x Aram Aharonian
An immense range of government agencies and political parties, especially in the West, exploit platforms and social networks to spread disinformation
As well as junk news, exercise censorship and control and undermine confidence in science, the media and public institutions.
The consumption of news is increasingly digital, and artificial intelligence, the analysis of big data (which allows information to interpret itself and anticipate our intentions) and the algorithms of the "black box" are used to put to test truth and trust, the cornerstones of the so-called Western democratic society.
There are very few owners of the infrastructure that allows the use of internet throughout the world, and also the services that are provided on it. The ownership of underwater fiber cables, the companies that host and control the NAP of the Americas, the large data centers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon or the so-called "cloud services" [which are the only novelty they have is the name, exist since the internet exists] such as Google Drive, Amazon, Apple Store, OneDrive, we will see that they are transnational corporations, mostly with US capital.
Today, of the six leading companies listed on the stock exchange, five of them are in the ICT category: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
Popular field: aggiornar la lucha
The world is constantly changing, often at the pace of technology and it seems that on the left, the movements and popular media, push us to fight in battlefields wrong or already outdated, brandishing slogans that have no correlation with this new world.
Meanwhile, hegemonic media corporations develop their strategies, tactics and offensives in new battlefields where they fight with new weapons, where reality does not matter, in what perhaps is not even about the fourth generation war, the one that attacks the perception and feelings and not the rationale, but a fifth generation war, where the attacks are massive and immediate by transnational mega companies, which sell their "products" (such as espionage) to the States.
Today we should be more attentive to the vertical integration of the providers of communication services with companies that produce content, the arrival of content directly to mobile devices, to the transnationalization of communication, turning information into media terrorism campaigns ... while we only denounce how easy it is to turn democracy into a dictatorship managed by big corporations
We should be attentive to the issues of surveillance, manipulation, transparency and governance of the internet, to video as a format to reign in the coming years, be attentive to the fact that the same televisions are becoming one more screen where manipulated content arrives by the big corporations.
But from the grassroots level we continue to demand the democratization of communication and information, believing that an equitable distribution of radio and television frequencies between the public, commercial and popular sectors can mean the end of media concentration. We are fighting wars that no longer exist, when the battlefield is on the Internet, in big data, in algorithms, in artificial intelligence.
Tired discursive insistence anchored in the past and with an agenda designed in central countries, which do not include our realities. It insists on a necessary renewal of the left, in the necessary search for new ways -in collective catharsis of seminars, forums, meetings, writings-, but no specific solutions are sought for the isolation and endogamy of our popular, alternative sites to hegemonic, community, popular messages.
These issues are not on the agenda of the movements, of the parties or of the governments (even the progressives), more concerned to continue with the demonization of new technologies, for the denouncement, than to define strategies and lines of action. Today the governments of the conservative restoration shoot against Unasur, that at its moment of boom could not specify a proper fiber optic channel, that at least tickled the control of megacorporations.
Today, the digital scenario can become a way for the reconnection of progressivism with its foundations, and in particular with young people, which is how to say with the future. However, no progress has been made in a common communication agenda, but neither in strategic issues for the future of technological sovereignty, such as Internet governance, copyright, innovation, the development of our cultural industries.
There is talk of new ways, but few seem willing to go through them, because they surely affect their identity, their memory and their life. It insists on denouncing misinformation, junk information, media terrorism (we have doctorates in denunciology and whining), but we do not prepare ourselves to learn to use the new tools, the new weapons of a cyberspace cultural war. Perhaps the problem is not to formulate, but to have ears willing to try, says the humanist Javier Tolcachier.
Each site of media and / or social organizations directs its messages to a limited critical mass, to those who are already convinced of its message, in an inbreeding gymnastics, without defining its own, Latin Americanist agenda, in defense of human rights and workers, an editorial line that can unify them and then enter with force in the cultural war, in the battle of ideas.
Their languages -and we talk about generality and that is why the efforts of mediationism of Fora de Eixo, Faction or Emergents, for example- are not appropriate to the historical, cultural or technological moment. They are anchored in the denunciation, without making visible the struggles, the desires, of the peoples or societies they claim to represent.
The Oxford report
A report by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard, researchers at the University of Oxford (Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation), confirms that the manipulation of public opinion on social media platforms has become a threat to public life.
In 2017, the first inventory of global cybernetic occupation troops conducted by these researchers shed light on the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and actors of political parties. This year reveals the new tendencies of organized manipulation of the media, and their increasingly growing capabilities, strategies and resources on which this phenomenon is based, with evidence of organized media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries, 20 more than past year.
In each country it was found that at least one political party or government agency used social media to manipulate national public opinion, in countries where political parties disseminate misinformation during elections, or where institutions feel threatened by junk news and foreign interference in internal affairs, and develop their own cybernetic propaganda campaigns.
In a fifth of these 48 countries, especially in the global south, there was evidence of disinformation campaigns operating on chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat. The manipulation of networks is a big business, where governments, foundations, NGOs and political parties have spent more than 500 million dollars on research, development and implementation of psychological operations and manipulation of public opinion through the Internet.
In some countries this includes "efforts to contain extremism," but in most countries this involves the spread of junk news and misinformation during elections, military crises and complex humanitarian disasters.
The fifth generation war
If the first generation war is based on mobilizing labor, the second on firepower and the third on freedom of maneuver, the paradigms change substantially in the fourth generation, where both the resources used and the objectives of the The interests to be reached encompass both public and private interests (corporate interests). The main idea is that the State has lost its monopoly on war, and at the tactical level it includes from the arms aspect to the psychological one,
Given the enormous technological superiority achieved during the previous stage in the face of this asymmetry of forces between contenders, it is only conceivable the use of hidden irregular forces that attack the enemy surprisingly, trying to provoke their defeat by destabilizing their rival, with the use of tactics unconventional combat.
In the war of fifth generation (also called war without limits), introduced since 2009 as an operational strategic concept in the US-NATO interventions, it does not matter to win or lose, but to demolish the intellectual strength of the enemy, forcing him to seek a compromise, using of any means, even without the use of weapons. It is a direct manipulation of the human being through its neurological part (biaural waves and components of magnetite crystals of the brain and the methods on their possible manipulations).
And the mass media and social networks are an integral part of the scheme of this war, to generate destabilization in the population through operations of prolonged psychological character; it seeks to affect the collective psyche, affect rationality and emotionality, as well as contributing to political wear and tear and the ability to resist.
And there are scientific mechanisms of total control through not only the manipulation of massive mass media and concentrated information, but also of financial systems such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, thousands of foundations and non-governmental organizations,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US Secretary of State, said that the key was to attack the emotional resources of a country through the technological revolution. The tactic to maintain political disintegration in society is to create inferiority complexes and become a reference external in all areas, preventing collective or alternative projects and models are consolidated in their identity, because the reference will be something other than themselves; the developed world and its prevailing model.
The mass media are responsible for conditioning the minds in underdeveloped nations, since "the Third World now faces the spectrum of insatiable aspirations," as Brzezinski wrote 44 years ago.
Social networks, isolationists
Social networks are a set of digital entertainment platforms and social interaction between their various users, whether they are people, social groups or companies, which allow the sending of messages, communication in real time and the diffusion of content in different ways, between the users that are connected to each other, that is to say, that they are "friends" or "followers".
The massive emergence of social networks, says the British-Ecuadorian expert Sally Burch, have revolutionized our societies, but they have also caused concern because, because they are not regulated, they are taken advantage of for misinformation, the imposition of collective imaginaries with the dissemination of false information, creating virtual realities far from real realities, the appropriation of personal data for commercial purposes and / or political manipulation and, even, to violate the privacy of citizens, invading their work spaces, education, leisure and even socialization.
Social networks have access to and manipulate the data of their users (email addresses, telephone numbers, hobbies, likes, friends), kindly provided by themselves through the construction of their own profiles. Its main attraction is mass: the same message, information - or the same tacit or covert advertising - can be sent to millions of people at the same time, through different platforms (computers, tablets, cell phones).
They operate based on algorithms that organize information to show us more of what we like and less of what we do not. When we validate a comment, an advertisement or a news, we feed back the system so that it adapts even more to our specific tastes. Since the algorithms privilege the content similar to the one we have chosen (with a "like"), restricting the opportunities to receive real, unfiltered information, where the user only accesses opinions similar to his (an undemocratic effect, no doubt ), adds Burch.
For example, an algorithm used by Facebook is based on affinity (how many times one connects with another, publishing on its walls, validating - I like - its contents, its weight is the number of interactions a publication has and the time makes the information decay in interest and go down in the queue of information.
The disadvantages of social networks point to the break with the presence of others, urging us to stop socializing in person, in the construction of cyber-dependent societies, niches where there is no place for the opposite thought, otherness.
The end of transparency?
The British consultancy Cambridge Analytica (CA), which led the scandal by the use of 87 million Facebook user data, although it announced the cessation of all its operations, simply changed its skin and will continue its manipulations, threatening the transparency of Elections in several countries, including Argentina, Colombia and Mexico.
The British company blamed the allegations of political manipulation that flooded the international media in the past, but the truth (and it does not say) is that its main assets already work in a similar company called Emerdata Limited, in which board of directors appear a series of names directly linked to CA, as uncovered in March Business Insider.
Alexander Taylor was appointed director of Emerdata on March 28 to replace the retired Alexander Nix, who acknowledged that he worked in elections in countries on all continents, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya and the Czech Republic, and had to move away Following a video recorded by British television with a hidden camera where he made all kinds of inappropriate comments such as offering large amounts of money to a candidate and threatening to publish it, to try to extort it.
According to Business Insider, Emerdata officials include Johnson Chun Shun Ko, a Chinese executive of Frontier Services Group, the military firm chaired by Trump's prominent supporter, Erik Prince, founder of the US military contractor Blackwater and "coincidentally" brother of the Secretary of Education of the United States, Betsy DeVos, pillar of the international capitalist Red Atlas.
The Observatory on Communication and Democracy points out that only when the scandal took on a global dimension, Facebook - the main business agent involved in the changes of tendency in the British polls (referendum for the Brexit) and Americans (election of Donald Trump) in 2016- acknowledged that the British consultant had accessed (or bought?) the personal information of at least 87 million users and had used it to create voter profiles.
Facebook manages more than 300 million gigabytes in personal information of its users, an arsenal of profiles that allows you to have one of the most important online platforms in the world, indispensable to benefit from business models that expand consumers and diversify markets to heat of the productive increase of robots and industrial automation.
Colophon
All this happens just two decades after Sergey Brin and Larry Page registered the domain google.com and eleven years of Steve Jobs presented in society, in San Francisco, the first iPhone. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to create user profiles and the algorithms used by Cambridge Analytica are still available to anyone who wants (or can) pay for them.
It is difficult for a country only to have the capacity to develop the necessary levels of response to maintain and / or recover sovereignty in some areas, and that is why the sum of wills -governments, academia, social movements- is essential to add strength of negotiation on issues basic as artificial intelligence and big data. There is no other way out: we must appropriate big data to think about liberating tools.
The only way to fight in this war of fifth generation is by catching up with regards to artificial intelligence, is the possibility of mounting new platforms that evade the filters of large corporations, is in need of ownership of weapons , the tools to be able to fight in this cultural war, to generate our own agendas according to the interests of our peoples.
Full text at: https://www.lahaine.org/ienfrentar-la-guerra-de-quinta
