In their new book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Annalee Newitz explains: "Social media election psyops have an unexpected origin story."
From "studying the advertising industry," psyops based itself on this principle: "Appealing to people's buried biases is the best way to activate them, for profit or for war."
"In 1943, a group of three researchers from the University of California at Berkeley invented a new kind of personality test that they administered to thousands of Americans. They called it the F-Scale test. Put simply, this test could measure a person's likelihood of becoming a fascist." They "collaborated with philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had fled Nazi Germany, to publish a book in 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality." Authoritarian feelings were ethnocentric, and authoritarian beliefs included "the strong would always rule the weak" and "force was the only way to resolve conflicts." Such people "would fall for fascist propaganda." Especially "when triggered by rapid social changes, these unconscious beliefs could erupt into full-blown genocidal movements."
Newitz quotes intellectual historian Martin Jay: "The way to confront fascism wasn't at the level of argumentation. You had to confront unconscious motivations. So how do you deal with something you can't argue people out of?" You can raise children a certain way: put them in racially diverse classrooms where their teachers don't hit them with rulers. It does help. But "every generation invents a new system for emotional exploitation," and there's the problem.
In the 2010s, Cambridge Analytica "administered a personality test to hundreds of thousands of people online" which "contained elements of the F-Scale." They were indeed looking for "latent authoritarians" because they were helping the authoritarian side. This was "a massive operation to influence American voters in the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential election." Christopher Wylie, who had worked for Cambridge Analytica's project and became a whistleblower, called it "Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindfuck tool."
About 270,000 people took the test, and Cambridge Analytica grabbed lists of their Facebook "friends," yielding data on 87 million accounts. Now, Cambridge Analytica could predict who had the "'dark triad' of antisocial personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism (manipulativeness), and psychopathy (lack of care for others)." Next, Cambridge Analytica "targeted those people with ads, luring them to Facebook pages that the firm had set up to test out which messages worked best on these easily activated people." Trump adopted two of the winners — "drain the swamp" and "make America great again" — as his 2016 campaign slogans. Worse: "Once a group of people with dark triad personalities had converged on a message, Cambridge Analytica operatives would encourage them to gather in a local bar or coffee shop, where they could swap conspiracy theories and strengthen their ties."
Bannon was specifically interested in cognitive biases that would surface unconscious racism. Cambridge Analytica found that a popular fear was being laughed at for being unable to pronounce an "ethnic" name. People who were outraged at "imagin[ing] an America where you can't pronounce anyone's name" were easily nudged into narratives in which white people were posited as superior.
Cambridge Analytica was simultaneously "running a 'voter disengagement' initiative aimed at African Americans, with the goal of confusing and disempowering a voting bloc that threatened Republican candidates." Those narratives included that Hillary Clinton was racist and that the Democratic National Committee preferred her candidacy over Bernie Sanders's. The strategy seems to have worked: The 2016 election saw "the first decline in Black voter turnout in twenty years."
In early 2016, the Russian intelligence organization GRU hacked into the emails of the chair of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta. Then, the Internet Research Agency, a private Russian psyops company, scoured them for anything that seemed useful. This led to "the '#Pizzagate' conspiracy, a precursor to QAnon."
This is the book
I have reached the limit of my ability and prerogative to explain the thing! Here is the book you want.
Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 3: Advertisements for Disenfranchisement.
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