations of hypocrisy as a strategy of critique in international politics

Malinformation campaigns are organized.

• The influential Signal chatrooms where tech billionaires and their courtiers swung far-right

It takes much longer to debunk a lie than to tell it.

• Brandolini’s law

Bots exist. You cannot reliably detect them.

• Experimental Evaluation: Can Humans Recognise Social Media Bots?

AI generated content exists. You cannot reliably detect it.

• Can We Still Detect AI-generated Content?

Foreign influence exists. You cannot reliably detect it.

• Are Influence Campaigns Trolling Your Social Media Feeds?

Opinion is not news. Analysis is not news.

News makes up less than half of what is on the New York Times’s front page.

• https://blog.tjcx.me/p/tracking-front-page-new-york-times

Fascism is a politics of aesthetics.

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1935