Va.—were just a forwarded email away from Bannon and others who worked
at the highest levels of the Trump White House.
More important for our considerations, though, is that the tactics of
GamerGate continued into the alt-right. In an article for Politico, “World War
Meme,” Ben Schreckinger writes about how the culture of 4chan and the
tactics of GamerGate made their way into the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 50
In fact, in many ways, we can see Hillary Clinton as simply the highest profile
GamerGate victim.
48Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, “Why Steve Bannon Wants You to Believe in the
Deep State,” Politico Magazine, published March 21, 2017, www.politico.com/magazine/
story/2017/03/steve-bannon-deep-state-214935.
49“Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate.”
50“World War Meme.”
Data versus Democracy
63
Schreckinger writes that “the white nationalist alt-right was forged in the
crucible of 4chan,” a community that was “preoccupied with gender politics.”
Some 4chan members saw themselves at war with the left. Others saw
electing someone like Donald Trump to the presidency as a massive prank, or
“cosmic joke.” For the lulz, indeed.
Just like GamerGate, these 4chan vets used 4chan’s “/pol/” board (short for
“politically incorrect”) as a “staging ground.” Like in GamerGate, their fluency
with a platform that was originally an image board and which requires constant
engagement to keep a thread from getting deleted meant that they knew a
thing or two about creating and propagating viral media. They used this to
their advantage.
Much of what was workshopped in 4chan was seeded or market tested on
Reddit. Even in most of the less savory subreddits, users tend to be more
mainstream than those on 4chan. The cream of the crop on 4chan often
crossed over to Reddit, where the system of up- and downvotes helped filter
for the most viral-ready content. (Though Schreckinger claims that alt-righters
“juiced the rules” to promote some of their content, anyway. 51)
The content that proved the most successful on 4chan and Reddit—the most
accessible to “normies”—was then seeded on Twitter and Facebook, where
it was easy for them to spin up the same kinds of automated (bot) and
sockpuppet accounts that they did during GamerGate.
But there was one more wrinkle. The alt-right wasn’t entirely a grassroots
movement of like-minded individuals who found each other and organized
online. There were also well-funded political operatives who had observed
the power of this community during GamerGate and were willing to put
them to work in electoral politics. According to Schreckinger, early on in
the election, the Trump campaign was monitoring Reddit, in particular one
subreddit named The_Donald. Schreckinger describes The_Donald as “a
conduit between 4chan and the mainstream web,” and numerous memes
and videos that originated on 4chan made it through The_Donald into the
mainstream—including some that were shared by Trump campaign staffers
and even Donald Trump himself. And this conduit was allegedly the
strongest during the time that Steve Bannon was in charge of Trump’s
campaign.
51Ibid.
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Chapter 4 | Domestic Disturbance
The Mob Rules -or- Who Decides What Stories
Get Told? [redux]
Ultimately, we’ll never know the full impact that social platforms had on
these domestic U.S. social issues in 2014 and beyond. We won’t know how
many lives were saved (or lost) by the increased public awareness and
mobilization around police violence and racial discord. We’ll never know
how the lives of the victims of GamerGate would have been different if the
social web hadn’t provided their attackers the platforms for finding each
other and microtargeting their messages of hate and violence. We’ll never
know how many votes were changed or suppressed by influence operations
leading up to the 2016 election.
and racial tension did not begin, or end, in Ferguson. We know that
prominent women—especially those who rock the boat or speak out about
injustices—have always been targeted more than men in the same position,
especially in the world of tech. We know that the influence operations
perpetrated by alt-right meme warriors (as well as some on the left, and—
as we’ll explore in the next chapter—foreign agents seeking to interfere in
U.S. politics) changed the tone of the election and influenced the topics we
were debating.
And we know that social media played a significant role in shaping how all of
these events turned out. As DeRay McKesson said, those of us outside the St.
Louis area might not have ever known about Ferguson—let alone joined in or
raised our collective voices—were it not for Twitter. On the other hand, the
same openness that allowed activists to organize in Ferguson allowed attackers
to organize and perpetrate their attacks against women and their allies during
GamerGate. But from yet another perspective, that openness is what gave
voice, reach, and new business opportunity to independent game developers
like Quinn and Wu and critics like Sarkeesian. And for better or for worse,
the affordances of forums like 4chan, with its disappearing threads, and Reddit,
with its upvotes and downvotes, honed the skills of those who sought to
create and propagate viral media beyond those platforms.
To some extent, we will always have to take the good with the bad when it
comes to technology. But that doesn’t mean that the tools—or the people
and companies who create and maintain those tools—are neutral. And it
certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t bear at least some responsibility for
what happens on their platforms, even if in some cases that responsibility is
moral and ethical rather than explicitly legal.
When a judge tells an independent online game developer to stay off the
internet and find a new career if she wants to avoid harassment and abuse,
that’s akin to telling someone to avoid the mall or the grocery store.
Data versus Democracy
65
The internet is a core part of our lives in the twenty-first century, and social
media is a “mediated public space,” where those who own and run the
“private” platforms have a responsibility to at least do their due diligence
toward providing safe access for those they invite to make use of those
platforms. But we don’t need to wait for them to do it. Like during many
technological revolutions in past centuries, it will take the will and the work
of the people at large to shape the evolution of these “mediated public
spaces” and to advocate for legislative change where necessary to ensure
fair, safe access for all.
To that end, I leave you with two inspirational quotes from two prominent
women in tech.
People believe they are powerless and alone, but the only thing
that keeps people powerless and alone is that
same belief. People,
working together, are immensely and terrifyingly powerful.
—Quinn Norton52
Although what was done to me wavs heinous, those responsible
for obliterating my old life have overlooked one important thing:
I’m better at games than they are.
—Zoë Quinn53
Summary
In this chapter, we explored three distinct but related historical events where
the affordances and limitations of social media platforms had a significant
impact on the way those events played out: the protests following the shooting
of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the GamerGate attacks on prominent
women in the video game industry, and the mobilization of the alt-right during
the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In each case, the affordances of platforms
like Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit—combined with the ideology and customs of
the communities that inhabited them—led to particular kinds of novel
“operations.” Social media is a powerful tool for community organizing and for
recruiting new members to a movement. But it is not always used for social
good, and the limitations of these platforms and the online space in general
52Quinn Norton, “Everything Is Broken,” The Message, published May 20, 2014, https://
medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1.
53 Crash Override, p. 7
66
Chapter 4 | Domestic Disturbance
can pose challenges to law enforcement, and on the grander scale to legislators
and platform administrators, as they seek to balance the rights of free speech
and free assembly with the rights to life, liberty, and safety.
In many ways, 2014 was a beginning, or at least a point of major acceleration,
when it comes to social media’s impact on society. And it wasn’t just in the
United States. In the chapters that follow, we’ll unpack operations outside
those borders, including operations that cross borders. Operations that
involve far more than serendipitous community organizing.
C H A P T E R
5
Democracy
Hacked, Part 1
Russian Interference and the New Cold War
Social media empowers communities of activists, as well as groups of
extremists and abusers, to discover each other and coordinate their activity.
The same tools can be used to spread political messages, both by legitimate
communities and by disingenuous actors—even foreign states seeking to
interfere in the electoral process of another country. That’s the environment
we find ourselves in today, as the United States, NATO, the EU, and their
(potential) allies are under attack from a Russian campaign of information
warfare. In this chapter, we’ll unpack some of their operations, culminating in
the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and conclude with a view toward future
threats and defenses.
What Happened?
November 8, 2018. Hundreds of millions of Americans—and many others
throughout the world—watched the results of the U.S. presidential election
roll in. The odds and the polls all pointed to a Hillary Clinton victory. The
question was simply how big a victory, and whether her party would control
Congress as well.
© Kris Shaffer 2019
K. Shaf fer, Data versus Democracy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4540-8_5
68
Chapter 5 | Democracy Hacked, Part 1
Of course, that’s not how things turned out. Even though Clinton won the
popular vote, Donald Trump won victories in key swing states, giving him
the edge in the Electoral College to become the 45th president of the
United States.
Almost immediately after he was declared the presumptive winner by the
major news networks, pundits and scholars began to ask, “What
happened?” Even some who supported Trump over Clinton were surprised
at his victory. Fingers quickly pointed at pollsters and their methods,
which are still being updated for the age of the internet and smartphones
(as opposed to one-per-family landlines). They also pointed to perceived
biases in the mainstream media, reporting from one perspective and blind
to others. Many voters disaffected with the two-party system and the
major parties’ nominees stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate,
winning them the ire of some Democrats. And, as is frequently the case
when the winning candidate loses the popular vote, there were calls for
the abolition of the Electoral College.
But to many, the blame lay primarily at the feet of Hillary Clinton herself. Not
only would old scandals simply not go away—Benghazi, her response to
allegations of sexual impropriety against her husband Bill when he was
president, her “socialist” tendencies as a past supporter of universal health
care—but new ones kept popping up. Her use of a private email server for
official State Department business suggested that she was a security risk. The
missing emails from that server surely must have contained classified
information (which would be illegal) or reference to other nefarious activities.
Private communications revealed that the Democratic National Committee
took steps to ensure that the more moderate Clinton won the party’s
nomination over democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Three weeks before the
election, then FBI Director James Comey announced that the Department of
Justice was reopening the case of Clinton’s private email server. And that’s to
say nothing of the more fringe rumors that Clinton had ordered murders be
committed on her behalf,1 was involved in “spirit cooking, ”2 or sat at the center of a massive child sex trafficking ring3—the latter of which, though
baseless, led a man to bring a gun to a D.C. pizza parlor to “investigate.”
(None of these conspiracy theories have completely gone away.) As a result,
1“FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide,”
David Mikkelson, Snopes, accessed January 3, 2019, www.snopes.com/fact-check/
fbi-agent-murder-suicide/.
2“Was Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta Involved in Satanic ‘Spirit Cooking’?,”
Dan Evon, Snopes, published November 4, 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-
podesta-spirit-cooking/.
3“Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Amanda Robb, Rolling Stone, published November 16,
2017, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-
scandal-125877/.
Data versus Democracy
69
many moderates and Sanders supporters who otherwise would have
supported Clinton over Trump voted third party or abstained in protest, at
least partially contributing to Trump’s victory.
While some of these scandals had at least a kernel of truth to them and most
had been shared in earnest by many Americans, it became clearer and clearer
throughout 2017 that there were other forces at work. Yes, Clinton appeared
mired in scandal, and yes Trump seemed to represent people and ideas that
many “mainstream” journalists and political operatives paid too little attention
to. But, we now know, not all of that was organic. Someone had hacked the
DNC server, stolen t
he emails of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, and
boosted both the scandals they contained and the pro-Trump movements on
social media. Many of the conspiracy theories were circulated and amplified, if
not created, by disingenuous operatives running fake accounts on a variety of
social media platforms. As researchers and the American intelligence
community now agree, all signs point to one primary culprit: Russia.
Unfortunately, the same lack of nuance that led many to fall prey to Russia’s
activities—and to other influence operations that took place at the same
time—has led many to either make Russia a boogeyman, responsible for all
narratives and political victories they dislike, or to cheapen the propaganda
problem as “Russian [Twitter] bots” and laugh it off. The former causes us to
overlook both other foreign actors and the role that domestic bad actors and
regular citizens play in the spread of disinformation. The latter causes us to
overlook both the breadth and the gravity of the problem altogether.
Meet the New War, Same as the (C)old War
The reality is that Russia describes itself as being in a state of “information
warfare against the United States of America” as well as our NATO allies.4 For
years, Russia has been using web sites, blogs, and social media as the latest
tools in their information arsenal against the United States, the United
Kingdom, the EU, NATO, Ukraine, and Syrian rebels. Their goals are to enlarge
their “empire, ”5 enrich Putin’s “inner circle,” weaken the EU and NATO,
discredit Western democracy, and—at least in the immediate regions
surrounding Russia—promote an illiberal faux democracy, where a few
corrupt oligarchs can manage a state economy in their own favor.6
4Martin Kragh and Sebastian Åsberg, “Russia’s strategy for influence through public diplo-
macy and active measures: the Swedish case,” Journal of Strategic Studies 40/6 (2017), DOI:
10.1080/01402390.2016.1273830, p. 6.
5Stephen Blank, “Moscow’s Competitive Strategy,” American Foreign Policy Council, pub-
lished July 2018, p. 2.
6Heather A. Conley, James Mina, Ruslan Stefanov, and Martin Vladimirov, The Kremlin
Playbook (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 1ff.