The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda 2019939408, 9781526459985

Table of contents :
The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Introduction
Part I: Concepts, Precepts and Techniques in Propaganda Research
1 Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins
2 Atrocity Propaganda in Australia and Great Britain During the First World War
3 Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda
4 From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past
5 Post-Truth and the Changing Information Environment
6 The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda
7 Computational Propaganda and the Rise of the Fake Audience
8 Visual Propaganda and Social Media
9 Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda
Part II: Methodological Approaches in Propaganda Research
10 Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda
11 Content Analysis and the Examination of Digital Propaganda on Social Media
12 Character Assassination as Modus Operandi of Soviet Propaganda
13 Assessing Propaganda Effectiveness in North Korea: A Limited Access Case Study
14 Towards the Measurement of Islamist Propaganda Effectiveness: A Marketing Perspective
Part III: Tools and Techniques in Counter-Propaganda Research
15 Propaganda and Disinformation: How a Historical Perspective Aids Critical Response Development
16 Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I
17 Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda
18 Defending against Russian Propaganda
19 Fighting and Framing Fake News
20 Measuring the Unmeasurable: Evaluating the Effectiveness of US Strategic Counterterrorism Communications
21 Countering the Fear in Propaganda
22 Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology
Part IV: Propaganda in Context
23 Propaganda and Information Operations in Southeast Asia: Constructing Colonialism and
Its Antithesis, Statehood and Peaceful Ambiguity
24 The Construction of the Chinese Dream
25 Darkness and Light: Media, Propaganda, and Politics in Japan
26 Syria: Propaganda as a Tool in the Arsenal of Information Warfare
27 Cold War Propaganda in Civil War Greece, 1946–1949: From State of Emergency to Normalization
28 Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela
29 Evaluating Putin’s Propaganda Performance 2000–2018: Stagecraft as Statecraft
30 Trumpaganda1: The War on Facts, Press, and Democracy
31 LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes
32 ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises
33 IS’s Strategic Communication Tactics
34 The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda in Cyberspace
Index

Citation preview

The SAGE Handbook of

Propaganda

SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we publish over 900 journals, including those of more than 400 learned societies, more than 800 new books per year, and a growing range of library products including archives, data, case studies, reports, and video. SAGE remains majority-owned by our founder, and after Sara’s lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures our continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

The SAGE Handbook of

Propaganda

Edited by

Paul Baines, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, and Nancy Snow

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Editor: Matthew Waters Editorial Assistant: Colette Wilson Production Editor: Jessica Masih Copyeditor: Sarah Bury Proofreader: Richard Davis Indexer: Elske Janssen Marketing Manager: Lucia Sweet Cover Design: Bhairvi Gudka Typeset by Cenveo Publisher Services Printed in the UK

Introduction & editorial arrangement © Paul Baines, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy & Nancy Snow, 2020 Chapter 1 © Neville Bolt, 2020 Chapter 2 © Emily Robertson, 2020 Chapter 3 © Thomas Colley, 2020 Chapter 4 © Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, 2020 Chapter 5 © Ignas Kalpokas, 2020 Chapter 6 © Alicia Wanless & Michael Berk, 2020 Chapter 7 © Aaron Delwiche, 2020 Chapter 8 © Hyunjin Seo, 2020 Chapter 9 © Jordi Xifra, 2020 Chapter 10 © Chris Miles, 2020 Chapter 11 © Darren Lilleker & Pawel Surowiec, 2020 Chapter 12 © Sergei A. Samoilenko & Margarita Karnysheva, 2020 Chapter 13 © Efe Sevin, Kadir Jun Ayhan, Won Yong Jang & Hyelim Lee, 2020 Chapter 14 © Paul Baines & Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, 2020 Chapter 15 © Gill Bennett, 2020 Chapter 16 © Ewan Lawson, 2020 Chapter 17 © Ron Schleifer, 2020 Chapter 18 © Christopher Paul & Miriam Matthews, 2020

Chapter 19 © Maria Haigh & Thomas Haigh, 2020 Chapter 20 © Alberto M. Fernandez, 2020 Chapter 21 © Paul Baines & Nigel Jones, 2020 Chapter 22 © Dianne Dean & Haseeb Shabbir, 2020 Chapter 23 © Alan Chong, 2020 Chapter 24 © Chung-Min Tsai, 2020 Chapter 25 © Nancy Snow, 2020 Chapter 26 © Greg Simons, 2020 Chapter 27 © Zinovia Lialiouti, 2020 Chapter 28 © Daniel Aguirre & Caroline Ávila, 2020 Chapter 29 © Tina Burrett, 2020 Chapter 30 © Mira Sotirovic, 2020 Chapter 31 © Emma L. Briant, 2020 Chapter 32 © Louisa TarrasWahlberg, 2020 Chapter 33 © Charlie Winter & Craig Whiteside, 2020 Chapter 34 © Gabriel Weimann, 2020

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939408 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using responsibly sourced papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

ISBN 978-1-5264-5998-5

This Handbook is dedicated to those who have needlessly lost their lives in terrorist attacks throughout the world.

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Contents List of Figures and Tables

xi

Notes on the Editors and Contributors xiii Introductionxxiii Paul Baines, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy and Nancy Snow

PART I CONCEPTS, PRECEPTS AND TECHNIQUES IN PROPAGANDA RESEARCH

1

1

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins Neville Bolt

3

2

Atrocity Propaganda in Australia and Great Britain During the First World War Emily Robertson

22

3

Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda Thomas Colley

38

4

From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

55

5

Post-Truth and the Changing Information Environment Ignas Kalpokas

71

6

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda Alicia Wanless and Michael Berk

85

7

Computational Propaganda and the Rise of the Fake Audience Aaron Delwiche

105

8

Visual Propaganda and Social Media Hyunjin Seo

126

9

Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda Jordi Xifra

137

PART II METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES IN PROPAGANDA RESEARCH153 10

Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda Chris Miles

155

11

Content Analysis and the Examination of Digital Propaganda on Social Media Darren Lilleker and Paweł Surowiec

171

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

12

Character Assassination as Modus Operandi of Soviet Propaganda Sergei A. Samoilenko and Margarita Karnysheva

13

Assessing Propaganda Effectiveness in North Korea: A Limited Access Case Study Efe Sevin, Kadir Jun Ayhan, Won Yong Jang, and Hyelim Lee

205

Towards the Measurement of Islamist Propaganda Effectiveness: A Marketing Perspective Paul Baines and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

223

14

189

PART III TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES IN COUNTER-PROPAGANDA RESEARCH243 15

Propaganda and Disinformation: How a Historical Perspective Aids Critical Response Development Gill Bennett

245

16

Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I Ewan Lawson

261

17

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda Ron Schleifer

272

18

Defending against Russian Propaganda Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews

286

19

Fighting and Framing Fake News Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh

303

20

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Evaluating the Effectiveness of US Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Alberto M. Fernandez

323

21

Countering the Fear in Propaganda Paul Baines and Nigel Jones

336

22

Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology Dianne Dean and Haseeb Shabbir

350

PART IV  PROPAGANDA IN CONTEXT 23

24

Propaganda and Information Operations in Southeast Asia: Constructing Colonialism and Its Antithesis, Statehood and Peaceful Ambiguity Alan Chong The Construction of the Chinese Dream Chung-Min Tsai

369

371

405

Contents

ix

25

Darkness and Light: Media, Propaganda, and Politics in Japan Nancy Snow

422

26

Syria: Propaganda as a Tool in the Arsenal of Information Warfare Greg Simons

441

27

Cold War Propaganda in Civil War Greece, 1946–1949: From State of Emergency to Normalization Zinovia Lialiouti

28

Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela Daniel Aguirre and Caroline Avila

29

Evaluating Putin’s Propaganda Performance 2000–2018: Stagecraft as Statecraft Tina Burrett

459

476

492

30

Trumpaganda: The War on Facts, Press, and Democracy Mira Sotirovic

510

31

LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes Emma L Briant

532

32

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises Louisa Tarras-Wahlberg

550

33

IS’s Strategic Communication Tactics Charlie Winter and Craig Whiteside

566

34

The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda in Cyberspace Gabriel Weimann

577

Index

593

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List of Figures and Tables LIST OF FIGURES 0.1 2.1 2.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 8.1 8.2 14.1 14.2 14.3 19.1 19.2 22.1 22.2 27.1 27.2 27.3 27.4 28.1 29.1 29.2 31.1 31.2 32.1

Word Cloud Outlining The Main Foci of the Handbook xxxvii Edmund J. Sullivan (1915), ‘The Gentleman German’, The Kaiser’s Garland, London: William Heinemann 30 Norman Lindsay, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, 1 July 1915, The Bulletin31 Total number of page followers, as of 6 June 2018 96 Follower engagement on page, 7 May to 6 June 2018 97 Shares: support + real + political 98 Comments: support + real + political 98 Message amplification 99 An image posted to the Syrian President’s Facebook page 131 An image posted to the Syrian National Coalition Facebook page 132 A rich picture of the terrorist propaganda effectiveness measurement space 225 The Extended Parallel Response Model 229 Stages of terrorist recruitment with associated social media metrics 233 Wardle’s (2017) taxonomy of ‘7 types of mis- and dis-information’ is centered on the intent of the creator of fake news, which may be challenging to determine 304 This satirical bingo card, produced by StopFake, summarizes the most common fake news and biased media tropes used against Ukraine around 2017 310 Marketing & Propaganda (Dis)similarities. 357 Replication and counter branding strategies. 362 The front-cover of the edition: Rodocanachi, C. P. (1949), A Great work of civic readaptation in Greece, Athens, 1949 465 Photo from the visit of the Royal Couple to Makronissos, published by the newspaper Kairoi, 4 March 24, 1949 465 Kairoi frontpage, March 20, 1949 469 Snapshot from “Agricultural day” published at Kairoi, 22/3/1949 471 Time-series press-freedom rank in South America 485 Putin Approval and Disapproval Ratings September 2013-September 2014 (%) 498 Is the Rise of China a Threat to Russia’s Interests? 502 Taken in the Goddard–Gunster Boardroom, ‘Celebration of the 45th Presidential Inauguration with Nigel Farage’ event was ‘Sponsored by LeaveEU’ 538 Graph showing VL Daily Total Facebook Ad Impressions 541 Push and Pull Factors Towards Radicalisation 554

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LIST OF TABLES 0.1 6.1 11.1 11.2 14.1 20.1 20.2 20.3 26.1 28.1 29.1 30.1 30.2 30.3

Some of the Key Themes Covered in this Handbook xxxviii Measuring the second information wave 98 Uses of content analysis in political communication research 173 Overview of major content analysis research of propaganda on social media platforms 175 Aims, narratives, lines of persuasion and dissemination used by four main Islamist terrorist groups 241 Growth of DOT Arabic language YouTube videos 326 Total views of DOT Arabic language YouTube videos 326 DOT Arabic video production/views on YouTube, 2011–2017 329 Article sample 449 A Populist Communication Framework for Comparative Propaganda Analysis482 Putin’s Propaganda Operations in 2000 and 2018 Compared 494 People and things Trump insulted on Twitter more than 10 times 518 Topics of Trump’s false and misleading claims 519 Sources of Trump’s false or misleading claims 520

Notes on the Editors and Contributors THE EDITORS Paul Baines is Professor of Political Marketing and Associate Dean (business and civic engagement) at the University of Leicester. He is a Visiting Professor at Cranfield University and an Associate Fellow at King’s College London. He is the author/co-author of more than a hundred published articles, book chapters and books on political marketing issues. Over the last 20 years, Paul’s research has focused on political marketing, public opinion and propaganda. He has published in, inter alia, the Journal of Business Research, Journal of the American Statistical Association, European Journal of Marketing and Psychology & Marketing. His current and recent research work includes grant funding for a project to evaluate the effectiveness of police social marketing/counter-terrorism communications (i to i research/Department for Transport) and a project to explore the effectiveness of guilt-elicitation in marketing communications (British Academy). He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society and the Institute of Directors (IOD). Paul’s most recent book is Marketing 5E (Oxford University Press, 2019) with Chris Fill, Sara Rosengren and Paolo Antonetti. Paul’s marketing research/strategy consultancy includes experience working with numerous government departments on strategic communication research projects as well as small, medium and large private enterprises including IBM, 3M, Saint Gobain Glassolutions, Fulham Football Club and many others over the years. He is a non-executive director of the Business Continuity Institute and operates his own strategic marketing and market research consultancy, Baines Associates Limited. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy is Professor of Communication in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London, Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and a Quondam Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge University. He is the author and co-author of numerous journal articles, edited chapters and books on marketing and political communication, including The Phenomenon of Political Marketing (Macmillan /St. Martin’s Press, 1990), Persuasion in Advertising (Routledge, 2003, co-author), The Marketing Power of Emotion (Oxford, 2003, co-author), Propaganda and Politics: Weapons of Mass Seduction (Manchester, MI, 2004), Propaganda (four volumes, Sage, 2012, co-editor), Theory and Concepts in Political Marketing (Sage, 2013, co-author), Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand (Hurst, 2016) and Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017). He is on the editorial board of various journals and is a Senior Editor of the Journal of Political Marketing. Nancy Snow has been a Japan observer since the Prime Minister’s Office sponsored her first trip in 1993 as a US Information Agency official. Since 2015, she has spent most of her time in Japan, where she teaches as the country’s only titled professor of public diplomacy. Her chapter (Chapter 25) is based in part on her Social Science Research Council Abe Fellowship, a research project in which she interviewed well over one hundred Japan observers, including foreign correspondents and foreign professors, as well as Japanese leaders in university and

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government. The chapter explains the landscape of Japan’s media and propaganda environment through a series of situations and events that are challenging Japan’s ability to successfully manage global information in the run-up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

THE CONTRIBUTORS Daniel Aguirre is a member of the Faculty of Communications, Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile. He holds a Master of Arts in International Studies and is a PhD Candidate in Communication at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on international political communication, publishing on topics related to public diplomacy and comparative political communication. He has also co-edited a book volume on digital diplomacy in the Americas and Spain, and published on public diplomacy in scientific journals. He is an active member of the International Studies Association within the sections of International Communication, Diplomatic Studies and the Global South Caucus. Caroline Avila is a professor at Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador. She holds a PhD in Communication from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her work is related to the field of political communication, specifically studying the role of government communication in a Latin American context such as populism. Her research analyses topics such as populist communication, government myth, media relations and communication policies. Part of her work has been published in scientific journals, and she has collaborated on several book chapters. She has presented at academic congresses in Prague, Montreal, Fukuoka, London and Cartagena, among others. She is a member of the International Communication Association and the International Association for Media and Communication Research. Kadir Jun Ayhan is a professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Graduate School of International and Area Studies. Ayhan’s main research interests include public diplomacy, power and status in world politics, active learning pedagogy for international studies and Korean foreign policy. Kadir Jun Ayhan has been a member of Public Diplomacy Scholars Group (later renamed Dol Dahm Club) within Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) since 2013. Ayhan’s work have been published in several academic journals and edited volumes including International Studies Perspectives, Korea Observer and Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia. Gill Bennett, MA, OBE, FRHistS was Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 1995 to 2005, and Senior Editor of the UK’s official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. Since then she has been involved in a number of research and writing projects both within Whitehall and more widely. Gill is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute. Her publications include Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (Routledge, 2006), Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy That Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on the history of counter-disinformation. Michael Berk is a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Cyber Security and International Relations, University of Florence, and Principal at Alton Corporation. Building on his career in defence and security, he studies cyber and information threats and their effects on government

Notes on the Editors and Contributors

xv

decision-making and group behaviours. Since 2014, he combines consulting, academic research and policy work on information security topics to acquire a multidisciplinary and cross-industry perspective on best practices allowing states to address emerging national security challenges online. His recent projects included managing an international capacity building program on ICT/cyber policy development in FSU countries, work with the OSCE on enhancing CBMs in cyberspace, contribution to the development of a strategic communications doctrine, and analysis of the Ukrainian information environment during the 2019 elections cycle, among others. Neville Bolt is the Director of the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications, and Reader in Strategic Communications at King’s College London where he convenes the Masters programme in Strategic Communications. He is Editor-in-Chief of NATO’s academic journal Defence Strategic Communications, and Chief Academic Advisor to NATO’s Terminology Working Group (Riga). Formerly a television journalist-producer specialising in war zone coverage, and communications strategist for the UK Labour Party and African National Congress (ANC), he now advises governments on responses to political and geopolitical threats. His book The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries (Columbia University Press, 2012) proposed a new theory of the Propaganda of the Deed: it received the CHOICE ‘outstanding academic status award’. He was the Teaching Excellence Award Winner 2017 at King’s College London. Emma L. Briant is Associate Researcher at Bard College and specializes in researching and publishing in political communication and propaganda studies. She is most interested in the rapid evolution of contemporary propaganda and its implications for democracy, security, inequality and human rights. Dr Briant analyzed the coordination and increasing impacts of the digitalization of defense propaganda for her book Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change (Manchester University Press, 2015). She spent 11 years researching SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica and was central in revealing their wrongdoing in 2018 – this research formed the basis for important evidence submitted to the UK Parliament and the Senate Judiciary Committee among other public inquiries. She is now consolidating her recent research–which straddles her interests in politics, security and the reproduction of inequality–into a book project: Propaganda Machine: Inside Cambridge Analytica and the Digital Influence Industry. Dr Briant is also working on a long term co-authored book project with Professor Robert M Entman: What’s Wrong with the Democrats? Media Bias, Inequality and the rise of Donald Trump. Her first book was Bad News for Refugees, (Pluto Press, 2013, co-authored with Greg Philo and Pauline Donald) examined UK political and media discourse on migration prior to ‘Brexit’, and its impact on migrants and UK communities. Tina Burrett is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Japan. Her recent publications include Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia (co-edited with Jeff Kingston) (Routledge 2019), “Russian State Television Coverage of the 2016 US Presidential Election”, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 2018, “Mixed Signals: Democratisation and the Myanmar Media”, Politics and Governance, 2017. She is author of Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia, (Routledge 2013). Alan Chong is Associate Professor at the Centre for Multilateralism Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He has published widely on the notion of soft power and the role of ideas in constructing the international relations of Singapore and Asia.

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These ideational angles have also led to inquiry into some aspects of ‘non-traditional security’ issues in Asia. His publications have appeared in The Pacific Review, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific; Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Asian Survey, East Asia: An International Quarterly, Politics, Religion and Ideology, the Review of International Studies, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Armed Forces and Society, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Global Change, Peace and Security, the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics and the Japanese Journal of Political Science. He is also the author of Foreign Policy in Global Information Space: Actualizing Soft Power (Palgrave, 2007) and coeditor (with Faizal bin Yahya) of State, Society and Information Technology in Asia (Ashgate/ Routledge, 2014/15). He is currently working on several projects exploring the notion of ‘Asian international theory’. His interest in soft power has also led to inquiry into the sociological and philosophical foundations of international communication. In tandem, he has pursued a fledgling interest in researching cyber security issues and international discursive conflicts. He has frequently been interviewed in the Asian media and consulted by think-tank networks in the region. Thomas Colley is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and a Fellow of the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications. His research interests include propaganda, strategic communications and their historical and contemporary use in war. His recent research has examined strategic narratives from the perspectives of ordinary citizens, focusing on the British public’s understanding of war. Dianne Dean is a Reader at Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. She has published extensively in leading journals including European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research and the Journal of Marketing Management. She specialises in Political Marketing with a focus on propaganda and persuasion. Aaron Delwiche (Ph.D. University of Washington) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He teaches courses on topics such as game development, transmedia storytelling and political propaganda. In 2018, with support from the Mellon Foundation, Aaron overhauled the 25-year-old site “https:// propagandacritic.com/”Propaganda Critic, adding nearly two dozen articles exploring the emergence of computational propaganda, explaining common propaganda techniques, and teaching users how to identify bots, trolls, and sockpuppets in online spaces. The co-editor of the Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012), Aaron’s recent work includes a chapter about the history of computer bulletin board systems in the Sage Handbook of Social Media (2018), an article about teaching game programming to liberal arts students in Coding Pedagogy (2019), a co-authored chapter about Propaganda Critic for Project Censored 2020, and a co-authored chapter identifying how media literacy educators can respond to the threat of computational propaganda in the forthcoming Routledge anthology Media Literacy in a Disruptive Environment. Alberto M. Fernandez is President of Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), which oversees all U.S. funded broadcasting in Arabic. A career foreign service officer for more than three decades, Ambassador Fernandez served as the U.S. State Department’s Coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications from 2012 to 2015, retiring from the State Department in May 2015. He also served in senior diplomatic positions in the U.S. embassies in Sudan, Afghanistan, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, and in the State Department’s Bureau of Near East and North African Affairs (NEA). After his retirement from government service, he was VicePresident of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute (2015 to 2017) in Washington,

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D.C. and is a member of the board of directors of George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security and Non-Resident Fellow in Middle East Politics and Media at TRENDS Research Foundation in Abu Dhabi. Maria Haigh is an Associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor at the Siegen University iSchool. Maria Haigh holds a degree in cybernetics from Shevchenko National University in Kiev Ukraine and PhD in Information Systems and Scholarly Communications from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Maria studies information practices, policies, and institutions in the former Soviet bloc. She has published multiple articles about online file-sharing practices in the post Soviet world and their relationship to cultural constructions of copyright. In addition, her research explores the social construction of Ukrainian libraries and library education, and their co-evolution with Ukrainian national identity. Maria’s current research focuses on methods of disinformation and media literacy programs in Ukraine. Thomas Haigh is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Siegen University. He is the primary author of ENIAC In Action (MIT, 2016) and the editor of Histories of Computing (Harvard, 2011) and Exploring the Early Digital (Springer, 2019). His interest in fake news is an extension of his work on Internet history, which included coediting a special issue of Information & Culture, serving on the editorial board of Internet Histories, and making network history a major theme in the new version of A History of Modern Computing he is writing with Paul Ceruzzi (MIT, forthcoming). Won Yong Jang is Professor of Integrated Strategic Communication at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. His writings about communications have appeared in Communication Theory, Journal of International Communication, Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, International Communication Gazette, Media International Australia, and Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, among other. His current research interests include global communication issues, relationships between media and society in East Asian societies, health Communication across borders, and political communication. He teaches courses on research methodology, strategic communication, international communication, and media law. Nigel Jones specialises in the cultural and social aspects of security, strategy and international relations, having an extensive practitioner, business and academic background. He is particularly interested in the interplay of social and technological factors in real world communications, security and risk challenges. He is CEO of the Information Assurance Advisory Council, which has a mission to advance Information Assurance (IA) and cyber security to ensure that the UK’s Information Society has a robust, resilient and secure foundation. He also consults and researches on social and cultural issues affecting leadership. He is a visiting fellow at King’s College London Department of Defence Studies. Ignas Kalpokas is Associate Professor at Vytautas Magnus University and Assistant Profesor at LCC International University. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Nottingham and his main research areas include (1) identity formation though political communication, particularly focusing on post-truth; (2) algorithmic governance of political life, particularly of political emotions; (3) more broadly, tensions between the constituent and the constituted powers in modern democracies. He is the author of Creativity and Limitation in Political Communities (Routledge, 2018) and A Political Theory of Post-Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Margarita Karnysheva received her BA and MA degrees in History of Japan from SaintPetersburg University, Russia and her PhD in History of Japan and Soviet Military History from University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA. She is currently involved in a research project in Russian museums that deals with memories of the Russian Civil War and the World War II. In addition, she is co-authoring a book on the legacy of the anti-Soviet White movement in contemporary Russia. Her professional interest focuses on the Soviet military history, Soviet-Japanese and SovietAmerican relations, Soviet propaganda, Russian nationalism, and memory studies. Ewan Lawson is a former officer in the British military with experience of information warfare. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University where he researches and teaches on contemporary international security issues. Hyelim Lee is a doctoral student in Seoul National University, South Korea. Her main research interests are Public Diplomacy, Political Strategic Communication and Gender & Media. She has written and published several policy papers, journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation discussing a relationship between network effects of social media and the citizens’ political engagement. Zinovia Lialiouti is assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary European History, in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has collaborated as a researcher with the Academy of Athens, the UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the author of the books: Anti-Americanism in Greece 1947–1989, (Asini Publishing, Athens 2016) (in Greek) and The ‘Other’ Cold War. American Cultural Diplomacy in Greece 1953– 1973, University Press of Crete, Rethymnon 2019 (in Greek). She has published several papers in peer-review journal and edited volumes on Greek political history, the Cold War ideology and culture, and the study of political discourse and national identities Darren G. Lilleker is Associate Professor in Political Communication in The Faculty of Media & Communication, Bournemouth University and is Head of the Corporate and Marketing Communication Academic Department. He is Convenor of the Centre for Politics & Media Research and teaches across the BA Politics, MA International Political Communication and MA Political Psychology programmes; and visiting professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Dr Lilleker’s expertise is in the intersecting areas of political campaigning and public engagement in politics, and in particular how public engagement can be potentiated and facilitated using innovations facilitated by digital technological developments. He has worked with the UK House of Lords as well as local communication agencies, political parties and pressure groups. Dr Lilleker has published widely on the professionalisation and marketisation of political communication and its societal impacts including Political Communication and Cognition (Palgrave, 2014). Miriam Matthews is a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation, where she conducts research in the areas of political psychology and diversity and multiculturalism. She has published research on multiple topics, including the factors that contribute to negative intergroup attitudes among Americans and Arabs, the effects of threats on political attitudes, and the situations that influence support for anti-Western jihad. Matthews earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from Claremont Graduate University, and she was a postdoctoral research fellow with the University of Oxford.

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Chris Miles is Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Communication in the Department of Corporate and Marketing Communication, Bournemouth University. His research deals with the discursive construction of marketing theory and practice, particularly as it relates to communication, rhetoric and control. His most recent book is Marketing, Rhetoric and Control: The Magical Foundations of Marketing Theory (Routledge, 2018). Christopher Paul is a Senior Social Scientist working out of RAND’s Pittsburgh office. He also teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Prior to joining RAND full-time in July of 2002, he worked at RAND as adjunct staff for six years. Chris received his Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA in 2001; he spent academic year 2001–02 on the UCLA statistics faculty. Chris has developed methodological competencies in comparative historical and case study approaches, quantitative analysis, and evaluation research. Current research interests include operations in and through the information environment, security cooperation, counterinsurgency, and irregular warfare. Emily Robertson specialises in the relationship between ideology, international law and war propaganda and has published several journal articles and book chapters on the topic. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales and teaches at the Strategic Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. Sergei A. Samoilenko is an instructor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. Sergei is a co-founder of the Research Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP), an interdisciplinary research team of scholars at George Mason University and the University of Amsterdam. He is the past president of the Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER), an association established to facilitate communication education in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the United States. His research focuses on issues in crisis communication, reputation management, and post-Soviet studies. He is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management, and Handbook of Research on Deception, Fake News, and Misinformation Online. Ron Schleifer specializes in the connected disciplines of communications, information warfare, history of propaganda, and the Middle East. He is a senior lecturer at the School of Communication Ariel University of Samaria. He founded the Ariel Research Center for Defense and Communications (ARCDC) which deals with issues concerning the role of image in modern warfare and specifically in the Middle East. His articles deal with the manipulation of intellectuals and students in current information wars, PLO and HAMAS PSYOP campaigns in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. His recent book on Psychological Warfare in the Arab-Israeli Conflict was published at Palgrave Macmillan. Hyunjin Seo is an associate professor and Docking Faculty Scholar in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. She is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. Seo’s research program focuses on identifying emerging properties of networked communication and understanding their implications for social change, collective action, and civic engagement. She is also the founder director of the KU Center for Digital Inclusion which provides technology education for underserved populations. Before joining academia, Seo was a diplomatic correspondent for South Korean and international media outlets. She has also consulted to U.S. and Koreabased nongovernmental organizations regarding their social media strategies and relations with international press.

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Efe Sevin is an assistant professor of public relations at the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University (Maryland, US). His current research focuses on the identifying and measuring the impacts of social networks on place branding and public diplomacy campaigns. Prior to joining Towson University, he worked at Reinhardt University (Georgia, US), University of Fribourg (Switzerland), and Kadir Has University (Turkey). His works have been published in several academic journals and books including American Behavioral Scientist, Public Relations Review, and Cities. His most recent book, Public Diplomacy and the Implementation of Foreign Policy in the US, Sweden and Turkey, was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2017. Haseeb Shabbir is a senior lecturer in marketing at Hull University Business School. He has published extensively on marketing and ethics, including Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and Journal of Business Ethics. He has also published in other leading marketing journals including in Journal of Services Research, European Journal of Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management and Psychology & Marketing. Greg Simons graduated with a PhD from the University of Canterbury in 2004, Associate Professor Greg Simons is currently a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University, Leading Researcher in Media and Communication at the Business Technology Institute at Turiba University and a lecturer at the Department of Communication Science at Turiba University in Riga, Latvia. He is on the Senior Editorial Board of the Journal for Political Marketing. His research interests include: changing political dynamics and relationships, mass media, public diplomacy, political marketing, crisis management communications, media and armed conflict, and the Russian Orthodox Church. He also researches the relationships and connections between information, politics and armed conflict more broadly, such as the GWOT and Arab Spring. Simons is the author/editor of numerous refereed articles, chapters and books: Academia EDU Profile https://uppsala.academia.edu/GregSimons. Mira Sotirovic is an Associate Professor and Karin and Folke Dovring Scholar in Propaganda in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests are in news media effects on how people think and perceive social issues, and how those perceptions may affect support for social policies. She has published chapters in books such as the Handbook of Political Communication Research and articles in scholarly journals such as Journal of Communication, Mass Communication and Society and others. Paweł Surowiec is a PhD, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Communication at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. He is a researcher in the field of political communication, with a particular focus on European politics. His research has examined political public relations, nation branding, public diplomacy and political campaigning. He is the author of the monograph, ‘Nation Branding, Public Relations and Soft Power: Corporatising Poland’, coedited ‘Social Media and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe’, and has published his research in academic journals in the field. Paweł serves as a Board Member and the Treasurer for the European Communication Research and Education Association. He tweets at @PawelSurowiec. Louisa Tarras-Wahlberg is a Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. She graduated with distinction in Political Science from Stockholm University, and carried out in-depth studies in International Relations at University of

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Washington as part of her degree. Tarras-Wahlberg holds a postgraduate degree with distinction in Security Policy from the Swedish Defence University. She has worked within the Swedish Government Offices preventing violent extremism and has also developed and implemented a preventive strategy against violent extremism for the city of Stockholm. Tarras-Wahlberg currently holds a position as a Research Assistant at the Swedish Defence University where she carries out in-depth research on disinformation and information influence campaigns. Chung-Min Tsai is an associate professor and chair at the Department of Political Science and the deputy director of the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, political economy, and China studies with a focus on state regulation. He has published articles in the Problems of PostCommunism, The China Quarterly, Asian Survey, Taiwanese Political Science Review, Issues & Studies, and edited volumes Alicia Wanless is a PhD researcher at King’s College London in War Studies where she explores alternative frameworks for understanding the information environment. With more than a decade of experience in propaganda research, Alicia has developed original models for identifying and analysing digital propaganda campaigns. She applies this learning to integrating information activities in support of tech companies, governments and military attempting to address related challenges, including in training exercises. Alicia has shared her work and insights with senior government, military, industry leaders and academic experts at Wilton Park, the Munich Security Conference, the Hedayah Centre, NATO’s ARRC and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her work has been featured in the CBC, Forbes, and The Strategy Bridge, and she has co-authored numerous academic papers and chapters related to propaganda. Gabriel Weimann is a Full Professor at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzelia, Israel and a Full Professor (Emertus) at the Department of Communication at Haifa University, Israel. His research interests include the study of political campaigns, persuasion and influence, modern terrorism and the mass media. He has published nine books and over 190 scientific articles. His books on media and terrorism include The Theater of Terror, Freedom and Terror, Terror on the Internet and Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation. He has received numerous research grants from NIJ (National Institute of Justice, United States), Humboldt Stiftung (Germany), the Fulbright Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and more. He was a Visiting Professor at leading universities including Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, University of Miami (in the US), Carleton University (Canada), University of Mainz and University of Munich (Germany), the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the NYU branch in Shanghai (China). Craig Whiteside is an Associate Professor for the US Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is currently a fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and the International Centre for Counterterrorism - The Hague. Charlie Winter Charlie’s research specialism is terrorism and insurgency, with a focus on online and offline strategic communication. He is studying for a PhD in War Studies, examining how militant groups cultivate creative approaches to governance and war. Alongside his work at ICSR, which is supported by Facebook as part of the Online Civil Courage Initiative,

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he is an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague and an Associate of the Imperial War Museum Institute in London.He has written for the BBC and The Guardian and has had work published by Critical Studies in Media Communication, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the CTC Sentinel, Philosophia, The Atlantic, War On The Rocks, and Jihadology, among others. He holds an undergraduate degree in Arabic from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London. Jordi Xifra is Professor at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), where he teaches strategic public relations, public diplomacy and the history of propaganda and public relations. His programme of research centres on interest groups’ communication – in particular those of think tanks and lobbyists –cinematic propaganda and public relations, and the intellectual history of public relations. He is the author and editor of more than 40 books and book chapters on public relations, propaganda and public affairs and has published papers in Public Relations Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Political Marketing, Comunicar and Historia y Comunicación Social, among others.

Introduction Paul Baines, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy and Nancy Snow

INTRODUCTION A SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, including chapters from major contributors from around the world on the topic of propaganda studies/ research/praxis, is required now more than ever. This volume comes at a most precipitous time. We live in what might be termed the ‘Apocryphal Era’, a time of doubtful authenticity, where information is less about power and more about suspicion. When asked, we often yearn for the true, authentic, and genuine to make sense of our media environment, but our authority systems stretching from academe, to the faith-based, public or private, have emerged as deficient in providing tools and pathways to reality. The world at present seem riven with a global dialectical: he vs. she, us vs. them, leave vs. stay, left vs. right. It is into this vacuum of ‘truth’ that propaganda inserts itself, and in which it thrives. This volume is about how propaganda is freshly relevant, not because it ever went away, but because it is even more prevalent than it ever was. The sheer volume of

propaganda and the speed with which it is disseminated is new. Propaganda is also newly relevant because we thought it had largely either gone away or ceased to be a problem, particularly in the 1990s (the ‘end of the cold war’), and so academe seemed to have largely ignored the genre. It took the horrific bombing of the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda and the loss of 2996 lives (Katersky, 2018), and the pre- and post-propaganda that succored the attacks, to bring propaganda studies front and center into academic focus. Suicide bombings, car bombings and terrorist spree killings seemed to increase inexorably. Since George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ following September 2001, we have witnessed terrorist attacks throughout the world (e.g. Boston, Madrid, Bali, London, Mumbai, Islamabad, Paris, Brussels, Sousse). These attacks are often conjoined with, and frequently preceded by, the use of propaganda to enhance the sense of terror in the target population. This is not to say that terrorist attacks

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are either new or newly accompanied by propaganda; they are not. Given this renewed focus on propaganda studies, the editors felt that it was important to draw together a series of chapters from propaganda experts from around the world in multiple geographies and across multiple themes. This is important because there has not previously been an attempt to map the discipline comprehensively from an interdisciplinary perspective, with the exception of the work previously undertaken by the editors (see Baines and O’Shaughnessy, 2013; Snow and Taylor, 2008) and the more narrowly focused, but nevertheless useful, work of Auerbach and Castronovo (2013), which brings together essays on propaganda by English language scholars but does not consider recent Islamist terrorist propaganda or that of the Far Right. To provide a comprehensive overview of chapter readings on the discipline, this Handbook is broken up into the following four Parts, each of which is described in further detail below, along with a discussion of the individual chapters that constitute the Part. Part 1: Concepts, Precepts and Techniques in Propaganda Research Part 2: Methodological Approaches in Propaganda Research Part 3: Tools and Techniques in Counter-Propaganda Research Part 4: Propaganda in Context

Propaganda’s (Im)moral Stance Not all the authors in this volume will agree on assigning propaganda a normative weight. One view holds that, like a hammer that can be used to build a house or strike a victim, purposive intention and manipulation make all the difference in attributing moral judgment and condemnation. This more handsoff scientific approach to propaganda is in keeping with Harold Lasswell’s observation that ‘as the technique of controlling attitudes

by the manipulation of significant symbols, [propaganda] is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle’ (1928: 264). This utilitarian focus on effectiveness in messaging and reaching the target audience drove research between two world wars, in part to first clinically observe how propaganda is manufactured, before assigning values and norms. What is far more erroneous is to dismiss propaganda’s deterministic reputation as unworthy of any study at all. Doob (1966) said that no purification ceremony will expunge society of propaganda’s odor. It is part of mass society and mass media relations. We need to confront propaganda’s inevitability in our modern lives, unless we want to return to a pre-lapsarian order devoid of mass media and technology. Many contributors take on the subject with passion and fervor, as they should, while others provide analysis with a technician’s detached observer hand. Both approaches, we hope, will inspire the reader to recognize the radical functioning and role of propaganda in our daily lives and neither filter out nor ignore its debased intents. Nevertheless, the question arises as to what is propaganda really, both conceptually and operationally? We now turn to this topic.

Why Study Propaganda? Methods and channels of propaganda remain heterogeneous; the digital world, for example, has not replaced all the forms of propaganda but rather it has expanded the channels: old formats continue to prosper, everything from polemical books to posters to public performances and demonstrations. Governments are, unsurprisingly, increasingly concerned that propaganda, particularly but not only from radical Islamist groups and (increasingly) Far Right groups, plays an important role in a person’s radicalization or pathway to extremism. Grievances are, thus, talked into people via propaganda. Some eras of history have been more marked by their

Introduction

propaganda content than others – eras as distinct as the English Civil War or the 1930s, when Nazism, Communism and Fascism were rife. This raises questions about today: are we indeed in a new era of superpropaganda and, if we are, how long will it last? There are several essential reasons for this concern, the first being the rise of globalism and with it the struggles that have gone global in the fight for self-­legitimation. Moreover, a world of hierarchical authority and dictatorship has been replaced by something different. We have seen the rise of regimes which claim democratic legitimacy, for example, Russia and Iran both have parliaments and elections but neither country can be regarded as democratic, coming 144th equal and 150th respectively out of 167 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s democracy index rankings (EIU, 2019). Such countries, among many others, are essentially authoritarian and use propaganda to justify their actions and obfuscate their real intentions.

Defining Propaganda: What Is It (Not) Anyway? There is considerable definitional fog about what constitutes propaganda. Propaganda, despite its use over millennia, remains feebly defined and frequently misunderstood. It is particularly poorly understood in layman’s terms where propaganda subsumes (usually) inept marketing and promotional activity, or any communication with which someone disagrees. A useful description of propaganda, however, according to Ellul (1973:25), defines it based on its principle aims, which are: To provoke action … to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes … to arouse an active and mythical belief. (Ellul, 1973)

This action imperative in propaganda makes it an obvious military and government communications tool, i.e. weaponized advocacy. Definitional opacity aside, there is consensus

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about how propaganda takes shape. First, it is directed and sponsored information. There must be some institutional backing in place for the propaganda to be engaged. Major sponsors of propaganda methods, particularly from a military perspective, include the UK, France, the United States, the Soviet Union and the Nazi German regime. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the use of propaganda has also been undertaken by rogue states, e.g. North Korea, Iraq and Iran, as well as by stateless terrorist groups or terrorist groups seeking to found states, e.g. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Daesh and Hezbollah. Second, propaganda information serves the primary interests of the sponsors, which invokes the common pattern of one-way, manipulative campaigns that solicit the action (and sometimes inaction) of the masses. While conventional wisdom may view such campaigns as primitive or anachronistic, they still work, especially on easily distracted, multi-tasking populations who seek selective information as a crutch for their biases. For example, how often do we critically examine our social media feeds and internet news stories for source and beneficiary content? Although digital age participants have ample access to contrarian, contradictory and debatable assumptions online, they do not necessarily or even usually discard rigid opinions when challenged. Online communities also offer more opportunity for like-minded people to connect in ideological fraternity, thereby challenging the notion that as people become isolated, they cease to voice their opinions (see Noelle-Neumann, 1974, on her spiral of silence theory from the pre-internet era). Propaganda does not ask for belief, nor does it usually employ a rational appeal. It does not seek credibility based on the provision of accurate information: rather, the genre is almost exclusively defined by its emotive content and rejection of non-emotive forms of persuasion, e.g. use of fear. When everything is under suspicion, nothing is sacred, including facts (statements embedded

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in propaganda content frequently lack credibility with at least some of their target audience). Propaganda operates by creating simulacra of rationality, e.g. by the selective use of statistics or seemingly factual claims which cannot be affirmed empirically. Facts become just true or false (an oxymoron, of course), and they are subsumed by the narrative, the story whose characters drive engagement and reach. A good story will trump the truth almost every time. As the old adage goes: ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes’ (usually attributed to Mark Twain, but fittingly was probably developed by Jonathan Swift, according to Chokshi, 2017). The old propaganda appeals continue to work: propagandists continue to exploit the fear appeal and the notion of existential threat. Far right concepts like the so-called ‘Death of Europe’ (see Murray 2017) or ‘the great replacement’ (i.e. the notion that the Christian people of Europe are being ‘replaced’ by nonEuropeans and particularly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, see Camus, 2015) are packaged and sold by incendiary propaganda that portrays a nightmarish world of threat and terror. For example, Camus’ work was used in the justification of the Christchurch shootings that resulted in the killing of 50 Muslims in New Zealand in 2019 (McAuley, 2019). The political consequences of propaganda are substantial, and they include, for the first time since World War II, the rise of a mass Far Right in Europe and extensive radicalization apparent in the mainstreaming of reactionary discourse. Moreover, people are not rational agents, what they seek is solidarity, the membership of a group, and intellectual doubt is consequently surrendered to gain this: that is an adequate, if incomplete, explanation for the persuasive power of propaganda. Propaganda is also, of course, used in peacetime (or pre-war to justify war), by governments and organizations as a way of homogenizing certain desired attitudes in the population. Consider, for example, Prime Minister Blair’s attempts to sell the Iraq War

to the British people circa 2002/3, which were a largely failed attempt to unify the British people around the government’s war plans. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was mobilized to persuade the British public of the rightness of war through Operation Mass Appeal, which planted stories in the media of the menace of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (Rufford, 2003). Equally propagandistic is the toxic negative advertising used in political campaigns (particularly in America), often slandering opponents with lurid accusations garnered through opposition research, with the aim of reducing the opposition’s voter turnout and galvanizing one’s own supporters to get out the vote.

Who (Needs to) Believe(s) this Stuff Anyway? Early notions of propaganda as being highly effective and being ‘swallowed’ by the public in their entirety (see the hypodermic needle or stimulus-response model associated with Lasswell, 1971) have been replaced by much subtler notions. This is specifically the idea that propaganda is a co-production between communicator and audience, and that the target audience, far from being naive, is a willing accomplice in their own persuasion, at least partly through self-deceit. Further, propaganda services the needs of its producers as well as its consumers: propaganda is a psychological resource to affirm and reinforce the conviction of those who construct it. In addition, the outlandish imagery and ideas that are often projected by propagandists are not an appeal to rationality, but rather an invitation to share a fantasy – of fear, of enmity, of existential threat. Outlandish, oversized and even exotic fiction is often proffered by propagandists; a refusal to face facts is accommodated with the invention of new ones. Credulity and delusionality may be character traits both of those receiving and those creating the propaganda. For propagandists, the conscious transmission of

Introduction

untruths is not really the point, and such is their ideological conviction that a lie is really just a different form of truth; it is about ‘right’ and conveys the ‘right’ tone. Thus, many countries around the world face the stubborn, even intractable problem of vicious alienation arising out of propaganda-fed delusions. There are radicalizing Muslims (e.g. UK, United Sates, Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, Russia) and Far Right radicals (e.g. United Sates, UK, Germany, Russia). There is also the continuing threat presented by Al Qaeda (the original and archetypal global terrorist group) and its various regional franchises (e.g. Islamic Maghreb, Arabian Peninsula). Daesh, despite losing much of the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2019, to a large extent copied the AQ model of franchising, but has been much more successful in attracting recruits quickly, in disseminating its messages and in the number of people it has killed, e.g. in its attacks in 2017 (START, 2018). That some people are persuaded by propaganda, in this case Islamist propaganda, is clear but what also deserves further research is how the relative brand competition between these organizations (e.g. Daesh and Al Qaeda, and Daesh vs. Far Right ideologues) plays out and its effects on adherents.

WHAT WE HAVE COVERED IN THIS HANDBOOK Part 1: Concepts, Precepts and Techniques in Propaganda Research The following chapters of Part 1 review aspects of propaganda that are historical, psychological and sociological. The chapters focus, for example, on the historical significance and contemporary imperative of the idea of disinformation and fake news, demonstrating its ubiquity (but also posing the question of why such crudeness appears to work). The chapters illuminate core themes via two

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central and related forms, that is to say technique and technology, and from this we can derive the integuments of a conceptual framework. The inherent lesson from this, the first section of the SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, is that the idea of propaganda is more openended and, in a sense, omnivorous than standard texts have represented it as being thus far. Specifically, these chapters focus on the power of atrocity propaganda to create and sustain a momentum toward war; but they also illuminate the relevance of things usually held to be external to the realm of propaganda, for example, strategy in war (which it is argued should have a narrative and propaganda imperative as well as a strictly military one). Other examples of issues that extend the orthodox domains of propaganda include terrorism, the random violence of the agitator and revolutionary. For these too make propaganda, but bloodily, since their violent deeds are a symbolic language per se – the targets, the methods and the rejection of normative values are all part of this psychotic medium. These chapters focus on the three central theatres for the performance of propaganda, that is to say politics (civic and un-civic), war and latterly, though not surprisingly, business and consumption, and the techniques and technologies that facilitate this performance. There is the digital world’s intoxication with the visual for example, or the rise of the socalled ‘sock puppets’ and ‘bots’, methods for creating the illusion of audience, or the conscription of real audiences as online amplifiers and loyal verbalizers. Therefore, our contributors discuss those aspects of technique which are driven by digital technology and which offer possibilities of conceptual evolution in the meaning and content of the word propaganda. Our approaches and conceptual discussions are also enlightened by a critical awareness. The role of atrocity propaganda in Australia in World War I, for example, is revealed as self-limiting: people simply ceased to have faith. Disinformation, on the other hand, has

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currency not because people are naïve but because they have a wish to believe and it is a co-production between creator and consumer, and it ministers especially to the psychological needs of its producers. It is not necessarily a lie but is it therefore an alternative form of truth? In Chapter 1, ‘Propaganda of the Deed and its Anarchist Origins’, Neville Bolt’s work on the Propaganda of the Deed is highly original. He analyses the debates and tensions within the mid-nineteenth century radical left and the different conclusions taken from them, manifest in the ideological split between the Anarchists and the Communists, and Anarchism’s seeking of the violent overthrow of the state not through mass revolution but through sporadic acts of terror against the social targets of its rage, expressive of both the depths of its alienation and norm rejection. The chronicle of such incidents, even now and through the miasma of history, make for grim reading. They represent a form of propaganda no less worthy of such categorization than posters, tracts and incendiary speeches. The ‘Propaganda of the Deed’ is a language without speech, a symbolic grammar that assaults friends and enemies and the bourgeois nation state they stand against. Its aim of creating a pervasive fear skulking beneath the surfaces of urban life is no less relevant today than it was then. It is this conceptual anatomy that Bolt evokes and diagnoses. In Chapter 2, ‘Atrocity Propaganda in Australia and Great Britain during the First World War’, Emily Robertson discusses World War I as the ultimate case study in the power of atrocity propaganda. This has broader ramifications and history does not offer a superior one. Propaganda was particularly important in Australia because that country did not introduce conscription – all its soldiers were volunteers. This case illustrates how we foster notions of sub-­ humanity to dehumanize an enemy and make their killing possible, and how universal was the belief in the bestiality of the Germans. People believed because they wanted to (i.e.

confirmation bias). Moreover, there is the specific effectiveness of the notion of ‘baby killers’ in mobilizing anger (as Richardson, 2006, also discusses). These are important generic notions on the utility of atrocity propaganda. Robertson’s exploration of atrocity propaganda, however, also incorporates the emergent notion and evolution of human rights codes as universal imperatives. The chapter furthers discourse in a number of important ways. It highlights, for example, the salience of bureaucratic propaganda, as where the official reports were exploited by polemicists. It also attests to the idea that successful propaganda contains a particle of truth: for example, the image of German ‘frightfulness’ was not entirely imaginary, the shelling of Scarborough in December 1914 or the Zeppelin raids, for example. A critical point here is how any appeal, if taken to an extreme, can create cognitive exhaustion or even cynicism: and Robertson’s work illuminates how the power of atrocity propaganda waned toward the end of the war. In Chapter 3, ‘Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda’, Thomas Colley explains how persuasion is the core dynamic of history. The persuasion-war nexus goes way back in time. War itself is narrative and yet its practitioners seldom conduct it as such. The organization of campaigns, the choice of targets, and weapons and the nature of victories or defeats is such as to communicate meaning via a story. Colley’s argument is that such properties determine how war is ‘read’ – is it a ‘just’ war of liberation or the action of an overweening bully against a defenseless target? Yet, as Colley explains, military commanders and politicians possess the ability to frame the narrative – to choose who to act against, how to do it and what methods to use. The Falklands War (fought in 1982 between the UK and Argentina over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands), for example, had a coherent although by no means universally accepted narrative; that of defending a free people against a foreign tyrant and its military

Introduction

regime. This line of persuasion was broadly accepted by the British public. With the Iraq war, the UK government and military originally held mastery of the narrative content and momentum. They began to lose it both because of the intractable insurgency that followed, the consequent deaths of civilians, and the emergent counter-narrative of a war created on a false prospectus. Colley argues that wars are begun, continued and concluded, largely in ignorance of the centrality of the narrative-framing device to their success, and that military/political actions undermine rhetoric/narratives and create message incoherence. He concludes that we possess considerable autonomy in choosing who we fight or not, and how we fight wars, but that such choices are often made without incorporating questions of meaning. Herein lies the source of abject failure and frustration. In Chapter 4, ‘From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past’, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy seeks to answer the question ‘why fake news?’ by positioning fake news, or disinformation, as a potent historic force which has simply assumed more power in our own era for reasons technological, sociological and psychological. The role of disinformation in history needs no embellishment, it encompasses everything from the Trojan Horse to the fabled Zinoviev letter, to the appalling ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, fictions and frauds that have beguiled nations and deluded their senates and leaderships. But O’Shaughnessy’s claim is that there is more to this than meets the eye and it is not merely – or even at all – a question of credulous, dumb masses à la Gustav Le Bon (Le Bon, 2014). Rather, the resonance of disinformation arises because of the need to believe, a force so strong that we really can speak of fake news as a co-production in which the target is not victim but ally conspirator. In Chapter 5, ‘Post-Truth and the Changing Information Environment’, Ignas Kalpokas explains that ‘post- truth’ has become our leitmotif, an idea inscribed in so

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many daily headlines. It has come to define us, a phrase we use to both describe our era and ourselves. We are so convinced that we do indeed live in an age of post-truth, that is to say a kind of merchandised serial fiction, that nothing is truly true any longer: instead, we live in a looking-glass world where everything is believed or maybe everything is disbelieved. We never quite know. What has happened is the comprehensive penetration of cognitive and intellectual defenses. For example, people once possessed the defense mechanism of a well-supported national press and its scribes. Post-truth also exploits vulnerabilities in psychological make-up, for example, the power of ‘confirmation bias’ when we look for evidence to support our existing predispositions. Kalpokas does not seek to simplify what is a complex phenomenon. Rather, he points out the intrinsic momentum of post-truth, that as its highly targeted narratives are empowering and the motivations for engaging it are pleasure seeking, it becomes quite simply a form of enjoyment and a leisure activity. Nevertheless, it is one that pays a psychological dividend, for it reinforces self-conviction; the very existence of the filter bubble repels all ideological or factual challenge, thereby protecting our comfort-zone. In Chapter 6, ‘The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda’, Alicia Wanless and Michael Berk seek to augment history and theory with modern practice. Propaganda has existed in some form since the first forging of civilizations but in general its characteristic down the millennia was its elite origin, in the sense of groups who were able to afford the time and money to build monuments or publish posters or write polemics or make films and so on. Frequently, they were acolytes of the regime, but even those claiming to speak for the masses were often themselves self-selected tribunes of the people. Therefore, the digital revolution represents a change as dynamic in its way as the arrival of print, and certainly as the arrival of radio: its unique enabling

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characteristic has been permitting anyone to participate as either creator, responder or indeed saboteur. Unfortunately, the further consequence has been less a plurality of voices than a reinforcing of the loudest chorus in the social media echo chamber. However, the clever propagandist knows and exploits this, persuading the mass demotic voice that they ‘own’ the cause (rather than merely project it) and that they possess autonomy. Hence, as of yore, the cognitive elites remain in control, cunningly enlisting the unwitting into the ranks of partisan voices. In Chapter 7, ‘Computational Propaganda and the Rise of the Fake Audience’ Aaron Delwiche describes some of the technological advances underpinning our theorizing and the conceptual frameworks, which exist today. Aaron enlightens as to how fakery is implemented via the provision of false audiences manipulated by true people, the agents of disinformation and political polarization. These ‘sock puppets’ so-called, and ‘bots’, mimic real people and real audiences but they are, in fact, totally imaginary, a phantom legion of bogus beings. Technology, in other words, enables deceit on the grand scale and creates fraud as the defining feature of our propaganda, people erroneously believing that there is an audience out there endorsing their perspective. It is a way for politicians to inflate their image and for demagogues of all kinds to claim a larger following than they, in fact, have. Such psycho-technical engineering is little understood and beyond the radar screen of the media for the most part. Delwiche’s chapter helps clarify just how propaganda is orchestrated today. In Chapter 8, ‘Visual Propaganda and Social Media’, Hyunjin Seo explains how visuality has always been an integument of propaganda: Pope Gregory the Great called statues ‘books for the illiterate’ and all down the centuries paintings, posters, prints and other visual images have had a galvanizing effect. This is because they are a form of speech, a visual grammar that can say far

more than formal rhetoric: they represent condensed meaning. Vividness of image says everything without the need for literary exposition, it commands attention, it trespasses on the mind unbidden. Historically, posters in public places were a great way of doing this, and today social media and Facebook memes are simply this – a cyberspace version of the poster in all its visceral power. The chapter evokes a cyberspace that has come to offer a turbo-charged imagery: the saturation of our consciousness with memes, with gifs, with short films. These are endlessly distracting, but very often contain a pithy, and polarizing, political message. By no means is such visuality a force for benevolence. It has, for example, been thoroughly mastered by the mavens of the so-called Alt Right and yet imagery is perhaps the principal form of political consumption of our era, a remorseless politicizing of the visual, or crude aestheticization, which merges very comfortably into the realms of entertainment, hence its persuasive power. In Chapter 9, ‘Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda’, Jordi Xifra explains how the word ‘propaganda’ has seldom been applied to modern corporations and the term ‘public relations’ has always been employed to invoke their externally manipulative operations. Yet these operations are designed to conceal as much as reveal. Like all advocacy, they repress some things and express others, but they also exist – ­ occasionally, periodically, though not ­ invariably – to sanitize the dark side. This essay enlarges our frame of discourse by incorporating the practice and ideology of corporations and consumption within the notion of propaganda. The corporation has ceased to be exclusively a provider of utilitarian solutions, a purveyor of instrumentality. Instead, their brands have become a public language, one that telegraphs status. Everything about an organization talks, and when we buy the brand, we consciously buy meaning and in consuming that meaning, we affirm the particular set of ideas and ideology

Introduction

with which the corporation has publicly sought to associate. The merit of Jordi Xifra’s article is to remind us that what companies actually do to enhance their brands is really propaganda, and conforms to the core definition of the term and its related practices. The corporation is therefore a political entity, a form of government, sometimes with worldwide powers, and in applying the term propaganda, we are merely unveiling a key truth.

Part 2: Methodological Approaches in Propaganda Research The following chapters of Part 2 review methodological approaches in propaganda studies. This is an area seldom discussed in its own right but is actually sorely needed. The means by which we investigate propaganda and its effects is, and should be, more than just an appendage to an article. This importance is particularly enhanced by the potentially devastating effects of propaganda; consider for example the millions of lives lost in the Rwandan Genocide incited through radio-based propaganda. Just as propaganda itself is completely multi-faceted, ranging from the patriotic posters of the Soviet Union, through the raging radio broadcasts of the Rwandan Genocide, to the homicidal YouTube clips of Daesh, so are the methodologies by which we interrogate these communications. What methods work to analyze the content of Twitter feeds will not work for posters, or for radio broadcasts. Similarly, the sheer complexity of the content of much propaganda today and in yesteryear gives rise to different attempts to analyze its meaning, often through linguistic techniques in analyzing structures of meaning including denotation and connotation. Nevertheless, the methods for constituting propaganda also differ. While some is developed to integrate and unify public opinion, other propaganda is developed to disintegrate public opinion. In Part 2, we consider an important

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consideration in propaganda studies, namely: how do we determine its effectiveness? This topic is particularly hampered by the fact that it is often difficult to evaluate the effects when one does not have access, or have limited access, to those targeted. In Chapter 10, ‘Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda’, Chris Miles interrogates the rhetorical properties of ‘viral’ propaganda, considering for instance who benefits from the notion that propaganda works to ‘infect’ its target audience? He also considers memetics and its transformation into a popular culture practice. By discussing the links between memetics and contemporary propaganda, Miles highlights how mainstream techniques have influenced political communication. The chapter seeks to make a methodological contribution by demonstrating the benefits of discourse analysis to ‘hypermodern’ political communication such as propaganda. In Chapter 11, ‘Content Analysis and the Examination of Digital Propaganda on Social Media’, Darren Lilleker and Paweł Surowiec critique content analysis as a research method used in examining digital propaganda. They discuss the types of research question that content analysis seeks to answer when examining digital propaganda, before critically examining issues which digital propaganda researchers encounter in their fieldwork. Lilleker and Surowiec also discuss how content analysis of propaganda can serve to reveal its computational, software-generated features. In Chapter 12, ‘Character Assassination as Modus Operandi of Soviet Propaganda’, Sergei A. Samoilenko and Margarita Karnysheva discuss the surprisingly neglected concept of character assassination; a concept they believe is as old as the hills. The authors posit that the increasing use of character assassination relates to the rise of information warfare and online disinformation in international politics. Character assassination is discussed within the context of Soviet propaganda o­ riginating in the

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nineteenth century, and its evolution into contemporary Russian propaganda. Samoilenko and Karnysheva argue that character assassination was an innovation and central feature of Marxism-Leninism, becoming a necessary tool to perpetuate the class struggle. Character assassination is therefore outlined as a set of stratagems to discredit influential public figures with opposing ideologies, via disinformation. The chapter discusses how the heritage of the subversive propaganda of early revolutionaries and Soviet ideological doctrines remains relevant in contemporary Russia and beyond. In Chapter 13, ‘Assessing Propaganda Effectiveness in North Korea: A Limited Access Case Study’, Efe Sevin, Kadir Jun Ayhan, Won Yong Jang and Hyelim Lee present a discussion of how to measure the effectiveness of propaganda projects conducted by select South Korean non-state actors directed at North Korean audiences. The chapter represents an interesting study of how to measure the effectiveness of propaganda when there is a near-total lack of access to the target audience, as is the case in North Korea. The authors build their discussion based on propaganda documents, interviews with select practitioners and an impressionistic survey of North Korean defectors. Their findings indicate that South Korean practitioners might use a threepronged approach to assess the effectiveness of their propaganda projects: via analysis of content, platform and indirect outcomes. In Chapter 14, ‘Towards the Measurement of Islamist Propaganda Effectiveness: A Marketing Perspective’, Paul Baines and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy set out to develop a rich picture of the ecosystem around the measurement of the effectiveness of Islamist terrorist propaganda. Writing from a marketing perspective, they posit that the problem-space of effectiveness measurement is multi-faceted, incorporating considerations of: barriers to measurement; identifying suitable measures of effectiveness and suitable methodologies by which to measure effectiveness; recognizing the

centrality of fear appeal use in propaganda and measuring its effect accordingly; and evaluating the effect of terrorist leaders. They also explore locating the center of gravity in terrorist group propaganda usage, and how to measure the effectiveness of terrorist group efforts to move people through the recruitment funnel (from attentiveness through persuasion/­ influence, to engagement, to action/conversion within the terrorist network). They go on to provide a set of metrics to monitor the use of propaganda at each stage of recruitment progression.

Part 3: Tools and Techniques in Counter-Propaganda Research The following chapters in Part 3 consider the important topic of counter-propaganda. Given the rise in terrorism and its accompanying propaganda, governments are increasingly concerned with how to limit the power of their opponents’ propaganda. The chapters in this Part discuss a variety of topics including how fake news differs from disinformation; how atrocity propaganda was improperly countered in World War I; how Israel has improperly sought to counter Hamas and Hezbollah propaganda; how its adversaries should defend against Russian propaganda as opposed to countering it; how fake news in general is framed and should be countered; how US counterterrorism communication efforts have been evaluated since 9/11; how the route to tackling propaganda is via its central fear appeal; and why peace marketing might be a credible alternative to counterpropaganda efforts. We consider each of these chapters in more detail below. In Chapter 15, ‘Propaganda and Dis­ information: How an Historical Perspective Aids Critical Response Development’, the Chief Historian of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Gill Bennett, compares and contrasts ‘fake news’, disinformation and propaganda. She concludes that the distinction between these concepts is less than

Introduction

clear-cut. She argues that both propaganda and disinformation have been employed as tools of statecraft for centuries in the service of worthy and unworthy causes. In the age of instant global media and the 24-hour news cycle, she argues that it is increasingly important for policymakers and the general public to try to discern the differences and similarities between them. In Chapter 16, ‘Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I’, Ewan Lawson, a former Commanding Officer of the UK Psychological Operations Group and the Royal United Service’s Institute’s expert on influence operations, seeks to address the challenge of so-called fake news and propaganda. He argues that challenging the falsehoods and identifying the organizations and approaches of adversary propaganda is essential to countering its pernicious effects. This chapter argues that to do this successfully, we must understand earlier critiques of propaganda that have led to its overwhelmingly negative image. The chapter tackles the role of atrocity reporting and propaganda during World War I, outlining efforts made by the allies in the first year of the war to identify and report on German atrocities in Belgium and Northern France, recognizing that as well as being intended to hold the Germans to account, they were also employed to influence domestic and neutral public opinion. Lawson highlights that the evidence was largely ignored or suspected in the post-war period and that this served to hide the actual details of real atrocities, affecting the attention given to war crimes in the Paris Peace Process. In Chapter 17, ‘Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda’, Ron Schleifer describes how Hezbollah and Hamas have successfully developed their propaganda strategies to assist in their battle against a militarily superior Israel, with an aim to bring them a de facto state, split Israeli public opinion and embitter Israel’s existential route. He characterizes Israel’s response to this propaganda as feeble. Schleifer,

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controversially, argues that the PalestinianIsraeli battle has wider implications beyond the Middle East, given both organizations (seeking to represent Shiite and Sunni communities respectively) are actually branches of global radical Islamic networks that reach the Western world as well. In Chapter 18, ‘Defending Against Russian Propaganda’, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews reprise their characterization of Russia’s contemporary propaganda model (which they title the ‘firehose of falsehood’), review the psychology behind the model’s potential effectiveness and discuss how target audiences might defend themselves. They suggest distinguishing between defending against propaganda and ‘counter-­ propaganda’, given the connotation of the latter to focus on the opponent and their propaganda. This model is applied to contemporary Russian propaganda, which they characterize as high-volume, multichannel, rapid, continuous and repetitive, in order to evaluate its effectiveness from a psychological perspective. Proceeding through this route allows them to identify how to defend against propaganda, using an array of defensive measures. In Chapter 19, ‘Fighting and Framing Fake News’, Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh consider definitions of fake news, using Ukraine, a country on the frontline of the fight against fake news since 2014, and the United States as case studies. Intriguingly, they take ideas from science studies and philosophy to argue that the status of a news story as real or fake depends not on its truth content per se or even on the intention of its producer, but on the process by which it was constructed. This allows them to document various frames to explain fake news production, which leads on to proposed and attempted methods of fighting fake news. In Chapter 20, ‘Measuring the Un­measur­able: Evaluating the Effectiveness of US Strategic Counter­ terrorism Communications’, former US Ambassador and Coordinator for Strategic

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Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) at the US Department of State (2012 to 2015), Alberto Fernandez, discusses efforts to evaluate public diplomacy programs against extremism and anti-Americanism, from the period after 9/11 until after the establishment of the interagency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) in late 2010. He argues that datadriven evaluation of CSCC’s efforts focused on one key but short-term part of its overall work, the overt communications initiatives of the Digital Outreach Team (DOT). Documenting and analyzing DOT’s Arabic video production from its beginning in 2011 to today revealed a rise to peak audience numbers in 2014. He argues that the launch of the joint USG-UAE Sawab Center in 2015 took up some of the slack in the change of DOT content, focus and style, but explains that that program remains in need of public evaluation to assess its effectiveness. In Chapter 21, ‘Countering the Fear in Propaganda’, Paul Baines and Nigel Jones review how counter-propaganda efforts should work specifically to counter what is often central in most adversary propaganda, the fear appeals they contain, especially those disseminated by bullying state actors and terrorist groups. By reviewing a variety of fear appeal models, they argue that adversaries’ propaganda efforts should be evaluated in terms of how severe is the threat posed and how susceptible the target audience feels to that threat. Any counter-propaganda effort must offer a credible solution to reducing or eradicating the fear generated by the adversary, framing that solution as one that is genuinely likely to work to reduce that fear and that the individual in the target audience feels they can actually implement themselves. This Fear Appeal framework provides a novel new way of dissecting adversary propaganda compared with, for example, the SCAME model (SourceContent-Audience-Media-Effects), and is (importantly) more focused on effectively countering that propaganda.

In Chapter 22, ‘Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology’, Dianne Dean and Haseeb Shabbir argue that one way of countering propaganda, and the physical conflict it often supports, is to market its antithesis – peace. Although the marketing of peace might initially sound implausible, it has in fact been achieved in various places, including to some degree, in Northern Ireland and Colombia previously. The authors argue that while the search for peace has been explored in a range of disciplines including psychology, war and conflict studies, peace studies and public diplomacy, there has not yet been any meaningful breakthrough, and sustainable peace remains elusive in many conflicts, even in the presence of peace talks. They consider whether a novel form of marketing, despite marketing’s baggage (of being characterized as manipulative), might instead fill this conceptual and practical gap. They argue that a peace marketing program would work to segment citizens into key actor groups, understand how the benefits of peace can be positioned to each group and then develop an overarching strategy in which peace is positioned to aid target audiences in preparing for the end of conflict. This way, target audiences would envision a new pathway to peace.

Part 4: Propaganda in Context The following chapters in Part 4 consider propaganda in context. We felt that this section was necessary given that propaganda practice is heavily context-dependent and that there are great differences in its use. The chapters in Part 4 begin by discussing a variety of contemporary propaganda contexts including how Southeast Asian nations use propaganda to create peace, how the Chinese government use propaganda to promote integration propaganda through their ‘Chinese Dream’ narrative – a me-too derivative of the US ‘American dream’ of good citizenship, how Japanese peace propaganda operates to

Introduction

stifle dissent and how propaganda has been used to perpetuate war in Syria. The examples which follow mix contemporary and historical contexts, considering: Cold War propaganda in Greece during the civil war between 1946 and 1949; the nexus between left-wing national populism in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela; Putin’s form of ultra-­ nationalist propaganda between 2000 and 2018; how Trump’s propaganda has served to cow an uncritical, domestic US press; a polemic on the ‘Far Right’ propaganda of the Leave.EU campaign during the 2016 UK-EU referendum campaign; how Daesh used propaganda to target and lure female foreign adherents; how Daesh designed and disseminated its propaganda messages; how terrorist propaganda has evolved in cyberspace since 9/11; and how the UK used counter-­ propaganda methods against a nimble enemy in the Middle East with maximum effect. We consider each of these chapters in more detail below. In Chapter 23, ‘Propaganda and Information Operations in Southeast Asia: Constructing Colonialism and its Antithesis, Statehood and Peaceful Ambiguity’, Alan Chong uncovers the variety in propaganda from justifying colonialism over a century to today’s reinforcement of state legitimacy and the ‘ASEAN Way’. His chapter reveals that propaganda and information operations are not constrained by regional or national boundaries, are not restricted to warfare, but can also be used to enforce a peaceful ambiguity in diplomatic discourse that maintains a status quo. The key contribution is a Southeast Asian creation of narratives in war and an imperfect peace. In Chapter 24, ‘The Construction of the Chinese Dream’, Chung-Min Tsai examines the construction of the Chinese Dream through its use of humiliation discourse and rejuvenation narratives. The Chinese Dream is a widespread meme of Xi Jinping that came with few concrete examples but is now closely integrated into policymaking goals in sustainable development, economic and

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political reforms, and China’s international influence. Chung-Min Tsai lays out the three stages of the Chinese Dream from political slogan to ideological symbol and a rationale for maintaining the dream through Chinese Communist Party rule. He explores the concept from a multidimensional perspective in history, politics, economics and China’s rise in global affairs. In Chapter 25, ‘Darkness and Light: Media, Propaganda, and Politics in Japan’, Nancy Snow reinforces the role of mythmaking in propaganda, or how reproducing and extending myths (Japanese homogeneity and consensus) can drive a state to a form of democratic totalitarianism where social solidarity is prized above civic effectiveness and with a real intolerance of dissent. It uncovers the propaganda of integration embedded in the culture, presented as a positive narrative by all citizens in all circumstances and, critically, without the oversight of a police state to enforce conformity. In Chapter 26, ‘Syria: Propaganda as a Tool in the Arsenal of Information Warfare’, Greg Simons applies propaganda rhetoric within an information warfare setting in Syria. Binary realities have taken hold since the beginning of the conflict, where what Simons describes as the propaganda of aversion is in constant contrast with the propaganda of attraction. Through a content analysis of selected newspapers in the aftermath of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Simons shows how media content can be distorted and manipulated to such a degree that they act as an instrument to perpetuate war through reinforcing binary realities. In Chapter 27, ‘Cold War Propaganda in Civil War Greece, 1946–1949: From State of Emergency to Normalization’, Zinovia Lialiouti undertakes a post-World War II Cold War analysis that crosses the Atlantic between Greece and the United States. Propaganda is viewed as a landscape for power struggles and power relations, with one state pushing an anti-Communist agenda where both physical and psychological

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actions were used against Greek Communists and their sympathizers to convert them. This conversion process is framed as healing and reformative and evolves into a transnational military and ideological battle with the antiCommunist Cold War Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine formulas bringing attention to the ‘Greek problem’. Zialiouti’s chapter includes a case study of the ‘Work and Victory Week’ of 1949. In Chapter 28, ‘Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela’, Daniel Aguirre and Caroline Avila make an important contextual contribution in regional populist communication practices. Three country studies are presented to show the ebbs and flows of Latin American populism in legacy and current practice. This review of the nexus between propaganda and populism on rhetorical and structural grounds offers a refreshing departure from the dominant media coverage of right-wing national populism in Europe and the United States. In Chapter 29, ‘Evaluating Putin’s Propa­ ganda Performance 2000–2018: Stagecraft as Statecraft’, Tina Burrett draws on content analysis, survey data and interviews with Moscow-based journalists to examine the stagecraft of Russian president Vladimir Putin over nearly 20 years. Burrett deftly deconstructs the Putin mystique and how he rose from obscurity to use his security credentials as a symbol of Russian ultranationalism in order for Russia to take on the world as a new super patriot power. Burrett examines Putin’s foreign and domestic operations and the chapter offers a landscape perspective on not only Putin but the shortcomings of the Russian media environment and its ancillary role in the rise of Putin. In Chapter 30, ‘Trumpaganda: The War on Facts, Press and Democracy’, Mira Sotirovic provides a window into the Trump administration’s misinformation campaigns known as Trumpaganda and how President Donald Trump is able to make mainstream news media outlets enemies of the state. She shows how the US news media, when used as

a daily punching bag, are complicit in falling for the Trump insults instead of serving the public interest and the truth-seeking function of the press, impacting important policies like healthcare. In Chapter 31, ‘LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes’, Emma L. Briant offers an unapologetic characterization of the Leave.EU campaign to support Brexit as Far Right propaganda. This chapter does not attempt to uncover the propaganda elements of the opposing Remain campaign, but rather offers an impassioned analysis of the Leave.EU campaign. Briant seeks to demonstrate, through documents and interviews with principals from Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica, that the campaign actively promoted and leveraged anti-immigration, racist and nativist narratives to reinforce stereotypes that Britain was under invasion. In Chapter 32, ‘ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises’, Louisa Tarras-Wahlberg takes a gendered approach to propaganda recruitment with her chapter on how Daesh attracts female recruits. Using a qualitative text analysis of two Daesh magazines, Dabiq and Rumiyah, she reveals the pull factors – the offer of support promises in exchange for their sisterly assistance – and adds that the Western media coverage of these recruits was ill-informed about the reciprocal benefits of the recruitment relationship. In Chapter 33, ‘IS’s Strategic Communication Tactics’, Charlie Winter and Craig Whiteside address the innovative strategic communication tactics of Daesh from the commercial perspective of building a product from scratch. From the level of message design to dissemination of its message in off- and online and pre- and postMosul contexts, the authors demonstrate that the media and persuasion tactics used have rarely been without precedent. In Chapter 34, ‘The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda in Cyberspace’, Gabriel Weimann addresses the open nature of the internet as an ideal platform for terrorist

Introduction

propaganda. Its free and open network properties provide anonymity and decentralization unavailable through mainstream media channels. Weimann carries the reader from the post-9/11 war on terrorism period through to relocation on social media and most recently to deeper migration flows to the Dark Web, all in an effort to conceal and protect terrorist messaging and their activities. If we use a synthetic review approach to consider, across all four Parts of the Handbook, what themes, and geographies, have been covered, we can see that the Handbook has embraced a wide area of the propaganda studies field (see Table 0.1), including: propaganda from around the world; integrative and ‘peace propaganda’ approaches; countering violent extremist propaganda; countering disinformation and fake news; atrocity propaganda; and countering cyberspace propaganda and other technological developments. These themes are not mutually exclusive and there is some crossover in topics. An analysis of the word frequencies contained in the abstracts in NVivo, based on each précis outlined above, reveals the broad topics that are covered in the book. When these are placed into a word cloud format (see Figure 0.1), they reveal how the Handbook particularly focuses on important contemporary topics such as propaganda effectiveness measurement, fake news, disinformation, war propaganda and propaganda in the digital era.

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We also consider what has not been covered in the Handbook; we turn to this topic in the next section.

WHAT WE HAVE NOT COVERED IN THIS HANDBOOK In considering what areas of propaganda studies have been covered, we are able to develop an agenda for further research in the field of propaganda and counter-propaganda studies by considering what has not been discussed. The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda could have covered in more detail, for example, the following areas: • Certain regions where propaganda use is rife (e.g. parts of Africa, including Nigeria, for example, where Boko Haram operate, and Somalia, where Al Shabab operate). • Contributions from under-published academic communities, particularly those outside the Anglosphere, for example, including more Far Eastern, African and Latin American contributors. • Some methodologies that can, and have been used, to interrogate propaganda texts (e.g. semiotic analysis) and propaganda dissemination (e.g. social network analysis), among many others. • Corporate propaganda in more than the limited detail contained herein; this is an important topic that deserves much greater consideration devoted to it and, consequently, this represents an important agenda for future academic research. • The effects of propaganda, particularly on democratic and authoritarian systems and on public

Figure 0.1  Word Cloud Outlining The Main Foci of the Handbook

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Table 0.1  Some of the Key Themes Covered in this Handbook Key themes covered

Chapters where topic explicitly covered

Geographic considerations

Principal author’s location

Propaganda by country context

2,8,12,13,20,23,24, 25,26,27,28,29

Integrative and peace propaganda approaches Islamist propaganda

9,12,22,23,24,25

Australia, Spain, Russia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Japan Spain, UK, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan UK, Israel, Sweden, Taiwan

Far Right propaganda Countering disinformation and fake news Atrocity propaganda Propaganda in cyberspace and other technological advances

8,31 4,5,7,12,15,18,19,21, 30 2,16 1,5,6,7,8,10,11,20,33, 34,35

UK, Australia, USA, Russia, North Korea, Ukraine, Southeast Asia, Japan, Syria, Iraq, Greece, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Russia UK, Palestine, Israel, Southeast Asia, Syria, Iraq USA, UK UK, USA, Russia, Ukraine UK, Australia UK, USA

UK, Australia Canada, USA, Israel

3,14,17,23,32,33,35

opinion, over time. This is a separate discussion from the effectiveness of (counter) propaganda, for example, and one which demands much greater consideration.

CONCLUSION We hope you feel, like we do, that the SAGE Handbook of Propaganda covers an impressive array of propaganda practice, illuminating its use through the modern and historical world via a global perspective. These chapters, from an impressive list of contributors ranging from academics to practitioners, cover a wide array of themes prevalent in propaganda today and in yesteryear. Our intention is to provide propaganda researchers and practitioners with a much more informed understanding of how propaganda functions, how it can be countered and how the effectiveness of both can be measured more accurately. We believe this is the first time a Handbook of Propaganda has been developed with this specific managerialist focus to aid policymakers, and this serves to supplement wider societal perspectives on propaganda also available in this Handbook and elsewhere. While we have tried to be comprehensive in developing the content for this

UK, USA UK, USA, Lithuania

Handbook and have benefitted enormously from the support given to us by our editorial board (see below), any omissions in content remain the fault of the three main editors alone. This is a large book and it has been less a labor of love than an impassioned task driven by perceived necessity, urgency even, because of the imbalance between the saturation levels of propaganda we encounter and the paucity of the tools we possess, cognitive and otherwise, to constrain or decode it. For us, then, this book has been a compulsive act; for you, the reader, the opportunity to explore the terrible grandeur of the edifice and speculate on what might happen next, on what kind of society might arise from this inferno of rhetoric and visual foment. For that, we have no answer. We can only pose those perplexing questions that new generations, who came to maturity in this climate of polemic, might seek understanding and find resolution.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To develop this Handbook required the labor of a larger number of people who diligently reviewed each of the chapters, and these comments together with those of the editors,

Introduction

were passed on to the author(s) in order that they could improve their submissions. The following reviewers, outlined below, were critical in helping the editors to improve the final chapters. Ms Emily Robertson, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra, Australia Dr Thomas Colley, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK Ms Alicia Wanless, The SecDev Foundation, Canada Prof. Aaron Delwiche, Department of Communication, Trinity University, USA Dr Hyunjin Seo, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas, USA Prof. Ignas Kalpokas, Department of Public Communication, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania Dr Chris Miles, Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre, Bournemouth University, UK Dr Darren Lilleker, The Media School, Bournemouth University, UK Mr Sergei Samoilenko, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University, USA Dr Maria Haigh, School of Information Studies, ­University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA Dr Thomas Haigh, College of Letters & Science, ­University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA Dr Christopher Paul, RAND Corporation, USA Dr Miriam Matthews, RAND Corporation, USA Ms Gill Bennett, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HM Government, UK Mr Nigel Jones, Georgina Capel Associates Ltd, UK Mr Alberto Fernandez, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, USA Dr Emma Briant, Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, UK Prof. Gabriel Weimann, Department of Communication, University of Haifa, Israel Ms Louisa Tarras-Wahlberg, International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, Sweden Dr Zinovia Lialiouti, Center for Modern Greek History, Academy of Athens, Greece Prof. Tina Burrett, Global Studies, Sophia University, Japan Dr Mira Sotirovic, Department of Journalism, University of Illinois, USA Dr Alan Chong, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

In putting together a book of this size, with this shape, focus, and international reach, we

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are grateful for the advice we received from our editorial review board, outlined below: Dr Greg Simons, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, University of Uppsala, Sweden. Mr Ewan Lawson, Royal United Services Institute, UK. Dr Dianne Dean, Faculty of Business, Law and Politics, University of Hull, UK. Dr Ron Schleifer, School of Mass Communication, Ariel University, Israel. Dr Neville Bolt, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. Prof. Jordi Xifra, Department of Communication, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. Kadir Jun Ayhan, Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. Prof. Chiyuki Aoi, School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo, Japan.

The editors would also like to thank Delia Alfonso Martinez, our senior editor, for her help in driving the very idea of a propaganda handbook, and for her considerable help in scoping and shaping the final product. Her energy and dedication, our (sometimes vexed) conversations on politics and ideology (including Spanish and Catalonian politics), and her professionalism all helped drive this unique project forward; it is what it is because of her considerable input. We would like to thank Umeeka Raichura for her help on the (not inconsiderable) administration associated with the Handbook, including administering the reviewing and chasing us all up to ensure the book was out on time. We would also like to thank Amber Turner Flanders for her administrative support during her internship with Sage, supporting Umeeka, and Colette Wilson for her help in sorting out what we all think is a brilliant cover design. In addition, we would like to thank the production editor, Jessica Masih, for the sterling work undertaken to bring our project into physical and digital reality. Finally, we have done our best to ensure that the Handbook is as error-free as possible and contains all the necessary permissions. Where any errors persist after publication, the fault remains with the three main editors.

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REFERENCES Auerbach, J. and Castronovo, R. (Eds.). (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baines, P. and O’Shaughnessy (Eds.) (2013). Propaganda, Vols. I–IV. London: Sage Publications. Camus, R. (2015). Le grand Remplacement. Plieux: Chez L’Auteur. Chokshi, N. (2017). That wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation is born. The New York Times, 26 April. Retrieved from: www. nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famousmisquotations.html (accessed 14 April 2019). Doob, L. (1966). Public Opinion and Propaganda. New York: Henry Holt. EIU (2019). Democracy Index 2018: Me Too? Political Participation, Protest and Democracy. London: Economist Intelligence Unit. Retrieved from: www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index (accessed 14 April 2019). Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Vintage Books. Katersky, A. (2018). The 9/11 toll still grows: More than 16,000 Ground Zero responders who got sick found eligible for awards. ABC News, 10 September. Retrieved from: https://abcnews. go.com/US/911-toll-growsl-16000-groundresponders-sick-found/story?id=57669657 (accessed 15 April 2019). Lasswell, H.D. (1928). The Function of the Propagandist. International Journal of Ethics, 38(3), 258–278. Lasswell, H.D. (1971). Propaganda Technique in World War I. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Le Bon, G. (2014). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Scott’s Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. McAuley, J. (2019). The New Zealand attack ratchets up pressure on Europe’s

anti-immigrant right. Washington Post, 19 March. Retrieved from: www. washingtonpost.com/world/europe/thenew-zealand-attack-ratchets-up-pressureon-europes-anti-immigrant-right/2019/ 03/19/a9447624-49cf-11e9-8cfc2c5d0999c21e_story.html?noredirect= on&utm_term=.916e31e81802 (accessed 15 April 2019). Mahler, J. and Rutenberg, J. (2019). How Rupert Murdoch’s empire of influence remade the world. New York Times. www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupertmurdoch-fox-news-trump.html (accessed 14 April 2019) Murray, D. (2017). The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The spiral of silence: a theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication, 24(2), 43–51 Richardson, L. (2006). What Terrorists Want. London: John Murray. Rufford, N. (2003). Spooks helped sex up Saddam report, confirms Blair govt. The Times of India, 29 December, 1. Snow, N. (2019). Propaganda. The International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies. Tim P. Vos and Folker Hanusch (General Editors), Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou, Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh and Annika Sehl (Associate Editors). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Snow, N., & Taylor, P. M. (Eds.). (2008). Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy. Oxford: Routledge. START (2018). Annex of Statistical Information: Country Reports on Terrorism 2017. National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, September. Retrieved from: www.state.gov/documents/organization/ 283097.pdf (accessed 15 April 2019).

PART I

Concepts, Precepts and Techniques in Propaganda Research

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1 Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins Neville Bolt

INTRODUCTION In the late 19th century, Propaganda of the Deed (or by Deed), the twin to the Propaganda of the Word, sought to bring about the fall of the state through acts of violence. These were to be operationally effective while symbolically charged events. As an instrument of direct action, they proclaimed that deeds speak louder than words. By goading the state through acts of violence aimed at symbolic targets, the state would be forced to overreact. That inevitably meant overstepping its remit, employing disproportionate measures. The consequent escalation in levels of violence would reveal the state’s true draconian nature but inherent, moral weakness too. Thus, would it undermine its own legitimacy in the eyes of the population. And accelerate its own demise. In its original context, Propaganda of the Deed (POTD) was a crude tool conceived to bring down the state. Some acts were strategic in their intent, targeted and planned. Others

appeared more random and less considered. All too often they were committed by individuals. Today, many of these militants might be described as lone wolves. By emphasising state rather than government, POTD’s ambitions and genealogy become apparent. As a tool of revolutionaries, it emerges from certain anarchist or anti-authoritarian socialist groups within the 19th-century Left who came to espouse the use of violence, and existentially reject the state as an institution of governance, control, and ultimately oppression. That meant activists turning their backs on a gradualist approach to constitutional change or what they perceived to be the elitist tendencies of more authoritarian groups of the Left. By contrast, the latter’s scientific socialism saw seizure of the state as only a stage in an historical process destined to culminate in the ‘withering away’ of the state. To their anti-authoritarian contemporaries, these authoritarian activists were viewed as statist, centralist, and potentially self-serving.

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1878 Versus 2020 The revolutionary Paris Commune was finally overwhelmed by the combined military forces of Prussia and France in 1871. What soon followed was the break-up of a decade-long attempt to unify a disparate and cantankerous Left under the aegis of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) or International. With the schism of the Left, bombings and shootings would become a fixture in the repertoire of fin-de-siècle politics, only to be silenced eventually by the artillery shells of the Great War. The trauma that would claim some ten million civilian lives and a similar number of military casualties between 1914 and 1918, was ostensibly set in motion by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The pages of the New York Times wasted no time in showcasing the anarchist Alexander Berkman. On that fateful day in June 1914, they ran his claim that ‘Austria-Hungary was a hotbed of revolution’: readers were left in no doubt that the attack had been an anarchist attempt to undermine the iron rule of the Emperor.1 The decades in which POTD flourished saw societal turbulence in countries stretching from Russia to America. Economic boom and bust, dramatic expansion of capital, rapid growth of wealthy middle classes alongside urban poverty and disease, waves of migration from the countryside to industrial towns, no less from Europe to the United States, accompanied the development of nationstate bureaucracies. All the while, a shared identity was growing among working men. Metaphors of the masses and the psychological crowd began to ring alarm bells with nervous governments. Nineteenth-century POTD would win many battles but lose its war. If killing heads of state is merely a measure of tactical success, then its proponents indeed failed strategically to bring down governments and the ultimate prize of the state as an institution of governance and command and control. Prussia’s Kaiser Wilhelm I was lucky

to survive the assassin’s bullet (1878). The same could not be said for other high-ranking targets. Russia’s Tsar Alexander II (1881), French President Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Cánovas (1897), Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto of Italy (1900), US President William McKinley (1901), King Carlos I of Portugal (1908), Spanish Prime Minister Canalejas (1912), Greece’s King George I (1913), and AustroHungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914) all died, victims of POTD. I have argued in The Violent Image (2011) that a failure to exert a unified vision across a spectrum of political tendencies, from the pacifist to the messianic, restricted the historical influence of POTD.2 Their messages, if coherent, were less than cohesive. Even more important in a period when daily and weekly newspapers were attracting millions of buyers for their mass-produced editions, the interpretation of terror outrages was left for newspaper reporters and their owners to frame. Unsurprisingly, these would be consistent with press barons’ interests in maintaining political and business stability. A far cry from insurrection. Revolutionaries, meanwhile, toiled at their ad hoc printing presses which were repeatedly detected and closed down by security services. At the same time, as media theorist Robert McChesney has pointed out, the nature of the press in 19th-century America was shifting; so too in Britain. The very logic of the publishing industry ‘changed from being primarily political to being primarily commercial. The press system remained explicitly partisan, but it increasingly became an engine of great profits as costs plummeted, population increased, and advertising- which emerged as a key source of revenues- mushroomed’.3 So when confronting the resources of vested interests and the status quo, radical and anarchist publishers lacked continuity of production, mass distribution, and politically, a uniform and consistent proposition. They were not just coming a poor second in the circulation battle, they were losing the information war.

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins

Success and failure cannot be solely judged on ownership or efficiencies of distribution. As modern communicators would remind us, this is to measure performance or output rather than impact or outcome. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall highlights the period between the 1880s and the 1920s as one of a revival in popular culture. He prefers to see the run-up to these decades through the lens of displacement and superimposition. We can see clearly how the liberal middle class press of the mid-nineteenth century was constructed on the back of the active destruction and marginalisation of the indigenous radical and working-class press. But, on top of that process, something qualitatively new occurs towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in this area: the active, mass insertion of a developed and mature working-class audience into a new kind of popular, commercial press.4

Popular culture for him is a work in progress subject to constant flux. Hence, he sees at play at this time ‘the reconstituting of the cultural and political relations between the dominant and dominated classes’ through new technologies, labour processes, and the commercial press.5 This has echoes for today. But it also requires that we understand better how ideas of change are absorbed into a public consciousness that is by no means static or hegemonic. By the late 20th and early 21st century, the transformation of the information environment and consumer access to technologies for disseminating information would allow for a dramatic change in the character and potential success of POTD. Exemplified by al-Qaeda’s strike on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001 – even more breath-taking than those of the Provisional IRA or PLO of earlier generations – that attack would inspire insurgents to conceive events played out in ‘real time’ across global media. More recently, some four billion mobile phones connect to multi-platform digital technologies enabling images, words, and ideas to circulate instantaneously in global feedback loops. Populations

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and individuals connect to one another with the potential that the messages they transmit can multiply exponentially should they be sufficiently ‘sticky’ or attractive to wider audiences.6 In these changed circumstances, POTD would evolve. It would shift from ‘using the weight of the state against the state’ to ‘using the weight of the media against the media’: this is a central argument I make in The Violent Image.7 In this important respect, perpetrators of POTD became sensitive to a shift in society’s centre of gravity, from the state circumscribing the arena of public information flows to a communications environment driven by media technologies, producers, and consumers who could at once receive, originate, and co-produce output. This discussion is mindful of being unduly coloured by technological determinism. Notwithstanding, something undisputedly changed between the late 19th and early 21st centuries. And dramatically so. Not the helter-skelter change that every generation feels it is living through. Although the new consumers of the 1800s had every right to think they were thoroughly modern in their embrace of new communications technologies: 1830s steam ships, newspapers; 1860s railways, mail, telegraph; 1890s telephones, cinema; 1900s popular press, gramophone. But by the millennium, the transition from analogue to digital technologies would replace the multiplied messaging of analogue with exponential messaging of digital. Once populations around the world were connected in the blink of an eye via digital laptops and mobile phones, any lingering ambitions states or state challengers might have had to control or at least manage information flows would have to face the sobering reality that content might now only be influenced. I have further argued that there should be two key components for theorising POTD. First, the shock and awe of the violent action prompts an immediate cognitive rupture, then a subsequent vacuum in the minds of observers.8 That vacuum creates an opportunity space which carefully constructed messages,

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previously disseminated within society, can fill. Where the state is found wanting, insurgents offer a way forward with messages they have prepared. This is shock doctrine. Second, the violent act is not simply operational in the military sense. Rather, its true purpose is to trigger associations with grievances in an archipelago of injustices and violent acts. This memory of coalescing dissatisfaction becomes the binding agent within a politicised community; it allows like-minded individuals to bond around a common identity.9 Hence, POTD becomes the trigger that activates emotive associations in a triad of memory creation, storytelling, and the passage of time. By creating a new memory, insurgents aim to rewrite the past as it is commonly understood in the public mind. Namely, a past created by the state as the official account of history using all cultural and educational resources at the control of governments. Insurgents push back against official history. They seek to control the past, to legitimately own the present, in order to lay claim to the future.10

so doing, I shall draw on various lenses from insurgency theory, discourse theory, and communications theory, and weave them into an historical account. Consequently, POTD is to be understood as acts of symbolic violence. These acts of terror are techniques in the insurgent’s arsenal which may or may not be selected for political ends. There is no suggestion that they form part of any phenomenon or ‘ism’ as in terrorism. By isolating 19th century POTD from its later manifestations, particularly in the TV era of the 1960s–1980s, and the postmillennial digital age, this discussion sidesteps any anachronistic comparison or failure to relativise any political movement to its time. Consistent with insurgency theory where all insurrections are understood as specific to their cultural and political contexts, it should be noted that activists on the Left were transnational in both outlook and travel, yet frequently local in the way they sought to effect change. Their national situations varied even if they shared a common understanding of the causes of oppression and suffering. Their understandings of how to shape the future were clearly divergent.

A Revolutionary Century The following discussion focuses on the original manifestation of POTD in the late 19th century. It looks to the sponsors of this newly conceptualised but under-theorised political weapon and the context from which it emerged. First, it offers a political economy overview of the later decades of the century before exploring the confluence and subsequent break-up of the International Working Men’s Association, the new hub of socialist activism. It moves on to chart the emergence of POTD from a schism between international socialists before offering an insight into acts of political violence that some committed in different countries across Europe and North America. Hence, its focus is deliberately narrow and excludes wider debates around the question whether states too, rather than simply insurgents, commit acts of POTD. In

No Eureka Moment POTD did not appear overnight. The climax of political violence towards the end of the 19th century was firmly rooted in the intellectual reverberations from the previous 100 years. Ideological struggles on the political Left accompanied the inexorable advance towards mass movements and democracy. The grievance of failed revolutions in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1870 cut deep. These simmered in the cauldron of industrial exploitation, rural unrest, and capitalist wealth-creation. Against the enduring legacy of two revolutions which transformed the 19th century – the ideological, political French Revolution and economic British Industrial Revolution – emerged the struggle of proletarian movements. ‘European (or

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins

indeed world) politics between 1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789, or even more incendiary ones of 1793’.11 The idea of ‘permanent revolution’ appeared early in the 19th century. But the 1848 failed revolution meant gradual reform would now look for sponsorship beyond the bourgeoisie.12 The 1848 ‘year of revolutions’ was a year of world economic slump. An insurrectionist contagion spread from Paris to south west Germany, Bavaria, Berlin, Vienna, and Hungary in barely three weeks. However, it faltered, foreshadowing universal defeat within six months.13 Impoverished by fragile organisation, inconsistent ideology, led by communists and socialists, these ‘social revolutions of the labouring poor’ collapsed. Europe’s moderate liberals would conclude ‘revolution was dangerous and that some of their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without it’. The moderate bourgeoisie, ‘ceased to be a revolutionary force’.14 Notwithstanding, 1848 proved a watershed, shifting politics into the domain of the people. The years to 1873 saw cheap capital and primary commodities, and rapid price escalation drive an unprecedented period of global economic boom, interrupted only by brief depressions in 1857–1858 and 1866–1868. The ‘permanent revolution’ went into temporary abeyance. Instead, the revolution was in capital. New industrial processes needed pools of surplus labour. Mass migrations around the world saw millions settle in fast urbanising centres of industrial production. Some nine million economic migrants, four times the number of people living in London, abandoned Europe; most were bound for the United States between 1846 and 1875.15 This would increase steadily. Soon 700,000 to 800,000 were migrating annually, undertaking the 12-day voyage to New York in search of a better life. From 1900, the flow became a torrent, almost doubling annually. Capital and communications exploded in unison. Railways transported the migrant poor across continents. By the mid-1860s,

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106,886 kilometres of track had been laid; a decade later, that had more than doubled. Steamships ferried migrants between continents; overall tonnage increased from 1,423,232 to 3,293,072.16 Migrants exploded the size of cities along road and rail routes. What awaited their arrival were overcrowded one or two room slum-dwellings with poor sanitation: ethnic ghettos where they clustered for safety and opportunity. Bourgeois ideologues and activists were not immune to social iniquity. Even if the growing middle class chose to see past the suffering. The post-Enlightenment revolution in science had been harnessed first to steampowered, then electricity-driven industrial revolutions. Increased demands of capital and a supply side desire to stimulate industrial production fuelled the international ambitions of European and American nation-states. An acceleration in media innovation was deeply interwoven with this process. Mass newspapers had since the 1840s offered a new product to the urban consumer. A single package with its blend of enticing adverts, graphic and photographic illustrations, opinion pieces, and reportage from the familiar to the exotic – often more subjective and jingoistic than journalistically objective – was brought to market at an affordable price. The transition to printing presses with metal plates fed by continuous rolls of paper meant machines could produce millions of sheets each day. By the turn of the 20th century, the typewriter, telegraph, photograph, telephone, cinema, and radio would have made their debuts.17 These social and economic contexts informed political debates of the period. In turn, they would radicalise certain groups to embrace the violent deed.

The Genealogy of POTD The shadow of three men hung over the International Working Men’s Association, spelling the eventual destruction of this historic attempt to unify an array of anarchists

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and socialists. By the late 19th century, one anarchist, the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was already dead. Another, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had devoted long years in exile to creating secret revolutionary groups in Italy. The former would come to be seen as the father of the late 19th century anarchist movement, the latter as the father of anarchist terrorism.18 A third personality, Dr Karl Marx, German journalist and communist ideologue, had delivered the inaugural address to the IWMA in London in October 1864.19 Roads of extreme circumstance had led to this point, he declared: After the failure of the Revolution of 1848, all party organizations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the transatlantic republic, and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasmus, and political reaction.20

Bakunin and his followers, under the sobriquet Collectivists, would join the movement in 1868. But earlier engagements during the revolutionary 1840s had already unearthed an antipathy between Bakunin and Marx which proved more than personal. Of Marx, Bakunin wrote: ‘(h)e called me a sentimental idealist – and he was right. I called him vain, perfidious and sly’.21 Marx saw in the Russian a buffoon, an ‘amorphous pan-destroyer’.22 For Proudhon, Marx was the ‘tapeworm of socialism’.23 The German responded by damning the Proudhonian faction from Paris attending the 1864 International: They disdain any revolutionary action that emanates from class struggle itself, any centralised social movement.24

Years earlier, the ambiguous Proudhon had precluded any discussion of revolution: I believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an

appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction.25

This all too tangible personality clash then masked fundamental ideological differences between authoritarian socialists and libertarian anarchists. Subsequent congresses between 1868 and 1872 became the battleground for Marx and Bakunin, both equally committed to revolution but espousing mutually exclusive strategies and doctrines.26 At stake were fundamental principles: ‘Authoritarian versus libertarian, political action versus industrial action, transitional proletarian dictatorship versus immediate abolition of all State power’.27 But the essential conflict resided in the issue of the state. Marxist revolutionaries would first seize political power, and only then destroy the bourgeois state-machine. Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels had argued: the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – is at the same time its last independent act as a state … The state is not ‘abolished’, it withers away to a non-state.28

Lenin was later unequivocal in highlighting Marxian state doctrine: All the revolutions which have occurred up to now have helped to perfect the state machine, whereas it must be smashed, broken.29

The political Left had found in Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories that Man was no longer the object of divine creation; rather one should look to historical development. Marx’s 30-year project of a universal theory of human society through the prism of dialectical materialism (Das Kapital: Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, 1867) would see publication shortly after Proudhon’s death. Its antecedents were eclectic. ‘He took the subject of materialist history from Feuerbach, the class struggle from Saint-Simon, the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he soon rejected) from Babeuf, the labour theory of value from Adam Smith, the theory of surplus value from Bray and Thompson, the principle of

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins

dialectical progress from Hegel’.30 But crucially, it emphasised the centrality of the state. Marx’s attack, however, targeted authoritarianism within the ownership of the means of production, the ‘despotism of capital’, and only then the authoritarianism of the state.31 By contrast, anarchists saw in the state itself the means of evil oppression. Thus, its extreme destruction should be immediate. As a family within the extended, dysfunctional socialist family, anarchists represented an anti-authoritarian tendency, a counterpoint to authoritarian communists.32 However, for Lenin, authority and autonomy were ‘relative terms’. While for Engels, anarchists were disingenuous: A revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing there is … one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, which are authoritarian means if ever there were any.33

Because anarchists rejected ‘statism’ – the centralised, industrialised state – they attracted enemies on two fronts, the ‘landlords and priests of the old order’, and ‘revolutionary tyrants and bureaucrats’ within movements which sought to transform society.34 Yet as much as the struggle was ideological, it remained personal too. Against the context of the rise of mass movements, and for the future of POTD, these fractures assumed prime importance. POTD, like much anarchist doctrine, appears contradictory, rooted in a clash between two temperaments, the religious and the rationalist, the apocalyptic and the humanist. Its intellectual legacy from the Enlightenment must therefore be informed by the psychology of religious faith.35 Across the anarchist and socialist spectrum, the rational and the millenarian were finely interwoven strands. That did not mean the path would inevitably lead to violent deeds. But for some it did. Utopian socialism creating a new society from ground-level small communities, appealed to anarchists. But suspicion of the kind of rigid planning and proletarian

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power expressed through the political party, as Marx theorised, would lead groups down different paths. If POTD was born of a schism within communists, its DNA contained the dominant genes of anarchism. POTD and anarchism fed off the growing power of the nationstate. Rooted in spontaneity and decentralisation, anarchism stressed the ability of people to innovate their own political and economic forms of administration free of constitution, political party, or state administration with its inevitable authoritarianism. Political parties mirrored the state in so far as they precluded individuals from negotiating free and ad hoc contracts. Accordingly, the price of freedom was to reject the state with its law making and refuse to perpetuate iniquities that bred social conflict. This credo dated back to the 17th-century English Commonwealth. More recently, William Godwin wrote at the height of France’s revolutionary Terror: ‘Government lays its hands upon the spring that is in society and puts a stop to its motion’.36 Institutions corrupt man where man is fundamentally good, rational and open to persuasion thus ultimately perfectible. Virtue leads to happiness for the individual, where happiness and justice are inextricably joined. But for Godwin, the root of unhappiness, crime, and evil was property. The solution therefore was simply to abolish property. Necessity should override excess and luxury. Proudhon went further, proposing a Europe without borders, states, governments, or topdown laws. Majority laws were the laws of force; government arising from such laws was the government of force: ‘Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, I declare him my enemy’.37 Society had neither right to judge nor punish. Only the individual possessed the right to judge himself, not the laws. Justice is an act of conscience, thus voluntary. Attacking excessive private ownership, ‘What is property? Property is theft’38 would become a maxim embraced by countless revolutionists. Labour

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value and dignity too lay at the heart of an ethical value system; the minute an individual’s labour equated directly to his family’s needs, exploitation would disappear. Surplus appropriation for owner or proprietor became redundant. This was Proudhon’s revolution. But not Marx’s, for whom labour was inescapably enslaved to the ownership of the means of production. His revolution hung on the historical process of class struggle. Within the anarchist tendency resides a tension between the individual and collective that underpins POTD. The same tension affected perpetrators who chose to act as individuals rather than through organised cells. German philosopher Max Stirner espoused individualist rather than collective anarchism. Freedom meant being free from all institutional control: ‘My project is built on nothingness’, he proclaimed enigmatically.39 States divide, subordinate, and subject the individual will to the collective. Individuals must be freed from man’s respect for laws, and imposing rights through force. Hence the mobilising factor in society turns on utility. People and resources are fair game for individual enjoyment and sublimation. The earth should be consumed by any and everyone, as and when. Remove the state and the Union of Egoists becomes the unregulated meetingplace for mutual advantage.40 Nevertheless, if the essence of POTD was utopian, its defining characteristic would be violence. Bakunin and his successor, the social anarchist Peter Kropotkin, shared a visceral loathing of Russia’s autocracy. Tsarist on-off policies – sometimes social reform, sometimes repression – had been partly fired by the Decembrists’ challenge to the state, a failed uprising of army officers in 1825. Bakunin’s doctrine became out-andout messianic. Activism could only mean violent state overthrow. Significantly, it was a doctrine that would fix its venom on Marx and his supporters who sought to dominate the floor of the International: ‘Communists believe that they must organise the working class in order to seize power in states’,

he accused, but ‘(r)evolutionary socialists (meaning anarchists) organise in order to destroy states’.41

The Storm Before the Torrent The International Working Men’s Association or International proved to have a tempestuous, and brief life, riven with the manoeuvrings and contests of two rival camps of Marx and Bakunin. Captured memorably in the understatement of Marx’s mouthpiece George Eccarius – ‘Marx will be terribly annoyed’42 – the Basel Congress in 1869 saw Marxists suffer a dramatic setback. From the opening session, division was in the air. One by one, decisive initiatives on direct legislation by the people; abolishing the right of inheritance; land ownership whether by state, agricultural collective, or peasants; and the value and future role of trade unions went decisively pro the better prepared Bakunists. It proved to be a turning-point. Yet by 1872, The Hague congress witnessed a fight-back and complete reversal. Through Le Réveil’s pages, Bakunin was attacked as a failed revolutionary and suspected police agent. His links with the extreme radical Sergey Nechayev were pilloried. Between the two congresses, the International made little progress in organising the European working class.43 Internecine warfare spread between the General Council and local branches. At The Hague Congress, Bakunin’s anarchists were isolated and Bakunin’s expulsion by the Marxists was finally achieved.44 The General Council, newly under Marxist domination, relocated to New York far from the influence of leading anarchists. It would subsequently fold at the Philadelphia Congress in 1876. A new rival Anarchist International of Saint-Imier appeared in Switzerland in September 1872 but failed to see out 1877. What was perceived as having been a rigged vote at The Hague was quickly rejected by national federations: Jura federation (St Imier congress) in September 1872; French congress, September 1872; Italian federation, December 1872; Belgian

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federation, December 1872; Spanish federation (Cordoba congress), December 1872; American federation (New York), January 1873; English federation (London congress), January 1873; Dutch federation, February 1873.45 Franz Mehring described ‘stormy scenes’ from the outset in The Hague. But the mood music of the times was one of sustained violence. The General Committee report: scourged all the acts of violence which had been committed against the International since the Bonapartist plebiscite, the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, the villainies of Thiers and Favre, the infamies of the French chamber, and the high treason trials in Germany; even the English government was taken to task on account of its terrorism against the Irish sections.46

Significantly, Bakunin’s ejection was the cue for his followers to renew a more violent line of direct rather than political action.47 What would become POTD was thus intricately rooted in a fierce contest over the optimum path to state and societal transformation, not merely operational utility. Bakunin had spent the post-revolutionary 1860s organising a secret international association of revolutionaries in Italy. This assumed an imaginative, mystical structure of three tiers: International Brothers; National Brothers; and the semi-secret International Alliance of Social Democracy. Each should remain distinct, unknown to the others in the hierarchy throughout Europe and America as they sought to ‘accelerate the universal revolution’. Lack of support spelled collapse. A phoenix-like Alliance Internationale de la Democratie Socialiste survived. Its credo preached atheism and abolishing religion; political, social, and economic equality between classes by destroying government and inheritance rights; an end to all political action and the assumption of all industrial processes by groups of producers; and the subjugation of all centralised political organisation to total personal liberty.48 Bakunin would often revise his violent ideology. While attacking Marx’s manipulation of the International, he had allied his efforts

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to a fellow Russian, Sergey Nechayev.49 The collaborative outcome was The Revolutionary Catechism (1869), a doctrine of 26 articles celebrating political violence. ‘The object remains always the same: the quickest and surest way of destroying this filthy order’,50 proclaimed one catechism, amplifying Bakunin’s earlier maxim that ‘[t]he desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire’.51 Their mission was terrifying and conjured up the uncompromising spirit of the Jacobin Terror: ‘Our task is terrible, inexorable, and universal destruction’.52 To be a revolutionary was to be judged ‘not by words but by deeds’.53 Selflessness was to guide their actions: The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilisation, and he lives in this world for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction … He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred.54

Gradually Propaganda of the Deed, or by Deed, entered the discourse. According to the radical, Italian nationalist Carlo Pisicane: The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free.55

Meanwhile, four young revolutionaries had coalesced around the volatile Bakunin: Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta, Paul Brousse, and Prince Peter Kropotkin. One of them, Paul Brousse commented on the recent appearance of the phrase ‘la Propagandie par le fait’ in an article he wrote for the Bulletin of the Jura Fédération:56 from one individual to another, propaganda in public meetings or conferences, propaganda in newspapers, pamphlets or books. These methods work only for theoretical propaganda; moreover, they are becoming increasingly hard to use effectively…something else had to be found.57

Notwithstanding, Brousse’s plea fell short of endorsing assassination to secure political transformation.58 It would fall to another in

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the group, Kropotkin to elaborate. Inspired by Bakunin’s and Nechayev’s principles, Kropotkin nevertheless modified their concept of insurrection, injecting a step-by-step methodology: A single deed makes more propaganda in a few days than a thousand pamphlets. The government defends itself, it rages pitilessly; but by this it only causes further deeds to be committed by one or more persons, and drives the insurgents to heroism. One deed brings forth another; opponents join the mutiny, the government splits into factions; harshness intensifies the conflict; concessions come too late; the revolution breaks out.59

Trained groups or individuals, adept in the techniques of POTD, set forth to awaken the spirit of revolt in the masses. Over the following years, the deed claimed high-profile, symbolic state-targets. It would be unwise to underestimate their impact on mass audiences of the day in societies more respectful of social hierarchy than today’s. Despite the hostile ways government elites and newspaper entrepreneurs framed terrorist acts to their readers, those deeds were widely reported, inevitably attracting some new adherents.

‘Selfless Slave of Her Idea’ As the month of March 1878 drew to a close, Vera Zasulich, a Russian political activist, walked out of the St. Petersburg Circuit Court a free woman. Her trial and particularly its judgement had been a tumultuous affair. Brought before the dock for having shot, injured but failed to kill General Fyodor Trepov, her appeal to the jury might have surprised any 21st century audience. Trepov was, after all, the head of state security in St. Petersburg. Zasulich had a ten-year record with the security services, having been kept consistently under surveillance or arrest. While she was working as a typesetter on the publication Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty), a prison inmate, Bogolubov, had been savagely whipped on Trepov’s orders.60 Corporal punishment, however, at this

moment albeit for a brief hiatus, was considered illegal by the Russian state. Zasulich claimed to have felt the prisoner’s pain as if her own body had suffered all 25 strokes of the rod. The jail population too had been stirred to boiling point. Not so the press and public opinion; they chose to remain silent. It was left to the young activist to fight his corner. Later in court she revealed her strategy, ‘the silenced question about Bogolubov’s punishment will arise; my crime will provoke a public trial, and Russia, in the person of her people’s representatives, the jury, will be compelled to pronounce a verdict not on me alone’.61 Her defence counsel went on to claim the high moral ground: Attention should be paid to the typical moral features of crimes against the state. The nature of such crimes changes very often. What was considered a crime yesterday, becomes a glorious deed of civic valor today or tomorrow. A crime against the state is often the expression of a doctrine aiming at premature reform, at propagation of something not yet grown to full maturity and for which the time is not yet ripe.62

For all that her defence rested on rhetoric and the Propaganda of the Word, her aim was to gain sympathy for Propaganda of the Deed in the public consciousness. After all, her deed had opened the public space for the word to shape a new discourse. Zasulich’s act in what has been labelled the ‘year of assassinations’, 1878, represents the first self-conscious act of POTD when viewed from a formal perspective in a still under-theorised area of direct action. The wider context in which it played out was one of ‘arrested modernisation’, namely two Russias described by the father of Populism Alexander Herzen as:63 governmental, imperial, aristocratic Russia, rich in money, armed not only with bayonets but with all the bureaucratic and police techniques taken from Germany … Russia of the dark people, poor, agricultural, communal, democratic, disarmed, taken by surprise, conquered, as it were, without battle.64

What is instructive is the broad make-up of prison detainees between 1873 and 1877 that

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immediately preceded Zasulich’s most recent incarceration: 1,611 propagandists (85% male, 15% female), 425 deemed ‘especially criminal’. The ‘criminals’ ranged in age: 117 (under 21 years), 199 (21–25), 93 (25–30), and 42 (30+). But more revealing perhaps was the class make-up. There were 147 nobles, 90 clergy, 58 sons of high officers, 11 soldiers, 65 peasants, and 54 bourgeois, although the peasants and bourgeois were actually factory workers and artisans. A register of those sentenced is equally interesting: 279 nobles, 117 sons of high officers, 13 soldiers, 27 ‘commoners’, and 68 Jews.65 This new form of anarchist assertion would appeal across class, gender, and national divides.

Archipelago of Violence More accessible targets were chosen too, more prosaic and not always operationally coherent. Incidents were as eclectic as they were enigmatic. Italy’s political instability in the 1870s provided firewood for Bakunin’s adherents. Police estimates of 30,000 anarchist sympathisers could only add to the conflagration. Italy’s unification struggle after the removal of the Austrians and the Bourbon monarchy exacerbated the economic hardships of increased taxation, bad harvests, and the European economic downturn. Peasant and unskilled labour unrest spread. For Andrea Costa and Errico Malatesta, it was an opportunity to launch their own version of the Paris Commune. However, the chief organiser Costa was arrested before the insurrection had fired a shot in anger. The quixotic Bologna rising of 1874 marked the last appearance of the ailing Bakunin, whose latest failure had produced a fitting epitaph to an unfulfilled revolutionary career.66 By contrast, in Lyons, in 1882, a bomb was thrown in the early hours into the Théâtre Bellecour, a music hall hosting ‘the flower of the bourgeoisie and commerce’. It prompted the arrest, imprisonment, and

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instant martyrdom of one young Swiss anarchist Antoine Cyvogt, whose guilt remained far from proven. Not surprisingly, the local anarchist press seized the moment. Nor did it hold back from fanning the flames of revolutionary strikes among coalminers in Montceau-les-Mines, near Lyons. In the pages of Le Révolté, the desirability of the revolutionary strike consumed heated column inches, claiming ‘a strike is a revolt or a folly’.67 What was needed was an anarchist strike, a strike followed by a riot, the harbinger of revolution: ‘the war of clenched fists, fists clenched around the handle of a knife or gun’.68 A 44-day strike in Roanne of 4,000 weavers provided the opportunity when it ended in a lock-out. One unemployed worker fired a shot at a mill-owner, was apprehended, and condemned to eight years hard labour. But for glorifying the act as the ‘most fertile, most popular propaganda of the deed’, the editor of the anarchist Droit Social received a 12-month prison sentence.69 For some time, accounts of clandestine, nocturnal meetings of the Bande Noire had been reported in the area. The group soon mobilised with a series of dynamite attacks on religious targets, prompting 150 rioters to march on Montceau, before torching a chapel. Three brigades of gendarmes and a company of troops guarding the trial of 23 arrested, testified to the fear of the authorities that a general uprising was afoot. The following year, the worldwide economic slump cut deep. Workers were dismissed from Montceau’s mines for their political affiliations. The dynamite campaign resumed with increasing ferocity. This time, by contrast, the authors claimed responsibility as anarchists, writing to Le Révolté under sobriquets ‘L’Affamé, La Dynamite, La Suppression des Bourgeois, La Revolver à la Main’.70 Recruiting a miner as paid informant yielded ambiguous dividends for the authorities and mine-owners. Of 32 suspects arrested, ten were condemned to hard labour ranging from five to 20 years. One had confessed to being an anarchist, another to having been in possession of copies of Le Révolté.

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Throughout, the authorities feared a systematic movement devised by the antiautoritaire Internationale. Lyons was a focus for anarchist propaganda and agitation. Police sweeps from Paris to Lyons led to 66 arrests. These numbered most leading French anarchists of the time: Bernard, Bordat, Gautier, Faure, Ricard, Martin, Liégeon, Reclus, and also Kropotkin on a brief visit to France. Other detainees had allegedly accepted positions in the insurrectionist organisation, knowingly conspired in its development by receiving subscriptions, procuring members or propagating its doctrines. Kropotkin joined the other leaders Gautier, Bernard, and Bordat, serving a five-year prison sentence, suffering 2,000 francs damages, and enduring ten years of surveillance and four years of suspended civil rights.71 In 1887, Charles Gallo was convicted of throwing vitriol at brokers on the trading-floor of the Paris stock exchange. At his trial, his 90-minute harangue proclaimed his had been ‘an act of propaganda by the deed for anarchist doctrine’, in other words, a symbolic strike. Another prominent state symbol, the Paris Chamber of Deputies witnessed a bomb attack by an impoverished anarchist Auguste Vaillant in 1893. There were no fatalities; the assailant was later convicted and sentenced to death.72 POTD had its cause célèbre.73 Paris experienced 11 explosions between 1892 and 1894. One committed by Emile Henry shocked fellow anarchists who claimed it a watershed. Not overtly symbolic, the Café Terminus at the Gare St Lazare was regularly frequented by office workers and shopkeepers. During evening rush-hour Henry secreted a bomb which exploded in the large crowd, injuring 20, killing one. At his trial ‘Il n’ya pas d’innocents’ was his defiant retort to the accusation that he had deliberately targeted innocent people. Refusing all mitigation of insanity to commute his death sentence, he declared: I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their

insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.74

When a new manifestation of the Revolutionary-Socialist or Anarchist Congress convened in Paris in May 1881, some 200 activists vigorously passed two resolutions committing the movement first to Propaganda by Deed, and second to the abolition of property, thereby changing the face of European anarchism. By adopting the deed, the leadership of the movement in Germany and Austria would be all but annihilated by mid-decade, its operational safe haven of Switzerland lost.75 The delegates resolved: to exert every effort towards propagating, by deeds, the revolutionary idea and to arouse the spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses who still harbour illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods … to win them (agricultural workers) to our cause, and to keep in mind that a deed performed against the existing institutions appeals to the masses much more than thousands of leaflets and torrents of words, and that ‘Propaganda by Deed’ is of greater importance in the countryside than in the cities.76

Three anarchist publications – Most’s Freiheit, Kropotkin’s Le Révolte, Serreaux’s La Révolution Sociale threw their weight behind the congress’s new message.77 Indeed, the pattern of Johann Most’s publishing would herald the 21st-century paradigm: contributions were both celebratory and propagandist, and instructional and operational.78 His articles in Freiheit (1880–1885) educated workers in the techniques of manufacturing and deploying bombs, poisons, and weapons. His job in a Jersey City Heights explosives factory meant he could extract both knowhow and ready-made matériel. Freiheit celebrated the deeds which ensued, preaching an uncompromising commitment to violence: We will murder those who must be killed in order to be free … We do not dispute over whether it is right or wrong. Say what you will, do what you do,

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but the victor is right. Comrades of Freiheit, we say murder the murderers. Rescue mankind through blood, iron, poison, and dynamite.79

Beyond the polemic, Most spread the word through instruction. The title of his handbook of revolutionary war-science left little to the imagination. It read: ‘for the use and production of nitro-glycerine, dynamite, triggermechanisms, explosive mercury, bombs, fuses, poisons etc’.80 A spate of murders and assaults throughout 1883 spread alarm through the Austro-Hungarian empire leading to widespread detainment of hundreds of radicals, censorship of their press, and imprisonment. Increased co-operation between police agencies in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Switzerland was the inevitable outcome. Germany’s Socialist Law aimed at the Social Democratic movement was reinforced by Bismarck with new legislation directed at proscribing the use of dynamite.81 But Most’s press, although carefully monitored, was allowed to continue above ground, partly to facilitate police intelligence, partly to provide a source of stories that might be harnessed to the state’s counter-propaganda effort. Particularly, alleged attempts on the Kaiser’s life were used to fan popular fears and heighten tension gripping the country. Assaults on bourgeois figureheads and property owners proliferated. Many were opportunistic, ill-conceived, and poorly executed. Meeting in St Gallen in 1883 anarchists voted to use all means possible to achieve their ends. A new strategy was adopted encouraging peasants and factory workers to form clandestine groups of two or three rather than engage in mass struggle in the open. They held true to their word. A Strasbourg pharmacist Lienhard was subsequently murdered by four assailants, a Stuttgart banker Heilbronner fatally attacked in his office by three men who absconded with gold and bonds, and Vienna’s Police Commissioner Hlubek was shot dead. A Viennese money-changer Heinrich Eisert was the next victim, killed by an axe blow

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to the head under the gaze of his two small children and their tutor. The attacker proceeded to silence all witnesses; only the tutor survived the carnage. This latest violence crossed a rubicon for a shocked Austrian public. Investigations revealed the St Gallen meeting to be the common factor. That same month, police officer Blöch was killed passing a stone-quarry near Vienna. The assailant tried to shoot his way to escape when blocked by workers. Police searching his pockets revealed a ‘metal-box-bomb containing two and a half kilograms of dynamite which was not fused … two revolvers, a quantity of ammunition, a knife, and two bottles filled with a liquid used to apply and to remove a false beard’.82 The killer Stellmacher, recently fired by Most as editor of Freiheit in Zürich before the anarchist paper’s relocation to New York, and his friend Anton Kammerer, who when arrested was carrying a ‘revolver, a file sharpened to a point and two kilograms of dynamite and some fuses’, reveals the opportunism of exponents of the deed. Kammerer had killed the pharmacist Lienhard and the banker Heilbronner. But the first victim was an opportunistic killing, following the failure to locate a different target, namely Mühlhausen’s Police Chief. Both assailants were executed, triggering a wave of arrests, repression of radical activities, and new legislation proscribing their organisation and assembly. Future anarchist prosecutions would be subjected to the remit of a special tribunal. The movement was effectively destroyed. Radicals who evaded imprisonment found exile across Europe and the United States. There in relative safety, Most celebrated these two martyrs of the social revolution to the endorsement of widescale anarchist demonstrations, particularly in New York.83

A Mystery Inside an Enigma Why Russia should have provided the ­engine-room of a theory of POTD is a complex question. It is there that its systematic

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development is most apparent. In the stifling bureaucracy of Tsarist autocracy, feudal peasants rooted the social pyramid, superseded by a powerless bourgeoisie, a nascent urban worker class, and above these underpinning the regime – church, army, and aristocracy. Secular and spiritual power remained concentrated in the Tsar. A central and provincial civil bureaucracy had been built so that a far from wealthy landed nobility with a weak power base in class or estate was dependent on bureaucratic advancement. Even the top 40% of nobility had no serfs,84 despite the ratios of landowner to peasant (1:234), land owned by master to peasant (11.5:1), incomes of master to peasant (97.5:2.5), and ratio of city workers to peasant (1:100).85 Rural workers, the serf mir, emerged at the heart of Leftist theory. An intelligentsia moved precariously towards a theorised opposition, characterised as populist and Russophile. It romanticised the peasantry as the route to a new socialism – far from the model taking hold in Western Europe.86 Various ideological strands had trodden the path to popular movements in 19thcentury Russia. A small, weak middle class sought constitutional reforms and civil rights through liberalism. Those who disavowed liberal political action adopted revolutionary populism, a movement between the 1860s and 1880s blending socialist values with traditional peasant communes. These Narodniks encouraged students to live among the rural poor disseminating socialism. The failure of the masses and peasantry to respond turned many intellectuals to violence and POTD. Only with the advent of policies of industrialisation in the 1870s did Marxists find a theatre in which to perform. However, theirs was a gradualist approach to change, since Marx had prescribed the need for a capitalist phase as the precursor to revolution. Tsar Alexander II’s ‘Westernisation’ programme had included legislative reforms freeing serfs with the chance to own their property. Yet the budgetary gap between promise and delivery, expectation and reality,

to a third of the country’s population spurred widespread political destabilisation and riots which only the army’s brutality could contain. Anarchist strategy capitalised on this. The failed assassination of Alexander II (1866) put paid to a period of social reforms and journalistic freedoms. As the Nihilists of the 1860s’ generation had given way to the Populists, so the society of Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) emerged in 1876, only to spawn the Black Partition advocating social and economic action, and Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) which chose the more violent path. This latter group achieved a remarkable success. A team of bombers eventually killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881, prompting a wave of repression that almost annihilated the group. One conspirator, Zhelyabov, charted the insurgent’s trajectory: they began by living like workers, moved onto promoting Populism while going among the peasants, before setting about representing their interests. Then, finally, did they embrace POTD: (i)nstead of spreading Socialist ideas, we gave first place to our determination to awaken the people by agitation … instead of a peaceful fight we applied ourselves to a fight with deeds.87

Thus did the flower of the 1881 assassination spring from the soil of 1878 and Vera Zasulich’s deed,88 widely credited as Russia’s first POTD. Her ‘unsanctioned’, unsuccessful attack on St Petersburg’s GovernorGeneral Trepov had failed to avenge the flogging of an anarchist comrade. Now the killing of the Tsar ushered in a reactionary commitment from his successor to ‘faith in the power and right of autocracy’.89 It would also drive a wedge between moderates and radicals. Sergey Kravchinski’s Death for a Death in 1878 was intended to be a landmark theoretical manifesto. It would both justify the subsequent murder of General Mezentsev, the Tsar’s police chief, and represent the final act in the ‘trial of the hundred and ninety three’. This event would mark the turning-point for a new offensive front to open up, targeting the bourgeoisie

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins

and capitalism, the true enemies of socialism. In the newspaper Zemlya I Volya he argued that terrorists were the military vanguard of the revolution, but only the masses as a class could bring about that revolution. The subsequent hostility and split between those who argued for the deed, an act of political terror, to be employed only in special cases (Plekhanov and Aptekman), those who favoured ‘pure terror’ (Morozov), and those espousing a Jacobin coup where the deed would be retribution for the repressive Tsar and his circle (Zhelyabov) grew to fever pitch.90 As the mood induced by state repression and economic hardship gradually turned to armed struggle, the strategy shifted from self-defence to attack, from targeted acts of retribution for comrades made to suffer, to direct action as a means to guiding the masses towards the target of state overthrow.91 For Morozov, terrorism was a novel, ‘cost effective’ method of attritional combat against asymmetric superiority of government force. Yet human inventiveness – that inexhaustible resource – expressed through networks of insurgents would oblige the government to secure bourgeois support and grant constitutional change. Similarly, Romanenko and Zhelyabov saw that cost efficiency could be humanitarian. Since the intelligentsia, not apathetic masses, would be the first to fall when confronting the state’s guns, better then to pinpoint striketargets than to face frontal assault and lose the pick of the crop. The strategic dispersal of POTD’s perpetrators proved no match for repressive state agencies following Alexander’s assassination. Organisations were suppressed; leaders not executed were exiled. The population remained indolent. While Russia’s rapid industrialisation in the following years provided Marxists with at least the foundations for a capitalist phase, the pre-condition to revolutionary class struggle. And so leading Populists (Plekhanov, Akselrod) slowly abandoned direct action for Marxism.92

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CONCLUSION Wherever flows of mass migration across countries and continents have transported people, ideas, and their grievances, POTD has left a trail of incidents and accidents. The Haymarket Massacre or Affair in Chicago in 1886, where an initially peaceful protest was interrupted by police attempts to disperse the crowd – at which point a bomb was thrown – would lead to the arrest of several anarchists and their prosecution for murder. Celebrated as the Chicago Eight, of their number, August Spies and three other defendants were hanged the following year. In Britain, suffragette Emily Wilding Davison’s apparent POTD suicide under the hooves of King George V’s horse at the Derby on June 4th, 1913, has been recently questioned. By applying new technology to contemporaneous nitrate film recordings of the incident, a likelier interpretation suggests she was not attempting to pull down the royal racehorse, rather trying to attach a scarf to its bridle.93 Nevertheless, recently explored archives containing personal papers of the music hall actress and dancer Kitty Marion reinforce the account of suffragette commitment to political violence. Newspaper clippings describing arson attacks that she had carried out alongside press reports of bombings about which she remained silent fill the actress Kitty’s scrapbook. Later that month, on the 13th, she sought revenge for Davison’s death by setting ablaze a racecourse grandstand. During her subsequent imprisonment, she records being force-fed 232 times in one day.94 Late 19th-century and early 20th-century politics were tumultuous as befits an account of national economies buffeted by boom and bust and social upheaval. In The Violent Image, I proposed that the transformation from one media rich environment of the second Industrial Revolution, powered by electricity, to the digital ecology of the third Industrial Revolution, driven by microprocessors, goes some way to explaining how POTD achieved different impacts at different times. Not that

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the anarchist model was lightly dismissed in its day. On the contrary, it would prompt US President Theodore Roosevelt to declare a War on Terror in 1901 – a familiar refrain from a White House incumbent a century later. But once insurgents had seen its potential as consumer societies in the West brought television viewing to the heart of family lives, so movements like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) exploited their ability to project a ‘soap opera’ of hijacks and bombing outrages into the physical space of people’s homes. More significantly, into the cognitive space of their minds. At the turn of the new century, the militant movement al-Qaeda would take advantage of a globally connected media system when it struck the Twin Towers in New York, crashing two airliners into the buildings live on television. Their relationship to viewing audiences, more significantly their attempts to let symbolic events resonate with scattered global diasporas emotionally connected to places of grievance across the Arab and Muslim worlds, would take POTD to a new level of spectacle and impact. Twenty-first century POTD would become a strategy in ‘shock and awe’ politics. At the moment of visual impact caught on camera, it would open up an opportunity space. In the shock of the moment, public doubt and the state’s temporary inability to explain the event could be exploited. Discourses, carefully shaped and placed amid the population, could be triggered by revolutionaries and insurgents. This was the means to bring to the fore a palimpsest of memory creation, blending historic and ongoing grievances with personal and collective identities. And these ideas – initially rumours, turning quickly to conversations – would shake the status quo and undermine state legitimacy. Yet the effect from incidents of extreme political violence brought about by their 19th- century precursors should not be underestimated. Anarchists raised the temperature of debate and the threat level of atrocity. Emile Zola captured the spirit of anarchist

agitators in the coalfields of northern France in his novel Germinal; Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent reflected the silent presence of the solitary bomber in London’s urban crowds; and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons suggested the power of persuasion of his charismatic anarchist in the drawing rooms of bourgeois Russia. Archives alone cannot recreate the lived experience of a time lost. Novelists bring us one step closer to understanding why some political actors embrace the shock and awe of violence to put an end to perceived and entrenched injustice. But neither novelist nor historian can adequately capture the fear or excitement of revolutionary zeal that would change the world, driven to the outer limits of political communication. That so elusive mood music or Zeitgeist of days past evades our ears.

Notes 1  New York Times (1914) Calls It Anarchist Plot, June 29th, 1914, p. 3. 2  Bolt, Neville (2011) The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries. New York: Columbia University Press. 3  McChesney, Robert (2008) The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 27. He notes that cities like St Louis had some ten daily newspapers from the middle to late 19th century. Bach Jensen, Richard (2014) The Battle Against International Terrorism: An International History 1878–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 55. Jensen notes that France’s leading anarchist publication Le Révolté was printing 8,000 copies every fortnight by the late 1880s. Les Temps Nouveaux launched in 1895 printed 18,000 copies at its height before stabilising around 7,000 by 1901. 4  Hall, Stuart (1981) Notes on Deconstructing the Popular. In R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, pp. 227–239, London: Routledge, italics sic. 5  Ibid. 6  Manuel Castells similarly underlines the primacy of the Information Age and Network Society. Castells, Manuel (2004) The Information Age: The Power of Identity, Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell; (2009) Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press

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7  Bolt (2011). 8  By comparison Emile Zola already writes in his Ebauche of the novel Germinal: ‘The subject of the novel is the revolt of the workers, the jolt given to society, which for a moment cracks: in a word the struggle between capital and labour’. Zakarian, Richard (1972) Zola’s Germinal: A Critical Study of its Primary Sources. Geneva: Librarie Droz - Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscript Department, manuscript 10.307, folio 401. 9  Bolt (2011). 10  Bolt (2011). 11  Hobsbawm (1978), p. 73. 12  Calhoun, Craig (1989) Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848. Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 210. 13  Hobsbawm (1988), p. 22. 14  Ibid, p. 33. 15  Ibid, pp. 228–229. 16  Ibid, p. 362 (table 2). 17  Ward, Ken (1989) Mass Communications and the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education; Starr, Paul (2004) The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books; Lee, Alfred (1937) The Daily Newspaper in America. New York: Macmillan; Chalaby, Jean (1997) No Ordinary Press Owners: Press Barons as a Weberian Ideal Type. Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 621–644. 18  Maitron (1951), p. 35: Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne (No. 39: 24/9/1874). 19  Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association, The First International. www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm. 20  Davey Smith, George; Dorling, Daniel; Shaw Mary (2001) Poverty, Inequality and Health in Britain: 1800–2000. Bristol: Policy Press, p. 94. 21  Woodcock, George (1986) Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 37, see Bakunin, Mikhail (1873, 2002) Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22  Hunter (1919), p. 7. 23  Calhoun (1989), p. 217. 24  Guillaume (1905), L’International: Documents et Souvenirs. Paris, Vol. 4, No. 31, p. 26. 25  Woodcock (1986), p. 138: Letter to Marx (17/5/1846). 26  Congresses: Geneva (1866), Lausanne (1867), Brussels (1868), Basel (1869), London (1871), The Hague (1872). 27  Woodcock (1986), p. 42. 28  Lenin, (1918, 1992), p.16. 29  Lenin, Vladimir (1918, 1992). The State and Revolution, London: Penguin.

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30  Davies (1996), p. 837. 31  Tucker (1969), pp. 88–89. 32  Maitron (1951), pp. 14–15. 33  Lenin, p. 63. 34  Joll (1964, 1979), p. ix. 35  Ibid, p. 12. 36  Godwin (1992) Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). 37  Proudhon (1851), p. 31, Idée Générale de la Révolution. 38  Proudhon (1840), Qu’est-ce que c’est la propriété? 39  Stirner (1844) Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. 40  Carlson (1972), pp. 58–60. 41  Davies (1996), p. 840. 42  Hunter (1919), p. 169. 43  Mehring, Franz (1918) Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, Chapter 14. www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/index.htm. 44  Hunter (1919), pp. 162–171. 45  Guérin, Daniel (ed) (2005), p. 683, note 3 No Gods, No Masters, Oakland CA: AK Press. 46  Mehring, Chapter 13. 47  For developments between congresses, see Webster, Nesta (1921) World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilisation, London: Constable; Nicolaievsky, Boris & Maenchen-Helfen, Otto (2015) Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, London and New York: Routledge. 48  Hunter (1919), pp. 11–16. 49  The charismatic activist Sergei Nechaev would inspire Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, in particular his character Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. First published in 1871–1872 in The Russian Messenger. 50  Nechayev (1869) Catechism No.3 www.marxists. org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm. 51  Bakunin (1842) La Reaction en Allemagne, fragment, par un Francais. 52  Catechism No. 24. 53  Catechism 12, ibid. 54  Catechism 13, ibid (italics sic). 55  Woodcock (1986), p. 43; see Marshall, Peter (2010) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, Oakland CA: PM Press. 56  Guillaume (1905), p. 224. 57  Ibid, p. 225, my translation. 58  Laqueur (1987), p. 48. 59  Hunter (1919), p. 52. 60  Yarmolinsky, Avrahm (2014), Road to Revolution, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 220. 61  Kucherov, Samuel (1952) The Case of Vera Zasulich. Russian Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 91. 62  Ibid, p. 90. 63  Tucker (1969), p. 1. 64  Ibid, pp. 113–120.

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65  Venturi (1960), pp. 595–596. 66  Joll (1964, 1979), pp. 100–102. 67  Maitron (1951), p. 137: Le Révolté No.49, 26/31/4/1887. 68  Ibid, p. 138: Le Révolté No.4, 30/4-6/5/1887. 69  Ibid: Le Révolté No. 3, 1/4/1882. 70  Maitron (1951), p. 146: Le Révolté No.13:1730/8/1882. 71  Ibid, pp. 153–155. 72  Joll (1964, 1979), pp. 112–113. 73  Goldman (1910). 74  Joll (1964, 1979), pp. 117–118. 75  Carlson (1972), p. 252. 76  Ibid 77  Serraux was widely held to be an undercover agent of the Paris police force. Cf Graham, Robert (2015) We Do Not Fear Anarchy-We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press. 78  For implications for 21st century POTD see O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas & Baines, Paul (2009) Selling Terror: The Symbolization and Positioning of Jihad. Marketing Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp, 207–221. 79  Carlson (1972), p. 254. 80  My translation. 81  Bach (2014), p. 47. 82  Carlson (1972), pp. 259–265. 83  Carlson (1972), pp. 268–269. 84  Skocpol (1999), p. 87. 85  Berlin (2001), p. xxii, (cf: Venturi 1960). 86  Wilkinson (1974), p. 60–62. 87  Venturi (1960), p. 719. 88  Ibid. 89  Wilkinson (1974), p. 63. 90  Laqueur (1987), pp. 33–34. 91  Laqueur (1987), pp. 30–34. 92  Berlin, pp. xxvi–xxvii. 93  see www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/26/ emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913 The Guardian (2013) Truth Behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison is Finally Revealed, Vanessa Thorpe. 94  see www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-44210012 BBC (2018) Kitty Marion: The Actress Who Became a ‘Terrorist’, Meghan Mohan.

REFERENCES Bach Jensen, Richard (2014) The Battle Against International Terrorism: An International History 1878–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakunin, Mikhail (1842) La Réaction en Allemagne, fragment, par un Francais. In Arnold

Ruge (ed.), Deutsche Jahrbücher fur Wissenschaft and Kunst, nos. 247–251 (Leipzig, October 17th-21st, 1842). Bakunin, Mikhail (1873, 2002) Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BBC (2018) Kitty Marion: The actress who became a ‘terrorist’, Meghan Mohan. www. bbc.co.uk/news/stories-44210012 Berlin, Isaiah (1995) Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolt, Neville (2011) The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries. New York: Columbia University Press. Calhoun, Craig (1989) Classical Social Theory and the French Revolution of 1848. Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 210–225. Carlson, Andrew (1972) Anarchism in Germany Vol 1: The Early Movement. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Castells, Manuel (2004) The Information Age: The Power of Identity. Malden MA & Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel (2009) Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalaby, Jean (1997) No Ordinary Press Owners: Press Barons as a Weberian Ideal Type. Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 621–644. Davey Smith, George; Dorling, Daniel; & Shaw Mary (2001) Poverty, Inequality and Health in Britain: 1800–2000. Bristol: Policy Press. Davies, Norman (1996) Europe: A History. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Godwin, William (1992) Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). London: British Library. Goldman, Emma (1910) Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association. Graham, Robert (2015) We Do Not Fear Anarchy-We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press. Guérin, Daniel (ed) (2005) No Gods, No Masters. Oakland CA: AK Press. Guillaume, James (1905) L’International: Documents et Souvenirs. Paris, Vol. 4, No. 31, p. 224.

Propaganda of the Deed and Its Anarchist Origins

Hall, Stuart (1981) Notes on Deconstructing the Popular. In R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, pp. 227–239. London: Routledge. Hobsbawm, Eric (1978) The Age of Revolution 1789–1848. London: Abacus. Hobsbawm, Eric (1988) The Age of Capital 1848–1875. London: Cardinal. Hunter, Robert (1919) Violence and the Labour Movement. New York: The Macmillan Company. Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association ‘The First International’. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1864/10/27.htm Joll, James (1964, 1979) The Anarchists. London: Methuen. Kucherov, Samuel (1952) The Case of Vera Zasulich. Russian Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 86–96. Laqueur, Walter (1987) The Age of Terrorism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Lee, Alfred (1937) The Daily Newspaper in America. New York: Macmillan. Lenin, Vladimir (1935) The State and Revolution. Moscow and Leningrad: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR. Lenin, Vladimir (1987) What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings. New York: Bantam. Maitron, Jean (1951) Histoire du Mouvement Anarchiste En France (1880–1914): Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne, No. 39: 24/9/1874, Le Révolté No. 3: 1/4/1882, Le Révolté No. 4: 30/4-6/5/1887, Le Révolté No. 13: 17–30/8/1882, Le Révolté No. 49: 26/31/4/1887. Paris: Société Universitaire d’Editions et de Librairie. Marshall, Peter (2010) Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Oakland CA: PM Press. McChesney, Robert (2008) The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press. Mehring, Franz (1918) Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, Chapter 14. New York: Covivi-Friede Publishers. www.marxists.org/archive/ mehring/1918/marx/index.htm Nechayev, Sergey (1869) The Catechism of a Revolutionary. www.marxists.org/subject/ anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm

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New York Times (1914) Calls It Anarchist Plot, June 29th, 1914, p. 3. Nicolaievsky, Boris & Maenchen-Helfen, Otto (2015) Karl Marx: Man and Fighter. London and New York: Routledge. O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas & Baines, Paul (2009) Selling Terror: The Symbolization and Positioning of Jihad. Marketing Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 207–221. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1840) Qu’est-ce que c’est la propriété? Princeton, MA: Benj. R. Tucker. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1851, 1969) Idée Générale de la Révolution. (Translated by John Robinson). New York: Haskell House. Skocpol, Theda (1999) States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starr, Paul (2004) The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books. Stirner, Max (1844) Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. https://anarchistischebibliothek.org/ library/max-stirner-der-einzige-und-seineigentum The Guardian (2013) Truth Behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison is Finally Revealed. www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/26/ emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913 Tucker, Robert C (1969) The Marxian Revolutionary Idea. New York: WW Norton & Co. Venturi, Franco (1960) Roots of Revolution. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press. Ward, Ken (1989) Mass Communications and the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Webster, Nesta (1921) World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilisation. London: Constable. Wilkinson, Paul (1974) Political Terrorism. London: Macmillan. Woodcock, George (1986) Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Yarmolinsky, Avrahm (2014) Road to Revolution. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Zakarian, Richard (1972) Zola’s Germinal: A Critical Study of its Primary Sources, Geneva: Librarie Droz – Ebauche, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscript Department, manuscript 10.307, folio 401.

2 Atrocity Propaganda in Australia and Great Britain During the First World War Emily Robertson

INTRODUCTION The First World War has been cited as the progenitor of a number of significant developments in war that influenced future conflicts. The war, David Zabecki argues, ‘was history’s single largest revolution in military tactics and technologies’. Air power, tanks and the development of the operational level of war are generally regarded as some of the most significant developments in war fighting (2015). It was also the conflict in which mass media and near-total war combined to make propaganda a critical part of modern warfare. Historian David Welch has observed that one of the most significant aspects of the war was ‘that public opinion could no longer be ignored as a determining factor in the formulation of government policies’ (2014, p.58). Propaganda was the means through which public opinion was aligned with the policy aims of government. This was a resource hungry conflict that required not only the acquiescence, but also the active support, of the population. Propaganda

assisted with raising funds, recruiting men to fight, and provided an imaginative bridge between those fighting and those at home. The Great War was, therefore, very much the origin point of thinking in new ways about war leading into the twentieth century, and propaganda was one area in which war was modernised. Out of all of the genres of propaganda produced by the British and Australians during the war, atrocity propaganda most exemplifies the linkages between ideology, propaganda and war fighting that came to be so crucial to prosecuting conflicts which required mass participation. The ideological underpinnings of British atrocity propaganda were present in Australian atrocity propaganda throughout the war. Despite the complex bureaucratic structure that oversaw propaganda production in Great Britain, and the chaotic method of dissemination to the Dominions, colonies, allied neutrals and within Britain itself, there was nonetheless a consistent, underlying message that transcended jingoistic imperialism to present the

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war as a humanitarian intervention. This distinctly liberal way of conceiving of the war – as one fought to defend civilisation and to defend the rights of small nations – was the cri de coeur that rallied people across classes, and across the globe. The unity of message was due to a shared moral code that existed both in Great Britain, and by extension, Australia. Australia was connected to Great Britain not just through imperial ties, but also through shared ideology, and shared culture (Lehane, 2013). The consistent messaging contained in atrocity propaganda about the Allies upholding ‘civilisation’ against German ‘barbarism’, was transmitted in both government and nongovernment pro-war propaganda and was a powerful way to both justify the war and quell internal divisions on the home front. Grand strategy, which is concerned with ‘all the resources of a nation’, was in the early stages of development during the conflict (Silove, 2017, p.35). In terms of exploiting the psychological elements in prosecuting war, by the end of the war the British and Australian governments were highly advanced in their use of mass psychology for strategic gain. An examination of the use of atrocity propaganda by both governments during the Great War demonstrates grand strategy was well underway in terms of official recognition that some aspects of modern war lay outside of the purview of the military. While ‘grand strategy’ as it pertains to the use of propaganda in the Great War was not conceptualised until 1941 by British strategists Antony Sargeaunt and Geoffrey West, it is clear that the psychological elements they identified as being central to a grand strategic approach were recognised by both the British and Australian governments during the First World War. West and Sargeaunt’s theory acknowledged the importance of ‘the relationship between war and society’ (Milevski, 2017, p.45). Atrocity propaganda of the First World War anticipated West and Sargeaunt’s theory, as it played a crucial role in the war by linking the political and ideological realm with the military mobilisation of the state in both Great Britain and Australia.

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ATROCITY PROPAGANDA: CONCEPT AND THEORY As governments scrambled at the outset of the war to harness the expertise of the advertising industry to engage with a mass audience, propaganda became an essential part of the war effort. The war historian George Bruntz explains, ‘drastically changed the relationship of the established order of society to propaganda’. He continues, ‘participating governments saw at once that psychological war must accompany economic war and military war. They took seriously the task of psychological mobilisation, and they felt the impact of the psychological campaigns of their rivals’ (1938, p.vii). A state of near-total war demanded a strong degree of civilian participation, and therefore civilian support, for the war. The high volume of propaganda produced by the British and Australian governments in the First World War attests to the ongoing need of the authorities to persuade men to fight and, in addition, to the need to convince voters to support a war that drained the economy and killed or crippled a generation of young men. Because it relied entirely upon voluntary enlistments throughout the conflict, the amount of government propaganda produced in Australia was higher than in Great Britain. Thus, while the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC) wound up its work in May 1916 following the introduction of compulsory service in Great Britain, Australia continued to produce costly recruiting campaigns until the end of the war (Douglas, 1970, p.585). Atrocity propaganda was one of the most important genres for the Allies during the Great War. It is a genre that has drawn upon consistent tropes of the killing of innocents, and its visual and linguistic grammar was established during the religious wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics. It has largely been used to dehumanise the enemy by painting him as ‘savage, barbaric’, which mobilises sentiment against the enemy (Welch, 2003, p.24). More recently,

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‘propaganda by deed’ has been employed by terrorists who have terrorists willingly taking on the role of ‘barbarian’ by committing atrocities to gain maximum publicity. As Louise Richardson writes of the killing of 186 children in the Beslan school siege by Chechan terrorists, ‘the larger the number of casualties, the more innovative the tactic, the greater the symbolic significance of the target, the more heinous the crime, the more publicity accrues to the perpetrators’ (2006, p.95). Barbarism as a military strategy can therefore be used for the strategic gain, or at the strategic expense, of the perpetrator. In the case of the Great War, barbarism was a poor overall military strategy for the Germans. While it may have been a militarily expedient means for quickly pacifying Belgium, it delivered the ultimate propaganda weapon to the Allies. The complex interplay between the actions of the enemy, and the way those actions are portrayed in propaganda, reveals that despite its simplistic presentation, propaganda can be a sophisticated means of communication. Propaganda has been regarded by some scholars as a means through which to alter the behaviour of people (Welch, 2003). Lindley Fraser, for example, defined it as ‘the activity, or the art, of inducing others to behave in a way in which they would not behave in its absence’ (1957, p.1). It is questionable, however, if First World War atrocity propaganda would have been appealing if it were not so closely aligned with the culture that produced it. While atrocity propaganda is a ‘timehonoured technique of propagandists’ and has been used in the West since the Crusades, the atrocity propaganda employed in the Great War was particular to the political culture that produced it (Welch, 2003, p.23). First World War atrocity propaganda incorporated liberal ideology about the just conduct of war that had been developing over the past 50 years, and its success was due to its inclusion of pre-existing values about the rights of non-combatants. Atrocity propaganda therefore inflamed emotions, rather than created them. The intense wave of volunteerism which was the bedrock

of recruiting in both in Great Britain and Australia in the early stages of the war demonstrates the depth of feeling associated with the war. Stephen Badsey asserts, ‘Whatever motivated the volunteer movement of 1914, it was a reflection of a very deep-seated consensus within British and Imperial society; propaganda is too small a word for it’ (2008, p.29). Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, atrocity propaganda was a form of propaganda that had a deep-seated connection to established concepts about how war should be conducted. The German invasion of Belgium and France, the shelling of British towns, Zeppelin attacks on cities and the sinking of passenger liners all featured in posters, pamphlets, films and newspapers. German atrocities were discussed frequently in the British and Australian media, and regularly featured in speeches by politicians. Atrocity propaganda drew upon a variety of cultural, philosophical and ideological influences to represent the German, or the ‘Hun’, as a monstrous threat to civilisation. It played a fundamental role in depicting the conflict as a just war, one fought to defend women and children from a ruthless and militaristic enemy. The moral absolutism of atrocity propaganda from the Great War had a direct role in bringing the term ‘propaganda’ into disrepute. Although ‘propaganda’ was a neutral concept before the First World War, following the conflict, it developed a very poor reputation, largely because of the more exaggerated and egregious forms of atrocity propaganda that were produced during the war. The German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 provided the initial material for atrocity propaganda, with stories of the rape of women, and the killing of children and unarmed men providing horrific material that became synonymous with ‘German frightfulness’. The subsequent invasion of France by Germany provided further material, as did the genocidal activities of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians. While a large amount of atrocity propaganda provided reasonably factual accounts of wartime atrocities, there

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were a number of tasteless tales – including the ‘Corpse Conversion factory’ (in which the bodies of dead German soldiers were allegedly being turned into soap) and the ‘Crucified Canadian’ – which came to embody the misleading nature of Allied atrocity propaganda after the war was over. It is important to note that work by historians John Horne and Alan Kramer demonstrated that the Germans did commit a number of atrocities during their invasion of Belgium (2001). Later work by Isabel V Hull also provided further evidence the Germans had disregarded the contemporary laws of armed conflict during their invasion of Belgium and France (2005; 2014). For propaganda to be successful, it must not only appeal to the values of the target audience, it must also have some factual basis, and the bombing of small British towns and the killing of civilians by German zeppelins provided confirmation that the German military did not respect the rules of armed conflict (Robertson, 2014, pp.261–262). First World War atrocity propaganda, while guilty of grotesque exaggeration, therefore also had an intellectual base, and drew upon a curious combination of liberal humanitarianism and racial slurs to present the conflict as a just war. Notwithstanding the factual basis of some atrocity propaganda, the post-war reputation of atrocity propaganda was largely due to its brutal dehumanisation of the German enemy. The term ‘Hun’ was a vile shorthand for the German solider. In both Australia and Great Britain, the hatred of the ‘Hun’ unleashed mass protests and riots against naturalised Germans. In London, the deaths of civilians that resulted from the 1915 sinking of passenger liner the Lusitania by a German U-boat resulted in neighbours turning on each other and damaging property (Gullace, 2005). In both Australia and Great Britain, people of German descent were stripped ‘of their civil and constitutional rights’. They were deprived, Gerhard Fischer has written, ‘of their property and professions, they were persecuted and attacked by enraged street mobs, sacked from their jobs, interned without trial

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and deported without a chance to protest their case and prove their loyalty’ (1989, p.6). Hatred and intolerance were stoked by atrocity propaganda. As Cate Haste stated, ‘The essence of propaganda is simplification. In wartime, the intricate patterns of politics are refined into simple and crude images of right and wrong’ (1977, p.80). Despite the simplistic and intolerant nature of First World War atrocity propaganda, the circumstances around its production and its reliance upon ideology makes it a nuanced form of communication. Propaganda is not merely a tool with which to influence the mob, it is also the means through which ideological discourse is transmitted in a mass society. Ideology describes how a group organises its ‘self image … identity, actions, aims, norms and values’; this group then perpetuates and confirms these notions ‘through discourse’ (Van Dijk, 2006, p.115). I argue that propaganda – which can be visual, textual and even musical – is a form of discourse that when it is at its most persuasive, confirms ideologies; it does not invent them. As Ernst Kris and Nathan Leites have observed, First World War propaganda relied heavily upon ‘moral argumentation’ (1972, p.42). An analysis of atrocity propaganda therefore provides us with a window into the ideological discourse – that of liberal humanitarianism – which was influential during the course of the First World War. War, therefore, is not simply the application of force to a situation; it is also a ‘cultural phenomenon’ – in other words, the way a society promotes a war reflects the values and morals of the society conducting the war (Kern, 1988, p.1). Recruiters in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) realised that shallow jingoism and patriotism were not enough to inspire reluctant men to join; deeper arguments were required. In 1917, a staff member on the NSW Recruiting Committee noted that: A successful appeal would provide the necessary moral force that would compel the indifferent and the selfish … to realise their duty, and bring them flocking in their thousands to take their places in the AIF.1

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Atrocity propaganda provided the source of ‘moral force’ in both Great Britain and Australia during the Great War. It formed part of an intricate nexus between the government, international law, morality and the masses. The ideology that buttressed atrocity propaganda was popularised in Great Britain by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone in the late nineteenth century. Gladstone’s target was the Ottomans, who had committed atrocities against Bulgarians and Armenian civilians. While he never successfully instigated a war against the Ottomans, the notion that the British Empire had a responsibility to intervene against military powers that abused civilians was popular both among the middle and the working classes. It marked the beginning of the Gladstonian tradition that Peter Clarke has identified as the basis for the narrative of the Great War, which was the struggle of the Allied forces of ‘civilisation’ against the ‘barbarism’ of the Germans and Ottomans (1996, p.72). Gladstone’s vision of humanitarian intervention was highly influential and provided the means for the British elite to craft a morally compelling argument to justify Britain’s involvement in the Great War. The narrative of ‘humanitarian intervention’ was the means through which to convince millions of people to commit themselves to fight on the behalf of a foreign people across the ocean. The growth of humanitarian sentiment in Great Britain occurred against the backdrop of two international conferences called the Hague Conventions, which led to the formulation of treaties and declarations that formed the basis of early humanitarian approaches to the laws of armed conflict and also a codification of what constituted war crimes (Hartle, 1986, p.112). Gladstone’s humanitarianism was part of a larger evolution about how war was thought about in Europe: ‘at this time’, Michael Barnett has written, ‘natural lawbased theories led to a stronger distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the view that not all violence was necessary or justified’ (2011, p.78). By this point,

this emerging form of humanitarianism had become an almost centrifugal force in British (and by extension, Australian) politics, particularly in relation to wartime atrocities against civilians. Atrocity propaganda, with its depictions of vulnerable non-combatants and militaristic Germans, perfectly encapsulated the moral values that were held by liberal humanitarians. The German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, as Peter Buitenhuis has observed, provided the British ‘with a readymade subject for their propaganda efforts’ (1989, p.10). The outrage in British society was immediate and intense; Australia, which shared the same liberal humanitarian perspectives about war, was quick to follow the British in their outrage. Thus, while atrocity propaganda was used as a tool for recruiting, it was also a tool for raising funds for humanitarian relief. In 1915, the Belgian Consul in Australia sold a pamphlet titled, The Story of Belgium: From Prosperity to Desolation; Murder, Rapine and Ruin (Turner, 1915). Proceeds from the pamphlet would go to the Australian Belgian Relief Fund. The pamphlet dwelt at great length upon German destruction of Belgian culture, the deaths of women and children, and the rape of women, at the hands of the German military. The German soldiers had, the pamphlet states, ‘introduced a species of callous brutality and savagery which belongs to a far distant period in the world’s history’. For their ‘crimes against humanity’, Germany ‘must be left to bear such punishment as can justly be inflicted by an outraged world’ (pp.79–80). Humanitarian sentiment was therefore intrinsically linked to the rhetoric that eventually led to the uncompromising conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Atrocity propaganda encapsulates the complex (and to modern audiences, contradictory) ideologies of liberal humanitarian intervention that drove the Allied justification for the war. The complexity of atrocity propaganda was due largely to the idealism of those who formed its intellectual framework.

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THE ARCHITECTS OF ATROCITY PROPAGANDA Atrocity propagandists saw the conflict as a means through which to reshape the world into one which would not tolerate militarism and violence against civilians. It was the ultimate progressive war, as it would eliminate the backwards, uncivilised German culture and create a new world order in which peace would prevail. The conflict ‘was being fought because big issues were perceived to be at stake’, Welch has written. It was a war of ‘big ideas’ which were generated by the intellectual elite (2014, p.73). In Great Britain, this elite had a large role in legitimating atrocity propaganda by funnelling these big ideas into legal investigations and philosophical pamphlets. Many of them were inclined towards the liberal side of politics, and, with the exception of the head of Wellington House Charles Masterman (who went to Cambridge), were educated at Oxford. These Oxbridge liberals provided the raw, intellectual material that would be decanted into sensationalist posters and pamphlets. Gilbert Murray was one Oxford scholar who was part of the elite intellectual circle that promoted the war. He produced several influential pamphlets supporting the war, and, at the behest of Charles Masterman, travelled to neutral nations and gave speeches in favour of the war.2 An Australian-born Oxford classicist, Murray was Vice-President of the ‘Fight for right’ movement, which was essentially a large, privately funded group that sought to convince Britons that the Great War was fought for ‘the best interest of humanity’ (Creswick Advertiser, 14 April 1916, p.3). Humanitarian sentiment was central to his work as an atrocity propagandist. In his 1915 pamphlet Ethical Problems of the War, Murray discussed the process ‘by which a highly civilised and ordinarily humane nation has gone on from what I can only call atrocity to atrocity’. He wondered how the Germans could ‘stand by passive and apparently approving, while deeds like the new Armenian massacres

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are going on under their aegis … all this passes one’s imagination’ (pp.8–9). The most significant publication to emerge from the British liberal intelligentsia was the Bryce report (full name, Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages). Viscount James Bryce, former Ambassador to the United States, Liberal politician and jurisprudence scholar, was approached by Attorney General John Simon to provide his interpretation of thousands of depositions from Belgium refugees. Simon wrote to Bryce stating that the government wished to form a committee ‘of persons of fair and independent judgement to report what the conclusions at which they arrive on the evidence available’.3 The impetus behind the Bryce report was multifaceted; on one level, it was an exercise in gathering evidence of German war crimes within the context of the international law of armed conflict. The report, along with those produced by other countries such as France, was part of the development of legal inquiry into war crimes that led to ‘the dawn of the modern system of international criminal justice’ in the postwar period (Schabas, 2018, p.396). The question was not whether or not atrocities were an inevitable consequence of the violence of war, but whether or not the offending nation had a policy of pursuing violence against civilians as part of its war strategy. Bryce Committee member and parliamentarian Sir Edward Clarke wrote a letter to Bryce in which he noted in relation to atrocities, ‘such excesses are found in the course of every war … the main question here is how far the German government is to be held responsible for them’. On another level, however, the report was a propaganda exercise, and Clarke recognised it as such: The object of our appointment is, I presume, that a careful ascertainment and statement of the wrongs committed by the Germans shall deprive them of any support in the judgement of neutral countries, and shall stiffen the resolution of our own people to carry on the war until atonement has been made.4

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While Belgium was the main focus of the Bryce Committee, allegations of German atrocities in France were also investigated. Professor John Hartmann Morgan had been commissioned specifically by the Secretary of State for Home Affairs to investigate the impact of the German invasion upon civilians in France (Morgan, 1915, p.3). Like Bryce, Morgan was a committed liberal and active in national politics. His production of First World War atrocity propaganda was also, like Bryce, interlinked with his involvement in legal activities that related to the laws of armed conflict and to wartime atrocities.5

INTERNATIONAL LAW AS PROPAGANDA IN AUSTRALIA AND GREAT BRITAIN Morgan and Bryce’s legal investigations played a crucial role in legitimating atrocity propaganda through the framework of international law. While news stories about the August invasion of Belgium had had an impact, official reports reassured sceptical readers that atrocities had occurred. Belgian Henry Segaert noted in 1916 that Australians were ‘incredulous’ when the media reported atrocities in December 1914; this doubt, however, ‘became impossible’ when the British and French Commissions published their reports (p.140). Official reports were therefore crucial to lending credibility to atrocity propaganda. Morgan and Bryce’s reports inevitably circulated in Australia, as did reports from France, Russia and Belgium. Drawing on the developing language of international humanitarian law, official reports translated well across national and imperial boundaries and were circulated in various forms in Australia during the war. Invariably, the reports focused upon alleged abuse of non-combatants and POWs – areas that had been confirmed as war crimes by the Hague Conventions. The NSW government published extracts of The Report of Commission of Inquiry

appointed by the President of the French Republic in the Gazette, ‘believing that a perusal of this document will illustrate to many the criminal nature of the aggression which it is now sought to check by the armies of the allies’. It was to give people an understanding of the ‘barbarism’ that was being conducted, and to understand what Australian men were fighting. In addition, while the ‘incidents narrated are of a character almost impossible’ to publish (these incidents presumably being the torture and rape of women), it was also to the women of NSW that the publication was aimed – not just men. They needed to ‘fully realise the nature of the cause in which the men of Australia are called upon to fight’ (1915, p.3150). As with the Bryce report that had been released a month earlier, the perception that there was an official tone in reports was very important to contemporaries when considering the truth value contained in the document. British propagandists such as Charles Masterman believed that ‘the appearance of objectivity’ was of central importance to establishing credibility (Sanders and Taylor, 1982, p.143). The French report’s tone appealed to the anonymous author of the NSW Gazette, who assessed the truth value of the official document by examining emotional qualities in the writing; the less emotion and the less hyperbole, the more truthful the document could be assumed to be: It is written with calm restraint – one might say almost without feeling. The most horrifying facts are set forth with a cold severity which is typical of the French nation at the present time. There is no emotion exhibited in the wording of the report, but one feels that beneath the words is a passionate resolve of which there is no need to give expression. (p.3149)

These reports provided the source material for abridged pamphlets and also posters. As information from official reports was summarised into shorter forms, the language devolved from the unemotional tone of official legal depositions, into sensationalist descriptions that served to not only dehumanise

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the German enemy, but also the victims. An Australian pamphlet published in 1915 that reproduced sections of France’s Commission did not shy away from discussing the rape of women. The front cover reads: ‘Orgies of Rapine, Fire and Carnage; and Outrages on Women and Children unparalleled in the History of the Universe’ on the front cover (German Atrocities in France, 1915). Morgan and Bryce’s investigations were summarised in a similar manner by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC) in Great Britain. The Bryce report was condensed into a small publication titled The Truth about German Atrocities, and Morgan’s investigations originally (included in the Appendix of the Bryce report) into Germany’s Dishonoured Army: Additional Records of German Atrocities in France. These publications were popular – RH Davies of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee claimed that the Bryce report-based pamphlet The Truth about German Atrocities ‘had been much in demand’ in the UK (1915); they were accordingly regarded with keen interest as tools for influencing public opinion in the Dominions and Colonies.6 These publications were distributed by the British government in Australia. They were tabled by the NSW Premier in the Legislative Assembly, and the contents were reported by the press (Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1915, p.12). Following this, the Legislative Assembly published the pamphlets, calling them ‘official papers’ and ‘Imperial documents’, and sent them to the NSW press which dutifully repeated their grisly contents in their columns. The ghastliest depositions from the Bryce investigation had been cherry picked by the PRC as highlights in the pamphlets, and the language altered to dramatise the allegations. For example, the original report has a section titled ‘The Treatment of Women and Children’; in the pamphlet this section was divided into two new ones: ‘Women Murdered and Outraged’ and ‘The Murder and Ill-Treatment of Children’ (pp.15–16).

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Where the original report used more cautious language about how women fared under the German occupation, the pamphlet compressed stories from the report into bullet points in order to create a more compelling narrative. Morgan’s depositions were transformed into sections that included subheadings such as German Officers’ Bestial Ways, and Methods of Savages (1915, Germany’s Dishonoured Army, pp.11–12). Essentially, the pamphlets highlighted the rape stories about women, and placed the reports of nonsexual violence in the background. The PRC pamphlet version of the Bryce report also focused upon the more extraordinary stories, some of which would become notorious by the end of the war. Perhaps the most shocking story from the entire Bryce report was that of the German soldier in Malines who allegedly speared a two-yearold with his bayonet: the child was lifted ‘into the air on his bayonet’ and he walked away with the impaled child, ‘his comrades still singing’ (p.17). Among other tales of murder and mutilation of Belgian children, this story dominated in the Australian press. In early 1916, the Goulburn Evening Penny Post provided a short summary of assaults on children, stating ‘As there may be some people fatuous enough to disbelieve the accounts of German barbarity to children’ they would quote the relevant passages from the report. The depositions from the pamphlet were compressed into a series of stories focusing on the mutilation of children. Among the most horrendous accounts of dismemberment was the toddler being bayoneted by the soldier (1 Jan 1916, p.6). The most effective method of decanting international law into a more succinct form of propaganda was visual, and it was in the visual realm that the story of the baby being bayoneted achieved iconic force. In both Great Britain and Australia, artists seized upon this gruesome image. In ‘The Gentleman German’, British artist Edmund J. Sullivan aligned the innocence of the child with that of God’s angels, depicting a brutish

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very open to both reproducing atrocity propaganda from abroad, and also producing its own. It was arguably the most significant theme in Australian pro-war propaganda.

AUSTRALIAN ATROCITY PROPAGANDA

Figure 2.1  Edmund J. Sullivan (1915), ‘The Gentleman German’, The Kaiser’s Garland. London: William Heinemann

German in a pickelhaube holding the body of a cherub speared on the end of his bayonet (Figure 2.1). Australian artist Norman Lindsay included the bayoneted child amidst a tumbling morass of war crimes: the bayonet wielding soldier has his jack boot upon a fallen woman; drunken soldiers carouse among the chaos of poisonous gas, Zeppelins deploying bombs against civilians, and a crucified Belgian peasant languishes in the background (Figure 2.2). As can be seen from the progression of atrocity propaganda from official reports to unofficial atrocity propaganda, the boundaries between official and unofficial propaganda were very fluid. The shared liberal humanitarian ideology that had developed during the late nineteenth century, and was codified in the Hague Conventions, created an environment in which these allegations would be readily received and then retransmitted in another form. Australia was

Atrocity propaganda had a significant impact upon how Australians regarded the war. The liberal and humanitarian concerns articulated in atrocity propaganda were powerful enough to unite disparate groups. Labour movement newspapers such as the Westralian Worker used the same strong language about German atrocities as Melbourne’s conservative newspaper, The Argus. German soldiers, The Argus reported, were ‘Inhuman monsters’ (7 December 1914, p.9). Across the continent, the Westralian concurred, stating that the Germans had committed ‘hideous barbarities’ (13 August 1915, p.3). Atrocities provided a strong moral imperative to fight which spanned political, social and class divisions. Concern about atrocities was omnipresent in the first years of the war. News of German atrocities in particular occupied Australians. Writing in late 1915, ‘Message’ of the Industrial Workers of the World described the atmosphere in Sydney: ‘We read in the papers every day, “German Atrocities”. At every workshop, tram car, we hear people talking about German cruelties’ (Direct Action, 11 September 1915, p.1). In the same year, Albert B. Dreher wrote in the Minyip Guardian and Sheep Hills Advocate that the ‘only topic of conversation in the town for days’ had been the sinking of British passenger liner, the Lusitania, by a German U-boats in 1915 (15 June 1915, p.2). The topic was so ubiquitous that it even appeared at the first celebration of Anzac Day in 1915, which was also a celebration of the Eight Hour Day. In one display, the Felt Hatters presented a variety of hats in different shapes and sizes to represent ‘Kultur’ and ‘Atrocities’ (Bongiorno et al., p.2). As the Daily Herald explained:

ATROCITY PROPAGANDA IN AUSTRALIA AND GREAT BRITAIN DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

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Figure 2.2  Norman Lindsay, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, 1 July 1915, The Bulletin Labor, in its celebration of its day of victory, was not forgetful of the gallantry of those brave boys who are fighting that the Australian workmen may not have to see his advantages swept away by the rough hand of Prussianism. (14 October 1915, p.6)

Although other forms of jingoistic propaganda were prominent, atrocity propaganda was the most significant genre. Throughout the conflict, novelists, filmmakers, poets, cartoonists and publishers circled around the topic of ‘poor little Belgium’ and other German atrocities. Some even made tremendous profits from doing so. For example, the 1916 film ‘The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell’, about a British nurse executed by the German military, grossed 25,000 pounds. According to one insider, the film ‘put several showmen on Easy Street for a long time’ (Cooper and Pike, 1981, p.79). Indeed, a large amount of

atrocity propaganda came from unofficial rather than government sources. One of the most significant producers of atrocity propaganda was newspaper owner Critchley Parker. Parker was notable for extending the rhetoric of the ‘civilised’ Allies against the ‘barbaric Huns’ into a venomous diatribe for the destruction of the Germans. He reproduced numerous items of British propaganda (including the Bryce report) and published explicit photographs of the bodies of the Allied civilian victims of war. His style was unashamedly bigoted – in a War Supplement to the Statesman and Mining Standard in July 1915, Parker stated (alongside photographs of French peasants who have been shot by the German military) that ‘the only way to win’ was to force sentiment such as mercy ‘and tenderness and humanity’ in dealing with the

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German nation out of the Allied mind. For, he states, one would not think of exercising these ‘virtues if attacked by a tiger or a shark or a cobra or even, to take perhaps the truest simile of all, by a mad dog’ (p.1). He also produced posters that went to great lengths to dehumanise the German enemy. One poster titled ‘The Only Good German is a Dead German’ had images of German military leaders and contained these lines: ‘The Allies must so finish the War that Germans will not dare raise their eyes to a White Man’s level for a century’. The logic behind Parker’s poster was that the Germans had reverted to savagery, and in doing so, had renounced both civilisation and their ‘whiteness’ (15 February 1917, supplement, the Statesman and Mining Standard). The immorality of the militaristic ‘Huns’ and the depredations they exacted upon Belgian women and children were also frequently alluded to in the media, not just by politicians, but by journalists and the public in letters to the editor. During the war, discussions about German atrocities were part of the everyday fabric of Australians’ lives. The story of Nurse Cavell had inspired not just films, but also sermons that were later published in pamphlet form, and also the raising of memorial funds.7 Films such as ‘If the Huns Came to Melbourne’ imagined an Australia experiencing the full devastation of a German invasion (Cooper and Pike, p.83). Poets and novelists were also inspired by the events in Europe, and the Belgian atrocities featured in three books by prominent Australian authors. Children’s book author Mary Grant Bruce featured a scene in From Billabong to London, in which the father’s permission for his son to go to war was entirely based upon the Belgian cause: There isn’t any room for further doubt. Every day brings evidence of what the job is going to be – the biggest the Empire ever had to tackle. And the cry from Belgium comes home to every decent man. (2015, p.31)

Renowned Australian poet CJ Dennis was also preoccupied by Belgium. His redoubtable

larrikin Ginger Mick was inspired to enlist by their plight. In Dennis’s 1916 book The Moods of Ginger Mick, the protagonist was initially disgusted by the ‘flamin’ war … wot’s old England got snake-’eaded for?’ Watching a car with ‘two fat toffs be’ind two fat cigars’ glide by does nothing to inspire Mick to enlist. Taking a leaf from the anticapitalist rhetoric of the labour movement, Mick mutters ‘Struth! I’d fight fer that sort – I don’t think’. Mick then asks his mate about why the war was being fought. His mate tells ‘im wot I read about the ‘Uns, an’ wot they done in Beljum an’ in France’. Mick listens intently to the narrator’s story of atrocities: Be burnin’ pore coves ‘omes an’ killin’ kids, An’ comin’ it real crook wiv decent tarts, An’ fightin’ foul, as orl the rules forbids, Leavin’ a string uv stiff-uns in their track.

While Mick is outraged by these stories, he claims ‘it’s no affair uv mine’ (pp.23–26). Yet in the very next chapter he has enlisted. As The Sydney Morning Herald observed in a contemporary review of the book, the stories of Belgium had been very effective and Mick’s decision to enlist ‘surprises no-one’ (21 October 1916, p.8). Where Ginger Mick is the epitome of the working-class Australian male, Brigid and the Cub by Ethel Turner used a very different protagonist – a young middle-class British girl who becomes caught up in the invasion of Liège and witnesses an atrocity (Turner, 1919). This children’s book was initially published in serial form in The Daily Telegraph, and its first few instalments would have been very topical when they were first produced in 1915 (The World’s News, 27 December 1919, p.29). Turner’s atrocity scenario is interesting, as the first killing is made not by a German, but by a Belgian: after a German soldier has dragged the bedridden wife out of bed, the crippled husband (Lemulquinier), unable to physically defend his wife, shoots the German soldier in the heart. The other soldiers retaliate by

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killing the husband, wife and baby. Brigid and Lemulquinier’s surviving child Josette witness the horrific scene while hidden in the rafters of the house. Josette the pitiable Belgian orphan is eventually adopted by Brigid’s family and taken to Australia. Turner’s tender depiction of Josette would have roused sympathy among many of the Australian population. These discussions about German depravity were deeply inspiring for some young Australians. For example, 13-year-old Denis Cullilane wrote in a letter to The Catholic Press of his desire to join the AIF in October 1915: If I were able I should go and fight to avenge the broad Belgian and French acres, made desolate by the German troops, the countless innocent people maimed or murdered by the barbarous Germans, the air raids by Germans on undefended English towns, the sinking of passenger ships and the blowing up of churches &c., by the ruthless Germans. (‘A Soldier’, p.42)

This personal response to the stories of German atrocities provide a glimpse into why recruiters were so keen to use atrocity propaganda: they believed it was effective. Not only that, when these stories were combined with the power of the cinema, they appeared to whip potential recruits into a frenzy. In early 1917, a man in the small Victorian town of Nhill became so ‘enraged’ by a series of films detailing German atrocities in Europe that he attempted to attack the Germans on the screen. Shouting, ‘Kill the Germans!’ the unidentified man had to be physically restrained lest he damage the screen. That evening, the residents of Nhill and surrounding areas had been exposed to a veritable cornucopia of atrocity propaganda, with subtitles ranging from ‘German Frightfulness’ to ‘The truth about German atrocities’ (Nhill Free Press, 24 April 1917, p.2). Following their viewing of Why Britain Went to War, eight local men enlisted in the AIF. Several months earlier in South Yarra, Melbourne, a woman had also reportedly ‘jumped up out of the audience and rushed towards the screen to attack the German in the picture’. As a result, six men had presented themselves to enlist.

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The Vice-Chairman of the Victorian Recruiting Committee presented the story of these two incidents (and the resulting recruits) to the Director-General of Recruiting as evidence of the efficacy of film, in particular atrocity-focused films like Why Britain Went to War.8 While the film no longer exists, the subtitles give some indication about the content. They explained that the German system of Kultur was one in which ‘the individual belongs body and soul to the State and must do anything demanded by the state: – even to murder’. It covered the ‘terrible record’ of the German invasion of Belgium: ‘At Melen’, read another subtitle, ‘in one household alone the father and mother were shot, the daughter died after being outraged, and the son wounded’.9 One reporter who viewed the film in Maryborough believed the film had brought about the realities of the war abroad with an intensity that was particular to the medium of film: ‘The whole picture was produced with a vividness that brought home forcibly to the minds of all who saw it the ruthlessness of the barbaric enemy against whom we have to fight, and was responsible for several men enlisting’ (Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, 11 May 1917, p.2). Recruiting authorities at this point certainly believed that propaganda was a highly effective hypodermic needle, and that the film Why Britain Went to War provided a potent dose of patriotism. Sergeant Pickett, who had provided an account of the hysteria at Nhill, stated, ‘I feel very confident in predicting many more enlistments from this district as a result of the screening of this picture’.10 JG Swan, also of the Victorian State Recruiting Committee, wrote in of the film in Graphic of Australia The object of the film is to pictorially place the facts of the war before the people in such a way as to impress the mind of onlookers, and to legitimately act on those brain centres that are responsible for such necessary national feelings as pride of race, duty to one’s country, family affection and personal manhood. (27 April 1917, p.5)

Those higher up in the organisation also hoped that the combination of atrocities and

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the cinema would arrest the great decline in recruiting numbers that had commenced in the middle of 1916.11 In April 1917, a federal conference was held to discuss the tactics of the various recruiting committees throughout Australia. Most of the states felt that their use of cinema in recruiting had been very effective. Captain Dash of the Queensland Recruiting Committee asserted that ‘the pictures were the best method of getting recruits’. Mr Noyes concurred, stating that ‘pictures were responsible for forty percent of the recruits being obtained in Victoria’. Senator Newland of South Australia also agreed and ‘hoped it would be continued’. The Victorians seemed to be the keenest proponents of film. Noyes stated: ‘The cinematograph films seem to be the best means we have yet discovered to get audiences, and I am receiving more encouraging reports from the country in consequence of showing them’.12 Towards the end of the war, the decline of voluntary recruits forced official Australian propagandists to travel further down the path of Critchley Parker to adopt his virulent style. By early 1918, rates of enlistment had plummeted, and authorities were desperate to increase the numbers (Robertson, 2016). While The Story of Belgium had begun to lose its power in the face of declining living standards and high levels of dead and injured troops, atrocity propaganda was nonetheless used to try to stimulate people to remember what the war had been for. On the fourth anniversary of the German invasion of Belgium, an editorial in Cairns Post attempted to counter the negative change in sentiment by stating that the invasion of Belgium ‘gave to the war its peculiar moral significance … The man who feels no particular abhorrence of the unprovoked attack on Belgium (to say nothing of that on France) is a person whose opinion is no longer worth taking into any consideration’ (‘Remember Belgium’, 1918, p.4). The Australian federal government in a desperate last attempt to boost recruiting produced a series of posters and pamphlets that dwelt at great length upon the depravity of

the German; the campaign was too late. First, the grotesque nature of the campaign meant it was met with derision even by pro-war parliamentarians. Second, it was launched in late October, a mere two weeks before Armistice (Robertson, 2016). Atrocity propaganda had lost its relevance, and the contempt it was held in by late 1918 merely foreshadowed its poor reputation following the war.

CONCLUSION Atrocity propaganda of the Great War has a complicated legacy. As this chapter has demonstrated, atrocity propaganda was the most visible and enduring manifestation of the liberal humanitarian justification for the conflict. It was produced by both government bodies and private organisations and individual citizens, and was part of the broad consensus in Australia and Great Britain about the rights of civilians in war zones. Simultaneously, the exaggerations and racial cruelty contained in atrocity propaganda led to such deep disaffection and cynicism about allegations of harm against ‘innocent civilians’ that, despite the horror of the Holocaust, very little atrocity propaganda was used by the Allies in the Second World War. The Nazis made adroit use of the poor reputation of First World War atrocity propaganda to discredit stories that were emerging in the international press about the mistreatment of Jews and a concerted public relations campaign was run to counter the atrocity stories from the Great War (Robertson, 2015, p.44). In 1935, the Cairns Post reported that a group of Australian schoolboys visiting Germany had had their young minds ‘purged’ of the lies from the war. The article stated that German ‘newspapers candidly declare that this rare opportunity of impressing young educated Australians must not be missed, because no country was so flooded with “atrocity stories” as Australia’ (‘Purging Young Minds’, 4 September 1935, p.6). The sophistication of

ATROCITY PROPAGANDA IN AUSTRALIA AND GREAT BRITAIN DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR

the Nazi propaganda machine was due to the sophistication of Allied propaganda from the preceding war. As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy has observed, First World War propaganda provided ‘key lessons’ for the Nazis – it had been a ‘protracted seminar on inflammatory persuasion’ (2012, p.32). This use of First World War atrocity propaganda against the Allies explains, in part, why so little Australian and British Second World War propaganda discussed the atrocities occurring against the Jews. Atrocity propaganda re-merged after the Second World War to play key roles in some conflicts. From the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, to the recent civil war in Syria, atrocities have contributed to both fuelling and ending wars. During the Vietnam War, the revelation of American atrocities against Vietnamese civilians led to increased anti-war protests in the United States and Australia. Now, in the twenty-first century, atrocities against civilians have become a flash point for Western nations. In the Syrian civil war, allegations of atrocities by the Assad regime featured prominently in Western news stories which speculated that a liberal humanitarian intervention was required to ensure the safety of non-combatants. The Salafi jihadists, ranging from Al Qaida to ISIL, have used atrocities in a different way. Rather than alleging atrocities against themselves, they have deliberately committed atrocities against civilians to goad Western nations into fighting wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan (Richardson, 2006, p.99). Their use of atrocity propaganda has been contiguous with that of the First World War atrocity propagandists, in that it has been part of a strategic use of psychology to further the policy aims of their organisations. Rather than dismissing atrocity propaganda as a simple means to whip up hate in the populace, it is crucial to unpack why this complex genre is so appealing – and so devastating. Future research into the link between atrocity propaganda, grand strategy and military strategy needs to be undertaken, and the cultural factors analysed. While atrocity propaganda,

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and the atrocities themselves alter within the political context of the time, they remain central to how conflict – be it terrorist, asymmetrical or conventional – is conducted.

Notes 1  Lieutenant McCulloch, NSW State Recruiting Committee, 9 February 1917. Scheme for reinforcements presented to the Director-General of Recruiting. MP367/1 609/30/699, NAA Melbourne. 2  See correspondence between G Murray and C Masterman, Box 29, Papers of Gilbert Murray, Bodleian Library. 3  John Simon, Attorney General to James Bryce, 4 December 1914, Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library. 4  Sir Edward Clarke to James Bryce, 21 December 1914, Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library. 5  JH Morgan to Thomas Inskip, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, 19 March 1940, LCO 2/2972, TNA. 6  RH Davies, Parliamentary Recruiting Committee to JCC Davidson, Colonial Office, 12 August 1915, CO 323/692, TNA. 7  ‘Nurse Cavell Memorial: Will You Help’, [no publication details], Mitchell Library, SLNSW.; W.G. Hindley, Archdeacon of Melbourne, ‘In Memoriam: Nurse Cavell’ [no publication details], Mitchell Library, SLNSW. There is a bust of Edith Cavell situated close to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne’s King’s Domain. 8  Henry Noyes to Donald Mackinnon, 2 May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 NAA Melbourne. 9  ‘Synopsis of Films for Recruiting Campaign’, c. May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 NAA Melbourne. 10  Sergeant Pickett to Captain AL Baird, Secretary, State Recruiting Committee [Victoria], 1 May 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27 NAA Melbourne. 11  AWM 38 3DRL 6673/169 PART 1, Donald Mackinnon memo to historian 15 July 1919, p.1, AWM. 12  Henry Noyes to Donald Mackinnon, 14 March 1917, MP 367/1 560/2/27, NAA Melbourne.

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Bongiorno, F., Frances, R. and Scates, B. (2014) Labour and Anzac: An Introduction. Labour History. 106, 1–17. Bruce, MG. (1915) From Billabong to London. Melbourne and Toronto: Ward, Lock and Co, London. Bruntz, GG. (1938) Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Buitenhuis, P. (1989) The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–1918 and After. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Clarke, P. (1996) Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990. London: Penguin. Cooper, R. and Pike, A. (1981) Australian Film 1900–1977, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Dennis, CJ. (1916) The Moods of Ginger Mick. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Douglas, R. (1970) Voluntary Enlistment in the First World War and the Work of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. The Journal of Modern History. 42(4), 564–585. Fischer, G. (1989) Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia 1914–1920. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Fraser, L. (1957) Propaganda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gullace, NF. (2005) Friends, Aliens, and Enemies: Fictive Communities and the Lusitania Riots of 1915. Journal of Social History. 39(2) 345–367. Hartle, AD. (1986) Humanitarianism and the Laws of War. Philosophy. 61(235), 109–115. Haste, C. (1977) Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War. London: Allen Lane. Horne, J. and Kramer, A. (2001) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hull, IV. (2014) Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hull, IV. (2005) A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Johnson, S. (2004) ‘Playing the Pharisee’? Charles Sarolea, Czechoslovakia and the

Road to Munich, 1915–1939. The Slavonic and East European Review. 82(2), 292–314. Kern, PB. (1988) Military Technology and ethical Values in Ancient Greek Warfare. War & Society. 6(2), 1–20. Kris, E. and Leites, N. (1972) Trends in Twentieth Century Propaganda. In Lerner, D. (ed.), Propaganda in War and Crisis. New York, NY: Arno Press. Lehane, R. (2013) A Military Mission for Greater Britain. In Beaumont, J., and Jordan, M. (eds.), Australia and the World: A Festschrift for Neville Meaney. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 101–120. Lindsay, N. (1915) ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, 1 July 1915, The Bulletin. Milevski, L. (2017) The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Morgan, JH. (1915) German Atrocities in France: Orgies of Rapine, Fire and Carnage. Sydney: Messrs. Comyns & Lloyd. Morgan, JH. (1915) Germany’s Dishonoured Army: Additional Records of German Atrocities in France. London: Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. Murray, G. (1915) Ethical Problems of the War. London: T. Nelson. NSW Government Gazette (1915) NSW Government Gazette. No. 99. New South Wales: William Applegate Gullick, Government Printer. O’Shaughnessy, N. (2012) The Death and Life of Propaganda. Journal of Public Affairs. 12(1), 29–38. Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (1915) The Truth about German Atrocities: Founded on the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages. London: Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. Richardson, L. (2006) What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. New York, NY: Random House. Robertson, E. (2014) Propaganda and ‘Manufacturing Hatred’: a reappraisal of the ethics of First World War British and Australian atrocity propaganda. Public Relations Inquiry. 3(2), 245–266. Robertson E. (2015) Atrocity Propaganda and Moral Injury. In Frame, T. (ed.), Moral Injury: Unseen Wounds in an Age of Barbarism. Sydney: New South, pp. 35–45.

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Robertson, E. (2016) A Much Misunderstood Monster: The German Ogre and Australia’s Final and Forgotten Recruiting Campaign of the Great War. History Australia.13(3), 351–367. Sanders, M. and Taylor, PM. (1982) British Propaganda during the First World War 1914–18. London: The Macmillan Press. Schabas, WA. (2018) International Prosecution of Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes Perpetrated during the First World War. In Bohlander, M., Böse, M., Klip, A. and Lagodny, O. (eds.), Justice Without Borders: Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Schomburg. Leiden: Brill, pp. 395–410. Silove, N. (2017) Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy’. Security Studies. 27(1) 27–57. Segaert, H. (1916) How Australia and New Zealand have Helped Belgium. A Little Book of Belgium’s Gratitude. London: John Lane, Bodley Head. Sullivan, E.J. (1915) ‘The Gentleman German’, The Kaiser’s Garland. London: William Heinemann. Turner, E. (1915) The Story of Belgium: From Prosperity to Desolation; Murder, Rapine and Ruin. Sydney and Melbourne: Turner & Sons.

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Turner, E. (1919) Brigid and the Cub, London and Melbourne: Ward Lock and Co. Van Dijk, TA. (2006) Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Public Ideologies. 11(2), 115–140. (1915) War Supplement to Statesman and Mining Standard, No.2. QSL. Welch, D. (2014) Images of the Hun: The portrayal of the German Enemy in British Propaganda in World War I. In Welch, D. (ed.), Propaganda, Power and Persuasion: From World War I to Wikileaks. London: IB Tauris, pp. 37–61. Welch, D. (2012) War Aims and the ‘Big Ideas’ of 1914. In D. Welch and J. Fox (eds.), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–94. Welch, D. (2003) Atrocity Propaganda. In Cull, NH., Culbert, D. and Welch, D. (eds.), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA: AB-Clio, pp. 23–26. Zabecki, D. (2015) Military Developments of World War I. In Daniel, U., Gatrell, P., Janz, O., Jones, H., Keene, J., Kramer, A. and Nasson, B (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Issued by Freie Universität Berlin, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10636.

3 Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda Thomas Colley

INTRODUCTION In the last decade, a particular set of circumstances has led to the emergence of strategic narrative as a discursive weapon claimed to be of such power that it might be decisive in contemporary war. The story goes as follows. The onset of the Information Age has transformed armed conflict. War now takes place primarily through the media, making the key battleground the minds of target audiences (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010). Since the ‘cognitive domain’ is assumed to be the key battlespace, information is the most important weapon in contemporary conflict, with military force increasingly subordinate to ‘information warfare’ (Roennfeldt, 2011). A strategist should therefore look to communicate in the most effective way, and research suggests that narratives are a uniquely persuasive mode of communication and integral to human understanding and identity formation (Riessman, 2008). Because of this, the most powerful propaganda devices are

narratives, to the point where ‘whose story wins’ is thought as important as ‘whose army wins’ today (Nye, 2004: p.106). Strategists should therefore pay closer attention to strategic narratives as the key ‘munitions of the mind’ in contemporary conflict (Taylor, 2003; Freedman, 2006). The intuitiveness of stories being the most compelling way to make information understood fostered over a decade of theory and practice in which it was hoped that strategic narratives could produce more coherent strategy (Simpson, 2012), sustain diverse alliances (Miskimmon et  al., 2013), secure public support (De Graaf et al., 2015), counter radicalisation (Archetti, 2013), project soft power (Roselle et  al., 2014) and ultimately win wars. These ideas were especially appealing in the West – referring loosely here to the American-led military coalitions fighting the expeditionary campaigns of the War on Terror. Facing what they saw as a surprising difficulty to convince local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan to embrace

Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda

liberal democracy, and struggling to convince domestic publics that the effort was worth it, strategic narratives were hailed as a potential solution to their communication challenges. Despite these hopes, the West’s strategic narratives have generally failed to meet expectations. Claims that narratives are unique in theory are undermined by a tendency to treat them as everything said about an issue in practice. The need to achieve coherence among large coalitions has led to a drive for succinctness that removes the unique aspects of narrative in favour of soundbites and catchphrases. The result more closely resembles spin than storytelling. The complex, digital media ecology defies control or predictability, and even if a narrative reaching target audiences is still recognisable, Western audiences appear increasingly sceptical of the utility of force and of attempts to persuade them to support it (Betz, 2008). These audiences remain poorly understood, for the rationalist search for the optimum story to deploy in the ‘battle of the narratives’ has obscured the fact that narratives are deeply interpretive, shaped through the prism of individual understandings of the world (Archetti, 2013). Insights from the history of propaganda in war have sometimes been missed by strategic narrative advocates seeking to avoid the negative connotations of the word. Instead, strategic narratives are more often associated with a new, honest and transparent form of strategic communication. This distinction might avoid the negative consequences of being seen to conduct propaganda, but it also ignores the selective and partial way stories represent reality, which is at the root of their persuasive power. As this chapter will argue, there is much that military actors can do better to harness whatever power narrative has to achieve political objectives in contemporary war. Particularly important is to develop a more nuanced grasp of the properties that differentiate narrative from other ways of communicating and understand far better the stories

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told by target audiences (Colley, 2017b). The prominence of fears of fake news implies that it is now possible for the stories one tells to deviate further from material reality than in the past. The history of propaganda suggests caution: words, whether structured in the form of narratives or otherwise, can only do so much.

STRATEGIC NARRATIVE: CONCEPT AND THEORY Strategic narrative came to prominence in military circles at a time of soul searching concerning the West’s military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. These campaigns, started in 2001 and 2003 by US-led coalitions as part of the post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’, began with swift military victories. In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda were routed within weeks. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government was overthrown swiftly. In both cases however, initial victory was soured by the development of insurgencies – armed uprisings which rejected new Western-imposed regimes. To defeat these, Western coalitions adopted counterinsurgency methods. Early efforts aimed at finding and eliminating insurgents caused civilian casualties that delegitimised their cause. In contrast, the insurgents appeared adept at persuading local audiences to support them, despite minimal obvious technological resources. From 2006 in Iraq, and later in Afghanistan, Western forces altered their methods to ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency, focused more on winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of local populations through providing security and good governance, backed by more extensive strategic communication efforts. Yet frustration remained about how ‘one man in a cave’ seemed to be able to ‘out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society’ (Gates, 2007). Many answers were offered. The most readily accepted was that the Salafi-jihadist movement possessed a single, compelling strategic

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narrative – essentially that Islam is under attack from the West and it is the duty of Muslims to defend it (Schmid, 2014). This, it was feared, was allowing them to win the ‘war of ideas’ which sits at the heart of any contest between insurgents and counterinsurgents – to persuade the population that their rule would be preferable to their opponents. In comparison, the West struggled to communicate the cause and purpose of its mission clearly enough either to convince local populations to reject the insurgents or to maintain domestic support. Claims of being driven by liberal democratic values were undermined by images of detainment and torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Western rhetoric sought to make the conflict seem existential while committing extremely limited resources. Coordinating large coalitions with divergent interests was proving extremely challenging. Watching publics found it hard to reconcile claims that such operations were preventing terrorism when a steady stream of attacks continued. It was theorised that if the West also had a strategic narrative that could exploit the ‘startling power of story’ (Haven, 2007) it might help resolve these challenges. The idea that communicating strategic narratives was fundamental to achieving political objectives then diffused from the military sphere to international relations more broadly. Emerging in constructivist, but also rationalist and poststructuralist approaches to international relations, strategic narratives have been theorised as a means to create consensus around policies, identities and the nature of the international system, as well as a tool to shape behaviour through persuasion and coercion (Miskimmon et al., 2013, 2017). Today, Western concern has turned to fake news and Russian hybrid warfare. In annexing Crimea in 2014 with minimal opposition and supporting insurgency in Ukraine, it was feared that Russia had become uniquely adept at using strategic narratives to confuse and confound any potential international response (Pomerantsev, 2014). As Miskimmon et al. observe, ‘whatever the

crisis, issue, or domain, we now find strategic narratives’ (2017: p.7). There is nothing new about artful narration as a propaganda tool in war. History is replete with examples, from famous examples such as Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the Allies’ Why We Fight films, to human interest stories about the child victims of chemical weapons attacks, or merely how ordinary people sustained surprisingly ordinary lives amidst the privations of war. The notion that war is an act of communication aiming to convince opponents and relevant target audiences to accept one’s preferred version of reality is not novel either. Wars can only be fought as long as supporters accept that armed conflict is necessary, and they can only be won when opponents accept that they are defeated (De Graaf et al., 2015). What is novel in the last decade is the assumption that arranging a collection of words (and images) in the form of narrative is fundamental to achieving this. But what is a strategic narrative, and on what is its persuasiveness theoretically based?

DEFINITION Claims of the transformative potential of strategic narratives in contemporary conflict are based on the assumption that they possess unique persuasive features that differentiate them from other ways of organising information. This assumption is frequently undermined in practice because narrative has, like many concepts, come to be used so broadly that any sense of its uniqueness is lost. Jeremy Black (2018) laments that ‘the language of war has come to be applied to everything and anything held to require an effort. Similarly, strategy is now applied to everything requiring a plan’. In a similar vein, narrative is now seemingly applied to everything involving the communication of information. This is problematic because it fatally undermines the claim that narratives are uniquely persuasive. All information cannot

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be uniquely persuasive, and different forms of communicating, such as narrative and argument, have been shown to persuade in different ways (Georgakopoulou & Goutsos, 2000). This makes differentiating what is and is not narrative vital to any assessment of its utility (Colley, 2017b). Here, strategic narratives are ‘selective interpretations of the past, present and future designed to achieve political objectives through persuasion’ (Colley, 2017a: p.1). Their strategic nature derives from their being deliberately designed to achieve political objectives. As narratives, they are most clearly distinguished from other modes of discourse by possessing a plot in which events play out over time. Simple plots might consist of movement through past, present and future. Alternatively, they might revolve around the resolution of conflict, starting with an initial situation and then a disruption to this that may or may not be resolved (Miskimmon et  al., 2013). An extremely simple strategic narrative generally applicable to many Western interventions is of an initial situation of a peaceful international order that has been disrupted by a dictator or tyrant (past), whose attacks on innocent civilians or states necessitates military intervention (present) to protect civilians and restore international peace and security (future). The temporal element most clearly differentiates narratives from arguments or frames, which do not necessarily possess temporality (Miskimmon et  al., 2013). Narratives also contain characters and settings, though these do not easily differentiate them from other modes of discourse used in international affairs, which is invariably framed in terms of what characters (countries, leaders, groups, organisations etc.) do in the setting of international politics (the ‘world stage’, the ‘uncertain and complex world’ commonly described in policy documents, or perhaps a world in which a ‘clash of civilisations’ is taking place). Narrative and story are considered synonymous here, although not all authors take this

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position. In the military sphere, a common way they have been differentiated is through analogy to strategy and tactics. From this perspective, narrative is the master strategic concept, and its effects are enacted at the tactical level through the telling of stories that relate more or less coherently to the strategic narrative (Simpson, 2012). However, as units of discourse formed of plot, actors and settings, they are structurally the same. More crucially, these shared structural features are what supposedly make narratives particularly persuasive (Davis, 2002), and they are integral to their utility as propaganda.

PROPAGANDA OR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION? Those endorsing strategic narratives in Western military thought have tended to dismiss claims that they are a form of propaganda, but instead a more transparent and honest form of ‘strategic communication’ aimed at being ‘first with the truth’ (Petraeus, 2010: p.117; Tatham, 2008). It is questionable whether this distinction is valid. Their definitions reveal such overlap that the main difference appears simply that the strategic communicator seeks to avoid being described as a propagandist because of the latter’s negative connotations. The British government, for example, describes strategic communication as ‘the systematic and coordinated use of all means of communication to deliver UK national security objectives by influencing the activities and behaviours of individuals, groups and states’ (Ministry of Defence, 2012: pp.1–2). Jowett and O’Donnell define propaganda as the: ‘deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perception, manipulate cognitions and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist’ (2011: p.7). There is such crossover between these ‘deliberate’, ‘systematic’ attempts to shape thought and behaviour that it is difficult to credibly

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differentiate them. One way theorists have sought to do so is to claim that propagandists hide their intent, but strategic communicators do not (Bolt, 2012: p.33). A second way is to suggest that strategic communication is different by being based on discussion and dialogue. In contrast, according to Tatham ‘the propagandist does not engage in genuine argument and debate, rather their answers are determined at the outset’ (2008: p.6). These assertions are not without merit, in that conscious efforts to be open and transparent, and engage in public dialogue, seem more democratic than the underhand manipulation propaganda is associated with. However, these arguments fall down in two ways. First, it is questionable how genuine engagement is when it is deliberately conducted as a means to shape behaviour. For example, military strategic communication practitioners are keen to persuade citizens in conflict theatres not to support insurgent groups. If one’s method to do this is to engage with citizens, discuss their grievances and address them, their eventual shift in behaviour is still a reflection of your initial intent. You have not explained to them first that ‘I am trying to build trust or show empathy with you because I think that’s a better way to persuade you’. In that respect, even the most open, well-intentioned communication efforts are often more propagandistic than their advocates claim. Moreover, failure to comply in a military context may well be followed by the use of force. It is hard to argue that this is not propaganda since the answer really is determined from the outset: ‘stop supporting the insurgency, or else’. Claims that strategic communication is open and transparent and thus not propaganda falter in a more fundamental way, however. Few if any methods of strategic communication, no matter how much public engagement is involved, are openly transparent about the mechanisms through which the words, deeds and images they choose persuade at the cognitive level. This is an integral part of the particular appeal of narrative as a mode of

communication, and something recognised by propagandists throughout history.

THEORETICAL APPEAL Three premises help explain the appeal of strategic narratives and why they are readily conceptualised as propaganda devices. First, that they are the most natural way to communicate because humans use narrative to structure information and construct their identities. Second, that narrative is a uniquely persuasive text type. Third, because of a combination of these cognitive and discursive elements, information communicated in narrative form appears more natural. This makes it easier to obscure persuasive intent.

NARRATIVE AS CENTRAL TO HUMAN THOUGHT AND IDENTITY The assumption that humans understand the world by telling stories about it emerged out of the narrative turn in the social sciences, combining insights from cognitive psychology and literary theory. Psychologists such as Roger Schank (1996) suggested that human thought is narratively structured, meaning that humans process new information by comparing it to past experiences and use this to anticipate how events will play out in future. These scripts inform anything from how a person thinks their workday will go to how a military strategist thinks their operations will play out (Freedman, 2013). Theorists also suggested something deeper; that through the selective filtering of information into emplotted stories, humans come to make sense of who they are (Davis, 2002). Humans come to see themselves as good or bad, brave or cowardly, kind or selfish, through foregrounding memories that support these claims and downplaying contradictory events. The same process occurs

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when people narrate national histories, where selective emplotment is used to portray one’s wars as necessary and ultimately benevolent while silencing oppression and barbarism (Baumeister & Hastings, 1997). The assumption that human thought is narratively structured led to suggestions that persuasive communication about war should be too.

NARRATIVE AS UNIQUELY PERSUASIVE Allied to the assumption that humans understand the world through narratives is the idea that because of this, narratives are more persuasive than other forms of communication. This notion also has intuitive appeal. Most humans will remember sitting in a boring meeting, enlivened with a telling anecdote that suddenly makes an abstract idea make sense. They may also recall the heroic tales they were told as children, when almost since birth, their minds will have been fed on compelling narratives. The most common way narrative persuasion has been differentiated is through comparison with argument. These two modes of persuasion are ideal types; in everyday language they overlap considerably, and it can be hard to differentiate them (Georgakopoulou & Goutsos, 2000). Narratives can be used to argue, and indeed this is how they are frequently used in propaganda. In the 1930s, when the US Institute for Propaganda Analysis highlighted seven propaganda techniques that publics should be ‘inoculated’ against, the fifth technique was ‘Plain Folks’, exemplified when a leader tells a story of their humble origins to portray them as at one with ordinary people (Sproule, 2001: p.136). Such a leader is using a story to make an argument: ‘Vote for me because I understand you’. Notwithstanding this overlap, narrative persuasion differs in three notable respects. First, while formal argument is based on

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deductive inference from general principles, narrative uses plot to create a coherent framework of meaning that makes sense of events as a whole (Colley, 2017a; Davis, 2002). Through this, a selective mixture of facts, half-truths, exaggerations and omissions can be combined together that presents a plausible and coherent interpretation of reality rather than a logically binding one (Bruner, 2002). This coherence makes narratives less likely to be challenged and harder to refute (Davis, 2002). Second, stories are thought better able to develop emotional identification with their characters. The hope then is that audiences might endorse, enact or aspire to those behaviours in their daily lives (De Graaf et  al., 2012). Third, narratives are thought to persuade through discouraging critical evaluation. This is achieved through ‘immersion’ or ‘transportation’ into the story world. Similar to the experience of forgetting the passage of time while absorbed in a good book, the idea is that while being immersed in the drama, audiences may be distracted from persuasive subtexts (Green & Brock, 2000; Slater & Rouner, 2002). This is very different from arguments, which invite the reader to consciously reflect on their merits and, hopefully, reason their way to the desired conclusion.

NARRATIVE AS LESS OBVIOUSLY PROPAGANDISTIC? Taken together, these features explain the appeal of narrative as a mode of communication. Contra denials by Western strategic communication practitioners, they also illustrate how strategic narratives can be readily conceptualised as propaganda. Knowingly choosing to convey information in a story rather than an argument is to choose a mode of communication where the persuasive intent of its creator is less obvious. It is to choose a mode of communication that is more suggestive than overt, where the message hopefully

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‘rings true’ without needing to be stated. Embedding messaging in narrative drama, however valid the message is, obscures persuasive intent. Plot can present highly selective accounts of events but without explaining why some events were selected and others are silenced, all the while making communication seem as natural as possible. These features of storytelling are long recognised, from Joseph Goebbels to modern-day television soap directors attempting to address social issues in their storylines. Strategic narratives are attempts to persuade, structured in a way that obscures how they are trying to persuade. In other words, propaganda.

STRATEGIC NARRATIVES IN PRACTICE How far strategic narratives have lived up to theoretical expectations depends who you ask and whose narratives they are assessing. Assessments of a decade of Western strategic communication suggest persistent failure in contrast to their opponents, be it Salafijihadists thought to have a single, uniquely compelling strategic narrative or Russians supposedly brilliant in their ability to project a variety of narratives to distract people from the truth. However, rarely have these assumptions been based on robust empirical research demonstrating that the persuasive effect of one side’s strategic narratives is superior to the other. This is partly a problem with any attempt to measure the causal effect of communication. Nevertheless, several issues can be identified that have limited the effectiveness of strategic narratives in contemporary war.

MISSION STATEMENT VERSUS STORYTELLING The most common way strategic narratives have been employed in Western military practice has been what I term the ‘mission

statement’ approach (Colley, 2017b), due to its similarity with a concept that has become commonplace throughout business over the last four decades (Morphew & Hartley, 2016). Just as companies and charities set out mission statements explaining their actions and purpose, it was thought that militaries should do the same. In theory, having set out this overarching narrative, tactical actions should then be explained in a way that supports it (Simpson, 2012). NATO for instance defines strategic narrative as a concise but comprehensive written statement of an organization’s situation and purpose, which can stand on its own as the principle context to strategic planning directives or be used to support the creation of individual culturally attuned stories that will resonate with particular audiences and foster cohesion within the organization. (2015: p.9)

The aim of strategic narrative when used this way is to unite an organisation around a coherent vision. The premise behind this is that political actors are more efficient internally if they possess unity of purpose, and more credible externally if their actions and words are consistently aligned – or in military circles, their ‘say-do gap’ is as small as possible (Betz, 2017). Strategic narration thus becomes more about establishing and maintaining credibility, because if different people in a politico-military campaign contradict each other, the whole organisation looks incompetent, disingenuous and potentially untrustworthy. Explaining that the military are trying to protect civilians while your air force are destroying their homes appears disingenuous. Claiming that you are fighting to uphold liberal values while images emerge of your soldiers torturing and humiliating prisoners looks hypocritical. Once the coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan began to project clearer and more consistent strategic narratives, some countries such as the UK, Denmark and Germany appeared to have more success sustaining domestic support for their missions (De Graaf et  al., 2015), and the efficiency of coalition military

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operations improved (Fussell et  al., 2017). They still struggled to match the quantity of communication products insurgents were producing, as the latter were more comfortable empowering lower level members to propagandise on their behalf rather than relying on a centralised, slower bureaucratic system (Betz, 2017). An overarching strategic narrative to coordinate the diverse coalition in Afghanistan remained elusive. As Boudreau (2016) comments, ‘expecting to synthesise every action, word, signal and match that with all aspects of policy in an Alliance of 28 nations (and 41 partners) is simply not possible’ (p.54). The idea that Western military operations should be designed and explained in a way that fit an overarching strategic narrative came to be known as ‘narrative-led operations’ (Nissen, 2012). It is not as novel as it first appeared. That ‘the propaganda consequences of an action must be considered in planning that action’ was one of Goebbels’ fundamental principles (Doob, 1950: p.424). But despite this lack of novelty, it was an improvement on Western military thinking early in the War on Terror, which largely assumed that there was little need to explain the meaning of military force, as the primary task was to simply find targets and destroy them using the West’s superior information technology. Compared with the plan to send only one public affairs officer to Afghanistan in 2003 (Loyn, 2017), observers saw the West as steadily learning to adapt to fighting war in the digital age, where communicating the purpose of military force to global audiences seemed more important than force itself. The principal limitation with the ‘mission statement’ strategic narrative approach is that communication that results from it rarely possesses the features that supposedly make narratives uniquely persuasive (Colley, 2017b). Because a strategic narrative needs to coordinate what people say and do throughout often large organisations, they tend to become oversimplified – in the MOD’s words, they need to be ‘short,

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succinct and simple to explain’ (Ministry of Defence, 2012: pp.2–10). The problem is that in an age of soundbites, tweets and short attention spans, this can lead to strategic narratives becoming slogans and catchphrases. This is exacerbated when communicating within a media ecology that prioritises tweets and memes over detail. Consequently, stories communicated to support the overarching strategic narratives tend to possess very low ‘narrativity’ – in other words, they contain few of the features thought to make narrative more persuasive as a medium – emotional identification with story characters, transporting individuals into a story world, during which their critical faculties are reduced. The second danger is that the desire for everyone to be ‘on message’ leads inexorably to spin – the attempt to frame everything as supporting the narrative, however tenuously. The best one can probably do is allude to or reference a broader story in the hope that the target audience knows what story is being referred to. Distilling deeper meaning into single words and images to trigger emotional responses is a staple in the practice of propaganda (Ellul, 1973). But it is questionable to assume that narrative persuasion is taking place in the mind of target audiences through the use of a single word. The effectiveness of operationalising strategic narratives in such a parsimonious way also rests on in-depth understanding of how target audiences interpret such information – a further limitation to which we shall return. It may also be counterproductive. As Goebbels explains, while messaging themes must be repeated, this would become damaging ‘if the theme became boring or unimpressive’ (Doob, 1950: p.435). US President Donald Trump appears to experience surprisingly limited electoral penalties when his thoughts and actions are wildly inconsistent, suggesting that inconsistency may seem more authentic than repeating soundbites and catchphrases verbatim. As Gaber (2009) explains, constant communication designed to maintain a positive impression of one’s

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actions can actually undermine trust, because target audiences know there is an underlying agenda – to persuade them that your system of government is preferable to someone else’s. This suggests the need for further reflection on whether a balance needs to be struck between coherence and authenticity.

STRATEGIC NARRATIVE AS EVERYTHING A further issue with the ‘mission statement’ approach to strategic narrative is that it perpetuates the tendency to treat narrative vaguely as everything said or done in relation to an issue over time. The result is that when people write about ‘Daesh’s’ narrative, it seems to mean little more than ‘what Daesh are saying at the moment’. The ‘Syria narrative’ just becomes ‘what is going on in Syria’ or ‘what people are saying about it’. Seeing everything said about a topic as its ‘narrative’ invalidates the assumption that narratives are a uniquely persuasive form of communication. It makes no sense to assume that narratives are uniquely compelling if everything said about an issue is narrative. This conflates narrative and discourse, and ‘shifting the narrative’ or ‘controlling the narrative’ merely become general references to whether public discourse concerns topics you want it to. In war, this typically involves emphasising victories and humanitarian efforts and silencing defeats and civilian casualties. Strategic communication practitioners have suggested that the impression of spin should be avoided (Boudreau, 2016). Yet the very idea behind messaging in a way that is consistent with an overall strategic narrative makes this hard to avoid. Mistakes, such as civilian casualties, may well be admitted, but the audience knows any framing of them will try and be as positive as possible. This is a long way from the foundational assumption that narrative is a specific type of communication with uniquely powerful

features. It risks overestimating the power of opposing propaganda without a robust and nuanced evidence base. The claim that Salafi-jihadists have a simple and remarkably powerful narrative is widely accepted as selfevident. By combining this with the assumption that everything relating to the group is part of its narrative, the result is that everything the group says is assumed to possess this persuasive power. Such thinking ignores nuances in the medium used to convey information, variation and contestation in narrative construction and interpretation, how credible the messenger is and how relatively persuasive arguments, stories, images, symbols, slogans or any other medium might be. It makes little sense to think that the key to success in counter-terrorism will come specifically through constructing a compelling counter-narrative, or an alternative narrative, if all this amounts to is ‘saying something different than one’s opponents’. Thinking about strategic narrative as everything said about a topic also invites the tendency to think of effective communication in terms of the volume of traffic one achieves. Communicators are likely to think they are doing well if more of public discourse concerns what they want to say rather than their opponents. This could be used to suggest one side is winning the ‘battle of the narratives’. But this says little about who is persuaded and how. It amounts to little more than agenda setting, a long-recognised fundament of political communication (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2006), but neither new nor specific to narrative. Advancing understanding of the utility of narrative in propaganda and strategic communication thus requires a far clearer differentiation between narrative as storytelling and other modes of communication. It also requires a far more extensive evidence base comparing how persuasive different modes are (Colley, 2017a). One should not be unrealistic. In the contemporary media ecology, it is unrealistic to expect politicians or soldiers to be given the time to elaborate on detailed

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narratives that immerse audiences in complex story worlds. But if one is committed to the assumption that narrative is a unique text type with specific persuasive properties, then this distinction should be reflected in practice.

MASTER NARRATIVES, MYTHS AND RESONANCE That strategic narrative might create coordination and coherence in a military campaign is only one aspect of what is hoped it can achieve. The other aspect, as NATO’s definition states, is that a strategic narrative should ‘support the creation of individual culturally attuned stories that will resonate with particular audiences’ (NATO, 2015). The idea that strategic narratives persuade through ‘resonating’ with target audiences is part of their appeal to which much attention has been devoted. Though again, it reveals numerous issues when theory has confronted reality. The ‘resonance’ metaphor is underpinned by the assumption that strategic narratives will be more persuasive when linking two elements: the narratives of individuals below and the ‘master narratives’ or ‘meta-narratives’ that order and explain life in a given culture above. This congruence between individual narratives, strategic narratives and master narratives has been described as ‘vertical coherence’ (Betz, 2008). Persuasion according to this theory is less about the processes of narrative persuasion such as immersion or transportation described earlier; the idea is that individuals would intuitively believe messages that are congruent with their worldview regardless of the form those messages take (even though narrative is assumed to be the optimum medium). It is more about tapping into ideas that are common sense in a particular culture. For this reason, master narratives are closely associated with ideology, dominant discourses and myths since they comprise frameworks of belief people use, often

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unknowingly, to understand the world. Their ‘narrativity’ comes from possessing temporality – movement through time – since they typically describe how the world has been, is and will be in future. This might be the progressive master narratives of Marxism and liberalism, that the world is on an inexorable path from feudalism to world socialism, or despotism to liberal democracy, or perhaps barbarism to civilisation (Somers, 1994). Or, as is particularly common in wars, the rise and fall of great powers that animates calls to ‘make countries great again’. The distinctions between master narratives and individual narratives is artificial in a sense, because narratives are never wholly individual. They are socially shared products that people construct for an audience, drawing typically on a limited range of narratives available in a given culture (Archetti, 2013; Somers, 1994). Strategic narratives might be best thought of as attempts to establish master narratives – to create a common sense of how things are, have been and will be in future. They attempt to link the cultural and the individual by establishing a master narrative which provides a ‘lens’ through which an individual interprets events in their lives (Archetti, 2013). As constructivist international relations theorists might put it, in the act of being told and retold, strategic narratives come to constitute the world they describe (Miskimmon et  al., 2013). The power of master narratives is that they come to be held unknowingly and uncritically. Consequently, communication that reflects them appears intuitive, common-sensical and thus less obviously propagandistic. As Freedman explains, ‘the greatest power is that which achieves its effects without notice. This comes about when established structures appear settled and uncontentious, part of the natural and generally benign order of things’ (2013: p.615). For example, Salafi-jihadist strategic narratives have sought to inculcate a master narrative that that world is characterised by a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam

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and that Islam’s victory is inevitable. They have sometimes been helped by the West’s own communication mistakes – a classic example being US President George W. Bush describing the War on Terror as a ‘crusade’, which merely reinforced Al Qaeda’s strategic narrative that Islam is under attack from the West. Salafi-jihadists have used other historical events as evidence of the West’s desire to conquer and divide the Islamic world, such as the Sykes Picot Agreement (1916) to divide the Middle East between Britain and France or the Balfour Declaration (1917) promising the Jews territory in Palestine (Bin Laden, 2002). But while some audiences might find century-old examples compelling, better would be to make people interpret the experiences in their daily lives as evidence of this broader cultural clash. This may include perceived or actual discrimination, islamophobia, targeted surveillance and so on. Success could be observed when a new event occurs and the audience intuitively interprets it as an individual manifestation of the broader phenomenon. Understanding this suggests the need to focus on two areas: the master narratives or myths circulating in a given culture and the extent of variation in how target audiences interpret events in their everyday lives.

BATTLES OF NARRATIVES In the last decade, Western strategic narrative efforts have focused extensively on the former but insufficiently on the latter. Largely this is because the initial diagnosis of the failure of Western strategic communication efforts in the War on Terror was that the Salafi-jihadist movement had a coherent strategic narrative and the West did not. Subsequent efforts to create one have been persistently criticised for failing to ‘resonate’ with target audiences domestically and in conflict theatres. Perhaps the most persistent criticism is that despite a decade of attempts to improve cultural understanding of Afghanistan, Iraq and the nuances

of Islam, the West still lacks the cultural understanding to be a credible speaker to Muslims worldwide (Betz, 2017). Thoughtful suggestions have certainly been made about how to counter the narratives of opponents. Corman (2013) suggests that in Afghanistan it would be useful to avoid reinforcing the master narrative of repeated success in repelling invaders and instead narrate a story of progress. This is sensible. But when being narrated through the words and actions of a soldier stood on foreign territory, perhaps on a six-month tour and with limited training in strategic communication, the message is unlikely to be communicated credibly whether it is culturally resonant with existing master narratives or not (Dimitriu, 2012; Loyn, 2017). The corollary of assuming that one persuades someone through messaging congruent with myths, ideology or cultural common sense is that one will in turn be influenced often unknowingly by what is common sense in one’s own. This too has been a problem for Western propaganda efforts. Some governments have recognised that they are not credible when communicating directly with disaffected Muslim audiences domestically and internationally, and as a result, outsource propaganda work to third parties, either private companies or community groups. But as David Betz (2017) explains, such groups have proved too easily undermined as agents of government propaganda, because they are tasked with promoting Western liberal values that are not necessarily resonant with target audiences. The fundamental issue for Betz is that the West has persistently failed to recognise that liberal democracy is not a universally desirable political order, and there is far greater sympathy across the Islamic world for a role of Islam in governance. The West’s own progressive master narrative of the eventual triumph of the secular, liberal order continues to constrain its ability to understand the appeal of alternative forms of governance. Despite efforts to improve cultural understanding, its communication efforts

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stand out as propaganda because they appear to be attempts by an outsider to persuade rather than appearing as a transparent part of the culture in which they are operating.

IDEOLOGY AND STRATEGIC NARRATIVES Expectations of the capability of welldesigned strategic narratives to overcome significant cultural and ideological differences have been excessive. As decades of propaganda research has shown, propaganda to external, foreign audiences is rarely effective compared with domestic propaganda (Ellul, 1973). However, this should provide some comfort to the West for a simple reason: their opponents face similar challenges. Part of the reason that the West expects so much of strategic narratives is their perception that their opponents are so powerful. However, this assessment is shaped partly by ideological assumptions and inconsistent measures of effectiveness. For the West, one lone-wolf suicide attack means ‘our communication efforts have failed and our opponents have succeeded’. This is a fair judgment at the level of the individual attacker, but such conclusions neglect the cost of such attacks. In the liberal West, the notion that humans would actually want to live in a society as repressive as that under the Islamic State, for example, is so anathema to assumptions about human preferences for freedom that it is assumed that only brainwashing could have achieved it. It is assumed, quite rightly, that one typically needs a strong reason to blow oneself up, and the only way someone would have that is if they had been persuaded by something incredibly compelling. In the discourse on radicalisation, this results in claims that extremist narratives are so powerful that they can radicalise people ‘in weeks’ (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2009). Such sensationalism neglects that they are not working on blank slates, but using ideas embedded

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in the cultural fabric over decades, however distasteful they may be to others. The suicide attack by one thus reinforces the assumption that extremist propaganda is incredibly compelling, even if 999,999 are repulsed by it. In a sense, the West is too hard on itself, because it is aiming, laudably (if unrealistically), for 100 per cent communication success. As the Irish Republican Army warned British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after they narrowly failed to assassinate her in 1984, ‘we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always’ (Getler, 1984).

WARS OF MYTHS Taking the assumptions of strategic narrative’s cultural ‘resonance’ to their logical conclusion, ‘battles of the narratives’ are not just competitions to convince military opponents that you will win and to convince populations that you will bring them a better life. Narrative battles are myth-making competitions, aiming to enshrine as common sense one’s own mythological worldview. This is the task of years and decades, not weeks. It is not easily amenable to short-term political propaganda campaigns or five-year electoral cycles, though that is what is expected of it. It is more akin to developing what Jacques Ellul (1973) terms ‘sociological p­ ropaganda’  – a process of ‘slow, constant impregnation’ to create a societal ‘climate’ or ‘atmosphere’ of favourable attitudes (pp.15–17). This ‘slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, requires propaganda of a very long duration’ (p.18). Only once this has been established will short-term political propaganda campaigns be effective. In its hopes for strategic narrative, the West has assumed the latter can succeed without the former, with the technical mastery of narrative construction providing the shortcut. If sociological propaganda is the key medium through which the struggle between

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the liberal order and the Salafi-jihadist movement is operating, it is far from clear that the West is disadvantaged. Liberal democracies have been remarkably effective at globalising Western cultural values – the Salafi-jihadist movement is in many ways a reaction to that success. The disparity in will exhibited by the comparatively extreme methods the Salafi-jihadist movement uses to prosecute war suggests that it faces the greater existential threat, as insurgencies typically do when facing states. Conversely, David Betz suggests that the West is hamstrung because postmodernism has inculcated what Lyotard described as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. As a result, any attempts to promote a given master narrative are quickly rejected by sceptical domestic audiences: In the West narratives which are deliberately constructed by government are almost immediately rejected for that reason whatever their inherent accuracy or falsity. The public is highly sensitized to ‘spin’, the media excels at revealing (and counterspinning) it, and no narrative can long survive the perception that it is based, even in part, on a lie. (2008: p.516)

This may be so, but it will be the same for propaganda from other governments and nonstate actors too, whether communicated on the BBC, Al Jazeera or Russia Today. As Rieger et al. (2013) have demonstrated, the standard response to propagandistic material is rejection, even among audiences supposedly sympathetic to its content. Still, when combined with the relative reluctance of liberal democracies to stir public passions for war through myth-making propaganda, conclusions that the West is fighting war in the cognitive domain with ‘one hand tied behind [its] back’ are understandable (Betz, 2015: p.53). A more pressing question is whether an apparent crisis of faith in liberal democracy is undermining the credibility and coherence of Western efforts to inculcate its vision of future political order. The current popularity of book titles suggesting democracy is under threat or that liberalism has failed appears to bear

these conclusions out. Some credit Russia with contributing to Western confusion and self-doubt through the promotion of multiple narratives to undermine trust in a shared version of reality necessary for government to function properly (Taub, in O’Shaughnessy, 2017: p.117). Tactically using multiple narratives to sow doubt in the liberal order does little to inculcate an alternative master narrative, however. It is also a long way from liberal democratic self-doubt to a profound shift in beliefs to support a political order based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia Law. Liberal democracies may not be clear what they are any more, but they are still clear on many things they are not. Moving forward, noting the difficulty of even identifying sociological propaganda, let alone measuring its effect on the strengthening or weakening of existing beliefs over prolonged periods, it is understandable that short-term proxies of political communication success are used, be it frequencies of terrorist plots and attacks, numbers of foreign fighters, investment in election advertising, numbers of bots discovered, Twitter accounts deleted, insurgent defections and so on. But to gain a balanced picture, perspective is needed from both sides of conflicts and over the longer term. If the number of migrants to the Islamic State is compared with the number who have fled it, assessments of the persuasiveness of their strategic narrative’s vision of the future presents a very different picture. Another element that would benefit from greater attention in strategic narrative research is detailed consideration of how to change beliefs rather than simply strengthening existing ideas. Belief that social media algorithms can create ‘echo chambers’ that reinforce people’s views is now well established, but ultimately states and their challengers are in the business of changing attitudes and behaviours too. The field would benefit from addressing what can appear as a contradiction between the assumption that strategic narratives can change attitudes and behaviour but by resonating with existing beliefs

Strategic Narratives and War Propaganda

rather than creating new ones. Jelena Subotić (2015) makes a similar point about narrative research in international relations, which may be able to ‘explain policy choices but [has] a harder time explaining policy change’ (p.4). Here research by Ronald Krebs (2015) on how US national security narratives have risen or fallen from prominence is useful.

UNDERSTANDING TARGET AUDIENCES Ultimately, the effectiveness of strategic narratives depends on how they are interpreted by different audiences, exposed to a complex array of narratives circulating within and across cultures. The attempt to establish overarching master narratives to explain events leads to optimism about achieving uniformity in how complex issues such as war are understood. This is appealing from a positivist, rationalist mindset seeking to find a single, optimum narrative that would maximise support. It is also understandable in a resource-limited policy environment where pragmatic choices must be made about what and how to communicate. However, narratives are not uniformly understood. They are interpretations, filtered through individuals’ unique experiences (Archetti, 2013). There is need not just to examine the ideal strategic narrative to project from the top down, but to examine from the bottom up the narrative understandings of individual citizens. This is especially important given that an attempt to communicate a strategic narrative might comprise a soundbite, slogan or tweet, which leaves much of the narrative unsaid and interpretation uncertain. Yet in over a decade of interest in strategic narratives, remarkably few studies examine the stories told by target audiences at the microlevel (Colley, 2017a, 2017b). The assumption that the Salafi-jihadist movement is animated by a single master narrative has led to neglect of the variation in how different individuals interpret it (Archetti, 2013). Western

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governments seeking to counter this with their own master narrative have similarly neglected that the stories their citizens tell about war can vary significantly. In international relations, studies have shown how states narrate their histories selectively to generate singular ‘national biographies’ (Berenskoetter, 2012). In contrast, limited attention has been paid to whether their citizens understand the past, present and future in the same way (Colley, 2017b). Instead, studies of strategic narrative reception in war have tended to focus on correlating different strategic narratives with public opinion over time (De Graaf et al., 2015). But as Miskimmon et al. (2017) note bluntly, ‘strategic narrative research must research narratives, not attitudes; otherwise, it is not narrative research’ (p.323). Several questions might inform the construction of more compelling strategic narratives in the future. How much variety is there in how people narrate their countries’ wars? Where is there contestation, where is there consensus? How much variation is there in the building blocks of citizens’ narratives such as plot, character and setting? Which historical events and characters do they emphasise and which do they silence? How congruent is this with how political elites narrate their country’s past, present and future? Research has begun to address variations in how narratives of military intervention are interpreted by target audiences (Colley, 2017a; 2017b; Miskimmon et al., 2017), but much more needs to be done in this area.

CONCLUSION Even armed with a compelling and unifying strategic narrative and a better understanding of its likely interpretations, successful persuasion may not occur. After more than a decade of trying to use strategic narratives to oppose Islamist extremism, some authors have concluded that there may be ‘no effective counter-narratives to be disseminated by

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Western governments’ because of their lack of credibility with Muslim audiences (Betz, 2017: p.62). I suggest a slightly different conclusion. It is not that there are no counternarratives to be disseminated by Western governments. One cannot not communicate (Boudreau, 2016), therefore as long as one opposes a given political order, by the act of communicating one will be producing counterpropaganda. One may as well try and do so as effectively as possible. However, it may be that there are no counter-narratives that will achieve significant short-term change in what is a long-term political struggle to embed worldviews deeply to the point that they become mythological, or common sense. This does not mean one cannot achieve significant short-term communication effect in war. Psy-ops officers attesting to getting insurgents to withdraw from territory using leaflet drops (Hughes, 2017), or Israeli leaflets compelling Palestinians to flee in advance of air strikes, suggest that communication effects can be achieved with crude methods without needing expertise in the art of storytelling. But what is striking about these cases is how their persuasiveness derives less from their artful construction and more from the genuine threat of force that accompanies them. That persuasiveness disappears if not backed by credible sanction, just as the credibility of claims of genuine commitment of a counterinsurgent to a local population disappears when political leaders announce imminent troop withdrawals. It is hard to imagine that a collection of words could be developed that could be as damaging to the Salafi-jihadist movement in the short term as the capture of the Caliphate’s symbolic sites such as Mosul and Raqqa. Actions may not always speak louder than words, but they typically do in war. Therefore, as with any form of propaganda, there is a need to moderate expectations of the utility of strategic narratives. They will not be able to resolve fundamental contradictions between the words one says and military events on the ground. There is evidence that using strategic narratives to

improve organisational coherence and unity can be effective. Thinking about the communication effects of armed force before applying it seems a sensible mindset in conflicts fought primarily in the cognitive domain. If one believes that narrative is a uniquely persuasive mode of communication, one should not treat it as everything said about an issue over time. If one believes that strategic narratives are the key to persuasion in contemporary war because they resonate with target audience worldviews, one should appreciate that shaping such understandings, particularly of foreign audiences, is a protracted and difficult affair. Moreover, it will not be achieved with words alone. As Miskimmon et al. (2013) explain, ‘one must assume that communication will fail; people are hard to convince’ (p.xi). In 1943, as Germany faced repeated defeats, Goebbels wrote that ‘at the moment we cannot change very much through propaganda: we must once again gain a big victory somewhere’ (Doob, 1950: p.442). There typically are not quick victories in the wars the West has recently being fighting, particularly counterinsurgencies. Propaganda, whether structured in narrative form or not, can only do so much.

REFERENCES Archetti, C. (2013) Understanding Terrorism in the Age of Global Media: A Communication Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baumeister, R., & Hastings, S. (1997) Distortions of Collective Memory: How Groups Flatter and Deceive Themselves. In Pennebaker, J., Paez, D. & Rime, B. (eds.) Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, pp.277–294. Berenskoetter, F. (2012) Parameters of a National Biography. European Journal of International Relations. 20(1), 262–288. Betz, D. (2008) The Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and Counterinsurgency. Small Wars and Insurgencies. 19(4), 510–540.

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Betz, D. (2015) Searching for El Dorado: The Legendary Golden Narrative of the Afghanistan War. In De Graaf, B., Dimitriu, G., & Ringsmose, J. (eds.) Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion and War: Winning Domestic Support for the Afghan War. New York: Routledge, pp.37–56. Betz, D. (2017) Putting the Strategy Back into Strategic Communications. Defence Strategic Communications. 3, 41–70. Bin Laden, Osama (2002) ‘Full Text: Bin Laden’s Letter to America’. Available at www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver [Accessed 15 January 2019]. Black, J. (2018) What is War? Available at https://defenceindepth.co/2018/06/11/ what-is-war [Accessed 12 June 2018]. Bolt, N. (2012) The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries. London: Hurst. Boudreau, B. (2016) ‘We Have Met the Enemy and he is us’: An Analysis of NATO Strategic Communications: The International Security Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, 2003–2015. Riga: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. Bruner, J. (2002) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Colley, T. (2017a) Is Britain a Force for Good? Investigating British Citizens’ Narrative Understanding of war. Defence Studies. 17(1), 1–22. Colley, T. (2017b) Britain’s Public War Stories: Punching Above its Weight or Vanishing Force? Defence Strategic Communications. 2, 162–190. Corman, S. (ed.) (2013) Narrating the Exit from Afghanistan. Tempe, AZ: Center for Strategic Communication. Davis, J. (ed.) (2002) Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. De Graaf, A., Hoeken, H., Sanders, J., & Beentjes, J. W. J. (2012). Identification as a Mechanism of Narrative Persuasion. Communication Research. 39(6), 802–823. De Graaf, B., Dimitriu, G., & Ringsmose, J. (2015) Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion and War: Winning Domestic Support for the Afghan War. New York: Routledge. Dimitriu, G. R. (2012). Winning the Story War: Strategic Communication and the Conflict in Afghanistan. Public Relations Review. 38(2), 195–207.

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Doob, L. W. (1950). Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda. The Public Opinion Quarterly. 14(3), 419–442. Ellul, J. (1973) Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitude. New York: Random House. Freedman, L. (2013) Strategy: A History. New York: Oxford University Press. Freedman, L. (2006) The Transformation of Strategic Affairs. Adelphi Papers, 379. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Fussell, C., Goodyear, C. W., & McChrystal, G. S. A. (2017). One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams. New York: Portfolio. Gaber, I. (2009). Exploring the Paradox of Liberal Democracy: More Political Communications Equals Less Public Trust. The Political Quarterly. 80(1), 84–91. Gates, R. (2007) Landon Lecture, Kansas State University. Available at www.k-state.edu/ media/newsreleases/landonlect/gatestext1107.html [Accessed 27 July 2018]. Georgakopoulou, A., & Goutsos, D. (2000) Revisiting Discourse Boundaries: The Narrative and Non-Narrative Modes. TextInterdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse. 20(1), 63–82. Getler, M. (1984) IRA Says It Bombed Thatcher’s Hotel. The Washington Post. Available at www.washingtonpost.com/archive/­politics/ 1984/10/13/ira-says-it-bombed-thatchershotel/21527b55-ffb3-434e-937ad81d4552cb09/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.5ac8e6d3d6de [Accessed 27 July 2018]. Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000) The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 79(5), 701–721. Haven, K. (2007) Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2009) Media and the Myth of Radicalization. Media, War & Conflict. 2(2), 107–110. Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2010) War and Media. Cambridge: Polity. Hughes, S. (2017) Verbalisation: The Power of Words to Drive Change. London: Verbalisation Limited. Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. J. (2011) Propaganda & Persuasion (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Krebs, R. (2015) Narrative and the Making of US National Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loyn, D. (2017) ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us’: A Review Essay. Defence Strategic Communications. 3, 207–222. Ministry of Defence (2012) Strategic Communication: The Defence Contribution, Joint Doctrine Note 1/12. Available at www.gov.uk/ government/publications/joint-doctrine-note1-12-strategic-communication-the-defencecontribution [Accessed 27 June 2018]. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2017) Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2013) Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. New York: Routledge. Morphew, C. C., & Hartley, M. (2016) Mission Statements: A Thematic Analysis of Rhetoric across Institutional Type. The Journal of Higher Education. 77, 456–71. NATO (2015) NATO Strategic Communications Handbook Version 9.1.21. Available at www. lymec.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/TT140221-NATO-STRATEGIC-COMMUNICATIONS-HANDBOOK-DRAFT-FOR-USE-2015-BI. pdf [Accessed 19 July 2018]. Nissen, T.E. (2012) Narrative Led Operations: Put the Narrative First. Small Wars Journal. Available at https://smallwarsjournal.com/ jrnl/art/narrative-led-operations-put-thenarrative-first [Accessed 27 May 2019]. Nye Jr., J. (2004) Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. O’Shaughnessy, N. (2017) Putin, Xi and Hitler – Propaganda and the Paternity of Pseudodemocracy. Defence Strategic Communications. 2, 113–136. Petraeus, D. (2010) Counterinsurgency Concepts: What We Learned in Iraq. Global Policy. 1(1), 116–117. Pomerantsev, P. (2014) Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare. Available at www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/ russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880 [Accessed 27 July 2018]. Rieger, D., Frischlich, L., & Bente, G. (2013) Propaganda 2.0: Psychological Effects of

Right-Wing and Islamic Extremist Internet Videos. Köln: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. Riessman, C. K. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. London: Sage. Roennfeldt, C. F. (2011) Productive War: A ReConceptualisation of War. Journal of Strategic Studies. 34(1), 39–62. Roselle, L., Miskimmon, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2014) Strategic Narrative: A New Means to Understand Soft Power. Media, War and Conflict. 7(1), 70–84. Schank, R. C. (1996) Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scheufele, D. A., & Tewksbury, D. (2006) Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models. Journal of Communication. 57(1), 9–20. Schmid, A. P. (2014) Al-Qaeda’s ‘Single Narrative’ and Attempts to Develop CounterNarratives: The State of Knowledge. ICCT Research Paper. Available at www.icct.nl/ download/file/Schmid-Al-Qaeda’s-Single-Narrative-and-Attempts-to-Develop-CounterNarratives-January-2014.pdf [Accessed 27 July 2018]. Simpson, E. (2012) War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics. London: Hurst. Slater, M. D., & Rouner, D. (2002) Entertainment – Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion. Communication Theory. 12(2), 173–191. Somers, M. R. (1994). The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach. Theory and Society. 23(5), 605–649. Sproule, J. M. (2001) Authorship and Origins of the Seven Propaganda Devices: A Research Note. Rhetoric and Public Affairs. 4(1), 135–143. Subotić, J. (2015). Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change. Foreign Policy Analysis. 12(4), 610–627. Tatham, S. (2008). Strategic Communication: A  Primer. Advanced Research and Assessment Group Special Series 08/28. Swindon: UK Defence Academy. Taylor, P. (2003) Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

4 From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

INTRODUCTION The distinctive contribution of this chapter lies in promulgating an idea of disinformation as self-service. It introduces two notions not normally surfaced by the public discourse that explain the phenomenon in terms of selfmanipulation rather than other-manipulation; disinformation as psychological crutch. The claim is that the purpose of disinformation is to serve the ideological and emotional needs of its perpetrators as well, such that it is not only other-deceit but self-deceit. And second, that the ‘victim’ of disinformation is by no means necessarily naive: the process could more aptly be described as a co-production, with the target being invited to join a shared fantasy. We ask why given its frequent crudeness does disinformation succeed – and locate the answer in our latent wish to believe. Moreover, the objective of disinformation is not necessarily to persuade but to sow division, to engender doubt, to foster acquiescence; and in all of this, actual belief does not necessarily play any role at all.

There was no golden age of Truth. P.M Taylor quotes a 1949 newsreel: ‘Union Square in New York was the backdrop for these scenes of red violence. From their ranks will come the saboteurs, spies and subversives should World War Three be forced upon America’. More generally, many of the most widely believed stories in history are the carcasses of long forgotten disinformation such as the claim that Queen Mary Antoinette of France said ‘let them eat cake’ (though in some stories it is brioche). She never said this, but disinformation works not because it is true but because it is plausible. Thus for Napoleon, history is ‘a myth which people choose to believe’: and, under his rule, conspiracies were ‘discovered’ and pseudoelections delivered (Taylor 1990). Disinformation is part of the larger conceptual realm of propaganda: so it means lying, but not always, and not necessarily: all propaganda is not disinformation but on the other hand all disinformation is propaganda. Disinformation does not have to be a complete

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lie; it can be largely or partly true and often is to make it more credible. But the reasons for the renaissance of disinformation as cognitive weapon do not lie primarily with the gullibility of the masses. A more probable explanation is the limited time people have available to search for truth, or the fact of ‘confirmation bias’ (where we merely wish to affirm their own perspective). Moreover, the reaction to disinformation is rarely belief but rather a general doubt and cynicism where everything is possible and nothing is true. This is a very different proposition from the notion of deluded masses as manifest in the titles of some works on propaganda such as ‘Easily Lead, A History of Propaganda’ (Thomson 1999). We assume publics are truth seekers who wish to avoid deception, as rationally they ought to be, but the reality is more nuanced. Persuasion does not always ask us for belief, but assaults us with propositions too absurd to be credible; like advertising or nonsense rhymes, they creep beneath our cognitive defences. We are playing not only on the credulity of our audience, we are inviting their participation in a collective fantasy in which both the target and the creator are complicit. We conspire to deceive even ourselves – this might, for example, explain the public acceptance of justificatory narratives for the Iraq War. A political fiction is something the politician very much wants to believe but knows may be untrue; it is not the same as a fantasy; nor is it a deception which is merely a tactical expedient to gain a desired end. A fiction is something deeper. The politician has a profound need for it that is not merely instrumental, in order to vindicate the ideal, the ideology, the worldview they embody. A politician is in this sense a novelist.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DISINFORMATION Disinformation is the hidden hand of history and it is neither a new invention nor something

created in the bowels of the Kremlin. The Old Testament story of Joshua at the Battle of Jericho is pertinent because it is one of the first recorded examples of the utility of fake news: Joshua and a tiny band of Israelites are able to take the city of Jericho via disinformation (Joshua 6 1: 27). Their night attack with torches, drums and cymbals gives the impression of a mighty army and the inhabitants of Jericho surrender. And this is a timely reminder that disinformation has been with us a long time: the myth of the Trojan horse for example – ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ – is perhaps the greatest fable of disinformation. The inference is that in the ancient world disinformation was a recognised resource in warfare. Its subsequent, toxic influence over the modern world is driven by the evolution in communication technology, that long journey via print, image reproduction, photography, recorded speech and film and radio; finally graduating at the end of the twentieth century into the phenomenon of the Internet, offering a vast new vista of disinformation. Disinformation and its related crafts played an outsize role in the story of the twentieth century. This role is especially associated with, but not confined to, the two great World Wars and the subsequent Cold War between Communism and the West. British disinformation in World War One was a sustained polemic on German brutality (and a protracted tutorial in method for the future Nazi leadership). Post-war the belief took root, specifically in Britain, that the atrocity propaganda surrounding the German invasion of Belgium was what we would call today fake news. In fact, as Philip Knightley (2000) reminds us, about 6000 Belgian civilians really were murdered by the German army; but imagination embroidered: ‘A Nurse Hume was said to have shot a German officer who had attacked a wounded Belgian, the Germans then cutting off her left breast. The story was in fact invented by her sister, later convicted for forgery, Nurse Hume herself never having left Huddersfield’. In post- 1918 Germany the new orthodoxy

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was that they had lost the war not because of inferior military skill but superior allied and British propaganda, of which disinformation was the key feature. Disinformation had been a key part of the Nazi script for seeking power, for wielding it and for waging war. The war itself was begun under a smokescreen of lies, the so-called Gleiwicz incident, manufactured to ‘prove’ a Polish attack on German soil as casus belli. Here the corpses of concentration camp inmates clad in German uniforms were riddled with bullets (O’Shaughnessy 2017). Then Hitler hectored the Reichstag. Yet disinformation was not just a phenomenon of the past, or a resource of the enemy. Disinformation had been an active agent in all late twentieth-century conflicts. There was that ‘dodgy dossier’ which the British government and security apparatus fabricated to ‘prove’ the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). The fact that there was no material evidence for them did not appear to matter; such illusory ‘existence’ was a pre-condition for the invasion of Iraq which otherwise would not have possessed a fig-leaf of legitimacy. Nor is disinformation merely a mechanism in politics, war or international relations: since it represents a tool for gaining access to power or resources, it is, improbably, a force in science as well. There is a venerable tradition of crackpot scientists, believed by publics or their leaders with catastrophic consequences, the great charlatans of scientific disinformation such as the Soviet fraud scientist Troyfim Lysenko. In our era a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, proclaimed the link between the MMR vaccine and autism (Deer 2011): thus many parents ceased to have their children vaccinated and his anti-vaccination movement, germinated in the UK, spread very quickly to California. As a result, populations of children began to lose herd immunity as vaccinations dipped below 80% of the population, and illnesses long marginalised were resurrected among them.

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WHY DISINFORMATION? ‘Hot’ disinformation is effective because there is a market for disinformation; in the end, people have a taste, a predisposition even, for it. Fake news is fun and has a swifter and deeper penetration of social media. ‘Cold’ information by contrast is more tedious, pedestrian and travels more slowly. MIT scholars found this was the case across all subjects, politics and urban legends of course, but business, science and technology too: False claims were 70% more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter. True stories were rarely re-tweeted by more than 1000 people, but the top 1% of false were routinely shared by 1000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people. (Lohr citing Vosoughi et al. 2018)

And bots, apparently, played very little part in this. The study covers 2009 to 2016: ‘The researchers identified more than 80,000 posts on Twitter that contain false claims and stories. Combined, those posts were re-tweeted millions of times’ (Lohr citing Vosoughi et al. 2018). Other research, reviewing ten years of Twitter and 126,000 stories tweeted by three million people, found the false stories had superseded the true ones because of their greater novelty value. For example, ChickA–Fil never ran a ‘We don’t like blacks either’ marketing campaign. But this false (and utterly non-credible) ‘news’ got 200 retweets in just over four hours (Lohr 2018). Underlying the fog of disinformation is undoubtedly the fragmentation of traditional media. Nearly two-thirds of adults in the United States are now getting some of their news on social media, according to the Pew Research Centre, a polling outfit (Economist 2016)., Specifically, the decline of the great news channels such as NBC and even CNN was balanced by the ascent of cyberspace-enabled partisan media, and the rich opportunities that gave for contrarian and non-orthodox perspectives.

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Such were the press closures/ redundancies at the end of the century’s first decade that we now had ‘26,000 fewer reporters, editors, photographers, and columnists to cover the world, analyse political and economic affairs, root out corruption and abuse, and write about culture, entertainment, and sports’ (Massing 2009). The decline of quality journalism was such that ‘the parasite is slowly killing the host’. The world we were losing ‘involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards’ (Massing 2009). This rise of disinformation is thus explained by the merging of news with propaganda and entertainment, which became the most serious threat to public understanding in our time: the news no longer existed to serve the ideal of objectivity. But its production has been so contaminated both by the thrust for market share and by the partisan agenda-driven values of its proprietors, that what emerges is pure obfuscation – no better seen than in Fox News’s reporting of the Iraq war. Then there is the democratisation of political expression itself. People are no longer just spectators but participants and this is significant as a source both of sabotage and reformation in national and international public life We are inadvertently creating a new kind of world – for example, the ‘polemical excesses’ of the blogosphere. Blogs in other words are ferociously partisan and their links connect to similar polemicists; alternative opinions are mercilessly excoriated (Massing 2009) (even Isis operated via the online, open-source approach, relinquishing corporate control but permitting thousands of amateurs to self– author their recruitment propaganda). The ostensible ubiquity of disinformation is popularly attributed to the indolence, the inertia of the Internet media giants including Google. When a Facebook executive was questioned as to why the conspiracy site Infowars was permitted – it has consistently rubbished the truth of the Sandy Hook

school massacre – he replied that InfoWars was merely a publisher with ‘a different point of view’ (Manjoo 2018). And in the 2016 US Presidential campaign, ‘Facebook was a primary vector for misinformation and statesponsored political interference and Facebook still seems paralysed over how to respond’ (Manjoo 2018). Yuri Miller, the Russian founder of Mail.ru, ‘had received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian government which he invested in Facebook and Twitter’ (Vaidhyanathan 2018). Their case rests essentially on the claim that they are more analogous to public utilities such as water providers than a publisher: what they offer is a conduit and nothing more. But they have been forced to change that public posture. These revelations – and the executives of these Internet service providers must have known about them for a very long time – go beyond even an uber-liberal interpretation of free speech, tolerating everything. For Google and Facebook turned themselves into a kind of toxic sump into which the assorted poisons of mankind were decanted, among them jihadist terrorism, and also rabid anti-Semitism. Mark Zuckerberg continued to permit Holocaust denialism because ‘there are things that different people get wrong’ (Manjoo 2018).

THE AIMS OF DISINFORMATION Objective: Acquiescence not belief. One purpose and object of disinformation is to create, sustain and amplify divisions within a rival political party, a government, a coalition. Disinformation is a strategy of political control; internally, within the nation state, its object is acquiescence not belief. Thus, maybe we are asking the wrong questions about aims and objectives. What regimes seek is external compliance. Such governments may be disbelieved even when they speak truth; indeed, one Chinese poet/political commentator (Han) actually thinks the Chinese Communist Party would be embarrassed by a genuine

From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past

display of public approbation (Link 2013). They are asking their citizens not so much to deny as to selectively see. People must focus and ignore the peripheral vision. Objective: sow division. But, externally, disinformation can also be a tool of national strategy with the aim of sabotaging international consensus, a weapon against a hostile nation or coalition. It becomes therefore a method of leveraging advantage in international relations, a hegemonic tool. Thus, Russia’s methodology in the US Presidential election was to amplify extant divisions by focussing on symbolically charged value issues and ruthlessly exploiting them, and elevating the Trump candidacy not by creating a new negative persona for Clinton but rather by fostering and canalising existing perceptions (Shane 2017). But while the notorious Facebook ads that Russia purchased did sometimes speak of the candidates, they were mostly issue oriented – focussed on ‘divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum – touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights’ according to Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos (Shane and Goel 2017). In other words, they sought merely to polarise Americans, for example, some ads pretended to celebrate ultra-liberal perspectives. Facebook subsequently claimed to have discovered a further 2200 ads (US$50,000) that were less easily attributable to Russia (Shane and Goel 2017). The disinformation technique is thus concealed message origin, what appears to be derived from activists, patriots, concerned citizens and so on, actually emerges from an alien and hostile state. But how impactful was fake news really in 2016? One study suggested that fake news was only a small proportion of the total news consumed by people in the 2016 US Presidential election; thus as a researcher ‘we have to be very careful about making the inference that fake news has a big impact’ (Lohr 2018). Objective: sow confusion. The sluice gates of disinformation create not belief

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but perplexity: everything, and nothing, is believable anymore, the pre-conditions for political paralysis. Lying is a strategy; the aim is obscurantist, the object not to create belief but spread confusion, and such regimes do not seek the affection of other nations. They know they cannot get it. One is reminded of Mark Twain’s aphorism, that a lie can travel halfway round the world while truth is still tying up its shoelaces. This creation of confusion externally, this sowing of doubt, is matched internally by the cultivation of a docile and submissive public – which does not equate with a trusting public. The Kremlin did not deceive the other nations: but it did confuse them. Traditional methods of Russian espionage include Kompromat, of course (which can be genuine or fabricated); but also Maskirovka, which is obfuscating truth in a haze of confusion; and Provocatsiya, a provocation or deliberate hoax (Macintyre 2017). Objective: doubt. The spreading of doubt is a very effective genre of disinformation since credible phenomena can seldom be proven absolutely. There is always the possibility of doubt, and through this rhetorical crack disinformation seeps in. This was the technique used to defend the cigarette industry from the time it first came under attack: ‘Beginning in 1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was no scientific basis for the claim that cigarette smoking is dangerous’, and ‘The most devious part of the campaign was the underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim’. One tobacco company executive wrote that ‘DOUBT is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public’ (Nordhaus 2012). This disinformation technique has served corporations and corporate purveyors of toxic products very well indeed. They can demand unrealistic standards of truth, and when this is not forthcoming doubt is cast. The methodology of doubt is central to the

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defence of organisations offering products which are under assault from the scientific community. There can be critiques of methodology, critiques of statistics, a plausible rationale can always be found to cast doubt on an apparently watertight scientific case. Science can be sabotaged with pseudoscience: credibility can always be destroyed by the application of meretricious counterarguments. Disinformation is the child of our need for rational explanation as well as our willingness to consume fantasy, and of the effective exposition of the pseudo-rational. Argument is polished with the veneer of objectivity. The aim is to perplex, for where we cannot persuade there is always the alternative which is to rhetorically create a dense mist of confusion. As long as they are able to undermine the argument that ‘scientists say’, science’s adversaries have not so much won the debate as kept it in a limbo where it will remain. Where claims of civic comfort or political rectitude transcend those of scientific truth: when the uninformed supersede the informed, the consequences are predictable. The problem is that we are polluting the wellsprings of public information and the climate debate is a very good example. Thus, Texas Governor Rick Perry was apparently certain that global warming was ‘self evidently a con cooked up by grant hungry scientists’ (Tomasky 2011). This is the polemicisation of policy. Indeed, one poll found that 43% of Republicans believe climate change is not happening at all compared with 10% of Democrats (Economist 2016).

THE METHODOLOGY OF DISINFORMATION Lies – historical impact of deception. Lying and deceit are part of the core definition of disinformation and indeed what many would imagine to be its essential method. As we have seen the notion is broader than this. Nevertheless, what the Chinese call the ‘wind

of falsification and embellishment’ (Rawski 2002) are indeed important, and a high- risk activity continuously indulged by parties, states, politicians. Donald Trump, of course, is an offender: ‘Pants on Fire’, a fact checking website, convicts Trump of lying more than any other candidate (Economist 2016). But other Presidents lie. Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, thus precipitating America’s Vietnam crisis. And in 1986, Ronald Reagan initially denied the weapons for hostages deal with Iran, saying later: ‘My heart and best intentions tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it’s not’ (Economist 2016). Then there were George W. Bush’s assorted fictions, for example, that Saddam Hussein had sought yellow cake uranium from Niger which was a conscious lie (Bromwich 2010). Why does lying succeed? And this remains an enigma – if lies are easily exposed, and their exposure sabotages the credibility of the political actor, how to explain their persistence as a tactic? For example, the ‘Kuwaiti babies atrocity’ was a lie perpetrated by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States (under the auspices of the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton), who posed as a shocked witness to Iraqi soldiers storming through a hospital and tearing babies out of incubators (O’Shaughnessy 2004). Subsequent exposure was irrelevant since events had moved on and nobody was interested anymore. President George Bush had even recounted this imaginary tragedy in a speech to American troops; the trouble is that it did not happen (O’Shaughnessy 2004). Yet deceitfulness is hardly an American political monopoly and other democracies furnish even more outrageous examples. Nothing quite matches the flesh tones of Berlusconi’s Italy. Scandals for example possess a distractive utility and thus were regularly manufactured – Berlusconi was ‘able to make and unmake scandals at will’ (Stille 2010). Another reason for the perpetuity of disinformation is the evanescent nature of

From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past

political and public attack and negativity. Time marches on, and when the fiction or the rumour is finally exposed the public is no longer interested. Exposure of disinformation is often easy: for example, allegedly US-made packages of goods that were the backdrop to a Bush speech were exposed by the New York Times as having their ‘Made in China’ stickers pasted over (New York Times 2003). But did it matter? While their lying may leave a stain on the pages of history and besmirch the reputation of parties and politicians, another view would suggest that in fact these exposures are quickly forgotten. For example, the deceitful allegations of the Swiftboat Veterans (founded to expose the ‘fraudulence’ of John Kerry’s Vietnam heroism, see below) were showcased by the ‘new’ media, and their subsequent falsification by the ‘old’ media was honourable but useless. Karl Rove for example was past-master of the liquid libel, allegations that would seep into a campaign, toxify it and then dry out without a stain as everyone would have forgotten and move away: ‘Rove means evidence that only appears credible, evidence that sprays fast enough and drips far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on’ (Bromwich 2010). Forgery in history. Forgery is a frequent tool in the disinformation toolbox. There was the Zinoviev letter, released on the eve of the British 1924 general election and purporting to be from the Soviet foreign minister Zinoviev to the Labour Party in fraternal support (Bennett 2018). The orthodox view is that it was apparently concocted by Conservative party officials and MI5. Some modern scholarship has suggested it did not in fact affect the Labour vote, the traditional assumption, but it did on the other hand prove instrumental in the collapse of the Liberal Party during that election. Such deceit is a part of the political art since times immemorial, but it degrades politics and civic society; for example, the engineering of fake imagery, specifically, a fake image of John Kerry with Jane Fonda (Watson 2004) at an anti-Vietnam

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war rally (it mysteriously emerged during the 2004 Presidential campaign: but they were never together). But the status of disinformation as historical actor and as causal mechanism was significant throughout the twentieth century. There is history’s greatest fabrication, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Ben-Itto 2005), a creation of the Czarist secret police under the influence of an orthodox priest, Serge Nillius, based apparently on a nineteenthcentury French satire: it purported to unmask the existence of a Jewish master plan for world dominion prepared by the leaders and enigmatic godfathers of ‘Zion’. Its plausibility, to the extent that it was plausible, was because of the first Zionist International, a conference at Basel Switzerland in August 1897: but there was nothing secret about that and no plan for global hegemony. And yet The Times newspaper was briefly taken in and Henry Ford had the tract published in the United States. The Times asked (May 8, 1920) ‘have we, by straining every fibre of our national body, escaped a Pax Germanica only to fall into a Pax Judaica?’ The ‘Protocols’ became an essential text of Nazism, their final demolition being before the law courts in Switzerland in a legal case which exposed their fraudulent and fantastic nature (the Berne Trial 1933–1935). Forgery Today. The masters of social mediaenabled disinformation are the Russians. Inmates of Russia’s ‘troll farms’ concoct fake narratives for global consumption to sabotage Russia’s enemies, the United States, Ukraine and so on; they troll online; they argue on websites (Dale 2015). Their stories emerge on social media and they are also fostered by a Russian propaganda organisation called the Internet Research Agency (which was created by Putin). That the government of a major foreign power intervened radically in a US presidential election is without precedent. Thus, a combined FBI-CIA-NSA report accused hundreds of Russian trolls of trashing Hilary Clinton (Shane and Goel 2017); for example, in 2016, Melvin Redick of

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Harrisburg PA, ‘a friendly looking American with a backward baseball cap and a young daughter’, posted on Facebook (June 8, 2016) a link to a fresh new website: ‘These guys show hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and all the leaders of the US. Visit at the hashtag DC Leaks website. It’s really interesting!’ (Shane and Goel 2017). But this man was a phantom American. And similarly with Twitter, where many, even thousands of fake accounts broadcast antiHilary polemics. Facebook subsequently (September 6, 2017) closed several hundred Kremlin- linked accounts. The legitimacy of the 2016 US Presidential result (and indeed of Brexit, Britain’s Europe Referendum) is hence now widely questioned. Alternative narratives. The offer is of an alternative narrative that neither substitutes for nor destroys the orthodox one but merely queries it, surfacing a pre-existent distrust of government and media. The methodology of Russia Today (RT), which targets 100 countries, is this advocacy of an alternative narrative; the Skripal poisoning, for example, was represented as a convenience for the British government so as to obscure their contortions over Brexit (Dimbleby 2018). The consequence is not disbelief, but unease, and pervasive cynicism. Such alternative narratives enter the bloodstream and become part of the general discourse, so that their tainted source of origin is forgotten. This was vividly illustrated by the saga of the iconic Syrian White Helmets (Solon 2017), a relief worker group created by the British and tasked with rescuing the injured from the pitiless bombings by Russia and Bashir Assad. They became indeed an almost sacerdotal symbol, their heroism captured on the nightly news as they carried the broken bodies to safety under fire. Such images were the best anti-Assad propaganda. But very quickly allegations, often retailed on the Russian international channel RT, began to circulate that the White Helmets had ties to Isis, an effective piece of disinformation. It  was essential that the Assadist/Putinist propaganda regime discredit them – while

it did not of course achieve this, it did succeed in generating widespread doubts. For example, The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a collection of British academics, has been accused of endorsing the activities of Assad partisans who circulate lies about the Syrian war (York 2018) Pseudo-realities. Reality, for such governments, is a blank screen upon which they can scrawl their ideas and febrile dreams; events, even history itself, can be created, cancelled or reimagined through the agency of rhetoric. The point is their essential plasticity: the government is an engineer of perception and this is not politics as conventionally understood. Events are a site of construction, they are organised and built, their outcomes are pre-determined. For such a political concept to operate disinformation is an essential, alongside such derivatives of disinformation as pseudo-events: ‘In the course of their training, they (the KGB) learned that events cannot be allowed to just happen, they must be controlled and manipulated’ (Applebaum 2012). Thus, the director of the Isvetsia publishing house on one occasion opined that ‘image is not reality, but, rather, its reflection, which can be made positive’ (Institute of Modern Russia 2012). Libel. Lies become myths, and myths are perpetuated. And this has a long history: thus, the story of the Tonypandy ‘massacre’ in the South Wales coalfields, the myth that Home Secretary Winston Churchill had called in the troops to confront striking miners and that they had opened fire. But there were no troops in Tonypandy itself, and there was no massacre (Jenkins 2001). Hence, disinformation also darkens the reputation of historical actors. Negativity is also the default setting of American politics (‘crooked Hilary’ etc.). For many years now US political advertising, exempt from truth in advertising laws unlike commercial organisations, has cheerfully offered a theatre of deceit and fraud, the artifice and contrivance of merchandised insincerity. The disinformation on Obama stands in this tradition, the accusations that he was a Muslim, a terrorist or the fabrications of the so-called

From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past

‘birthers’ – the idea was that he is un-American. Thus, Newt Gingrich opined (September 2012) ‘what if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, but only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behaviour, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?’ (Klein 2012). Disinformation is also a process; it originates somewhere, obscure perhaps, a point of origin which is quickly forgotten as the untruth gathers momentum. The Drudge report is a nexus of disinformation – theirs was the Muslim Obama fib. But then the ‘sick Hilary’ smear emerged (via a photo of her losing her balance) which Fox News purloined, and then Guiliani urged people to google ‘Hillary Clinton illness’ (Egan 2016). Breitbart then amplified: according to Steve Bannon ‘I’m not saying that, you know, she had a stroke or anything like that, but this is not the woman we were used to seeing’. The final stage, the crescendo, in this biography of a libel was its inclusion in a Trump speech (Economist 2016). Outrageous lies solicit attention, and their free mass-media replication is an intensely economic form of proselytisation. It is not that many people actually see such commercials when they air, but subsequently, via their reproduction in television news and press. Hence 527 group attack ads penetrated the other commercial ‘noise’ (these legally constituted agitation groups were independent of campaigns and campaign finance rules, such as the Swift Boat Veterans). And in the 2004 Presidential campaign: The old-fashioned mainstream press was ignoring the claims of the Swifties, but on Fox News, the ‘fair and balanced’ cable network whose viewership was roughly 80% pro-Bush, the Swifties were getting plenty of air time. And not just on Fox … the Swifties had brought only a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of ads, but each played over and over -free – on the cable channels, CNN and MSNBC as well as Fox. The Swift Boat charges were the source of constant debate in the blogosphere. (Thomas and Newsweek Staff 2004)

The Republican achievement was to make Kerry’s heroism an issue while neutralising the record of their own candidate.

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Duplicitous rhetoric. Another method of disinformation is via duplicitous rhetoric. The modern persuader is no Pericles or Edmund Burke but a thoroughly modern rhetorician and hence is a labeller and a rebrander, re-branding unpleasant truths with pleasant names. He is an engineer of perception and understands the power of labels to direct thought; for example, the eminent Republican rhetorical tactician Frank Luntz, a pollster whose key understanding was that words, in fact, think for you (McKibben 2004). Deceitful rhetoric acquires a life of its own. It becomes reality because there is no truth outside rhetoric, and no force superior to it which creates, manages and directs perception: the rhetoric convinces both its creators and its victims, a curious kind of circularity. Thus, the pharmaceutical industry has become inter-alia a branch of disinformation. Take the example of shyness: it was originally designated as ‘social phobia’ in 1980. It had mutated into ‘social anxiety disorder’ by 1994. Glaxo Smith Kline then decided to promote social anxiety disorder as ‘a severe medical condition’. It got FDA approval (Angell 2009). Particle of truth. The Victorian Englishman Leslie Stephen observed ‘no good story is quite true’ (Hastings 2010). The most apparently deranged assertions can remain credible because not everything about their content is fiction. What is really being promulgated is an amalgam of truth and fiction, and the fiction illuminates the truth. So disinformation works not because it is untrue but because it is partly true, even though the truth secreted within it may be a thin sliver. For example, The Economist argued that the Leave campaigns, that successfully persuaded Britons to leave the EU, were based on ‘blatant misinformation’ – that Turkey was likely to join by 2020, and that the alleged £350 million weekly cost of the EU could be spent on the NHS (Economist 2016). And this is now the orthodox view. Yet, despite a level of deceitfulness, some other critiques from Leave hit their target because they resonated – in other

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words, Leave offered not a lie but a half-truth which the Remain campaign failed to really expose.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISINFORMATION Disinformation is effective because it energises confirmation bias (Nickerson 1988), that is, the tendency of new information to merely entrench further the fault lines of existing perspectives. We see what we want to see according to the concepts we possess and internalise, therefore, we may not ‘see’ murder, genocide even, when the radiant ideal blinds us to the real. We believe because we wish to: disinformation, even though it be only partially true or a complete fiction, is affirmative of perspective. This effect is sharpened by social media where we are speaking to our fraternity in a space populated largely by our own ideological cohort. Such disinformation creeps under our cognitive defences, it beguiles, eludes the evidentiary demands that we would normally exact in a different context. Google and particularly Facebook use algorithms which customise results, according to historic user preferences in the case of Google, and ‘likes’ in the case of Facebook: the unanticipated consequence has been to shield people from contrarian political perspectives and hence during the UK Europe Referendum users might see mainly either pro-Brexit or pro-Remain items, according to their historic usage (Economist 2016). Thus today, data analytics permit increased accuracy of targeting via tracking browser habits or demographics (Maheshwari 2016). Hence, Cambridge Analytica fed on ‘rich behavioural data on at least 87 million voters’ (Vaidhyanathan 2018). Disinformation also engineers polarisation effects via entirely imaginary distinctions, as manifest in the ‘Granfalloon technique’ (Turnbull et  al. 1988). This is a social psychology experiment where people are randomly divided up into

groups, and the groups assigned purely arbitrary labels to which their members begin to attribute coherent meaning. The consequence is to make us feel apart from those who are in fact like us, the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ or even group narcissism. Fear: emotion. Disinformation is the amanuensis of fear. Since public opinion is often passive, sometimes confused, the rhetorical evocation of threat can canalise and radicalise it, ostensibly resolving all ambiguity. In other words, it invokes the frightened child within us. The underlying psychology of this is supported by the thesis of Tversky and Kahneman (1978), which suggested that the dissatisfactions of loss are stronger than the satisfactions of gain. Specifically, disinformation nourishes conspiracy theories, which arise where people instinctively reject alternative and more rational explanations for public phenomena (such as error or incompetence). Conspiracy theories in particular are useful because they give coherence and meaning to the inchoate matter of public events. By evoking an opponent, often an elite, that is subversive and malign, they ostensibly explain the inexplicable, but they also elucidate ambiguity; they are a sensemaking device. Psychology-delusion. Disinformation exists to confirm the delusional worldview of its fabricators as well as to persuade others, which is sometimes a secondary consideration. Faith is needed to believe in something emotionally invested in, however absurd, but evidence can always be distorted in favour of the theory and to sell the delusion to others. Disinformation is integral to this process of rationalising the irrational and explaining away contrarian evidence, so we become reliant on continuous nonevidence-based assertions. Delusions happen because of our need to believe, a foolish course because we thus construct an entire world picture from faith not evidence. Trumpian history, for example, is fiction but not fraud since he appears to believe it: thus, General John Pershing had Muslim rebels shot with bullets bathed in pigs’ blood (Shear and Hebberman 2017).

From Disinformation to Fake News: Forwards into the Past

Only he did not. Trump also said, ‘there was no more Islamic terror for 35 years’. Untrue. Here as elsewhere it is unclear whether he consciously lies: a more likely explanation is that the concept of truth has a no meaning for him – an assertion is correct if it feels right, Steve Colbert’s notion of ‘truthiness’. Delusion though is not like lying or fakery (which are techniques). Delusion is not a technique and the disinformation produced to sustain it is believed by its creators not to be lying but a form of truth-telling. So, much disinformation is an earnest fiction that ministers to the needs of its creators as much as to its targets and is a guide to their real agenda. We can even, therefore, ‘feel something to be true while knowing it is false’ and thus people sometimes react as if they believe something is the case rather than actively believing it.

THE MEANING OF DISINFORMATION Fiction and the enigma of evidence. This ability to create a fully fictive or false world and think it real is a consequence of disinformation. Misconceptions also arise because of lack of skill in the evaluation of evidence and the filtering out of counter- evidence. If the Holocaust is a lie, then what is actually true? What does evidence mean anymore? Again, this presents the problem of evidence in disinformation and fake news: evidence however complete or tangible is apparently never enough, even if it would sustain the classic legal test of being beyond reasonable doubt, since unreasonable doubt can always be cast. But it is a testament to the world of deranged lunacy we now inhabit that some people were credulous of the ‘Pizzagate’ myth to the extent of one outraged partisan (Edgar Maddison Welch) appearing at the Washington restaurant Comet Ping-Pong with a semiautomatic to defend phantom children from the rapistical onslaughts of Hilary Clinton and her manic coterie (BBC Trending 2016); he fired three shots (December 4 2016).

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The disinformation, random or organised, following the tragedy of 9/11 is an eloquent re-affirmation of the power of collusive fantasy. There were, for example, the bizarre claims that American Airlines Flight 77 had not smashed into the Pentagon. But the more alarming feature was the widespread belief, persistent in the Middle East of course but even among some educated people in Western countries, that 9/11 had nothing to do with Al Qaeda but was in fact either a self-inflicted wound by the CIA, for whatever purpose; or was a crazy plot by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, or more generally something engineered by ‘the Jews’, with, naturally, persistent rumours that no Jew was killed at 9/11. So these are grotesque fables, and similarly the Sandy Hook fiction that the massacre (December 14, 2012) of 27 little schoolchildren and their teachers by a deranged former pupil (and perpetuated by Alex Jones on the Infowars site) was a charade (Garber 2018). The parents were driven to pursue court cases in order to prove that their murdered children were actually murdered (see, for example, a Daily Mail headline, December 4, 2018: ‘Father of six-year old boy killed in Sandy Hook shooting sues conspiracy theorists’; Associated Press 2018). Parallel reality. The methodology of disinformation therefore is not merely the preparation of fiction but something beyond that, the invention of a complete parallel reality. This reality has a density and coherence and an internal logic: not just a description of things that are not, but of things that might be and that may become. In that sense, it is aspirational: it just happens not to be true. And thus, ‘the age of neutral journalism has passed’, according to the Kremlin’s propaganda chief, it is impossible ‘because what you select from the sea of information is already subjective’ (Economist 2016). A British journalist ‘described Russia’s actions as an attempt to undermine the concept of objective reality itself’ before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2015 (Dale 2015). Patriotic, not literal, truth is what

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really matters: such that Russia, for example, continues to claim, despite overwhelming evidence, that it did not shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (17 July 2014), or it is completely innocent of the Salisbury ‘Skripal’ poisonings (March 4 2018) and other unexplained deaths. And Russia is active over a broad subversive front: the headlines began to proliferate such as ‘Russian Trolls Spread Discord Over Vaccine Safety’ (Glenza 2018). Moreover, in the eyes of the true chauvinist, lying is immorality in the service of morality; the nation’s honour, the state and the interests of civic solidarity are absolute imperatives that license duplicity in their service. The lower lie serves the higher truth. Benevolent lying is not the exclusive prerogative of authoritarian regimes: liberal democratic governments do it too (so as, for example, not to stigmatise vulnerable groups). Thus, Japanese determinedly un-remember World War Two – ‘as recently as 2008 the serving head of the Japanese air force was obliged to resign after publishing a study that suggested that his country’s wartime operations in China represented something close to an exercise in philanthropy’ (Hastings 2010). Not only the historic past but the contemporary present is invented; the Trump White House’s ‘Bowling Green massacre’ simply did not happen (BBC News 2017). And thus ‘If more than 16% of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a really big deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade – two years after they had invaded it’ (Egan 2016). In such a civic order, facts are what the public can be persuaded to believe are facts – for example, Aquila, hit by an earthquake, was one year later still bereft of any attempt at reconstruction, but Berlusconi’s television ‘had been running story after story about “the miracle” of the Abruzzo earthquake reconstruction efforts’ (Stille 2010). Hence ‘much of Berlusconi’s career has been dedicated to the concept that it is appearance and not reality that counts’. He has admitted as much: ‘Don’t you realise that something doesn’t exist – not an idea, a politician, or a product – unless it is on television?’ (Stille 2010).

DISINFORMATION AND TRUTH Fiction is a form of truth. Disinformation is at one level a superficial phenomenon, easily understood. But when probed, the idea of disinformation is capable of endless nuance and is one of the most subtle phenomena in politics and international relations. It carries deeper meanings: for example, as we have seen, the ostensible target of disinformation is visible but the secondary target, its creators, is necessarily hidden; yet it ministers to their political, power and psychological needs. Moreover, ‘what people believe generates consequences and becomes a kind of truth’; wars, for example, are what we believe them to be, ultimately, for such is the alchemy of myth and meaning that they cease to have an objective truth (Fernandez Armesto 2006). Fiction has a complex relationship to truth. Fiction is to the propagandist something other than a mere lie, it represents, even, a profounder form of reality, an alternative narrative which embodies the ideal state of affairs sought. Since the truth of any situation is elusive even to the historians who subsequently study it, fiction in fact becomes a kind of sense-making device. Fiction then is not untrue but another form of truth since it illuminates the deepest anxieties of the regime: their lies therefore need to be understood as something more than lies; in fact, they are the key to unlocking the belief systems and priorities of the government. Invitation to shared fantasy. The perpetuity of disinformation in history is because of the willingness of its victims to be complicit in their victimhood. We are making an offer of affiliation, soliciting their agency in a collective illusion where both creator and target, criminal and victim, are co-conspirators. George W. Bush had convinced Americans that the United States was pursuing war against the right enemy in the right place. Indeed, 42% of Americans thought Saddam was personally responsible for 9/11; 55% believed he gave direct support to Al Qaeda

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(Dowd 2003). There was, is and never has been the slightest thread of evidence, but it was something people badly wanted to believe. And so here is an example of disinformation which transcends the idea of disinformation, since, rather than only a calculating lie, it is a fantasy of completion, and therefore it becomes a kind of alternative truth. And Trump’s fictions are a co-creation of speaker and audience: ‘Mexico must pay for the wall’ or ‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive’ (Tweet, November 6 2012 at 8.15 p.m). Disinformation is what people sincerely wish to be true: moreover, since the false story could over time become true, they may in a sense think they are anticipating the news. When Donald Trump made claims (February 18 2017) about a terror attack in Sweden, it was seen as yet another instalment in the rhetorical career of history’s most famous liar; but he later claimed vindication since there was a riot in a migrant area two days after he said there had been an ‘attack’ (Borchers 2018).

IMPACT OF DISINFORMATION Can something so crude as disinformation ever really be called effective? And when we see the strings of the puppet, surely the manipulation ceases to work, or does it? The rise of science and universal education, and the evolution of an empiricist culture, seem to have had no effect on our credulous thirst for disinformation. There were the claims, widely believed among the US public, of an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the ultimate nexus of evil. Disinformation helps orchestrate events today, that much is obvious from every newspaper and every news bulletin. There is, for example, Brexit, and the unresolved question of covert Russian involvement. Disinformation plays a critical role in elections and is therefore a toxic poison in democracy: but it also

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affects even the search for scientific truth as well as relations between the nations. And it is an annex to war and potential cause of it. Local impact of disinformation. A new era represents a retreat from rationality and the triumph of the irrational. Never since the Third Reich has fantasy played such a role in public affairs. False beliefs of all kinds, from the global conspiracy against Islam that fuels ISIS/Al Qaeda to the claims that 9/11 was authored by the CIA, even doubts about the moon landing, fester and prosper. Disinformation is a disruptive force at the international but also at the national level. False information communicated via social media is inciting violence everywhere. For example, Facebook has been used to foment enmity through misinformation by populist regimes in the Philippines (Duterte), Kenya (Kenyatta) and India (Modi) (Vaidhyanathan 2018). But at the parish level, its effects can be truly murderous, as India has found with some recent incidents where WhatsAppenabled viral rumours about child snatchers have precipitated lynchings of innocent travellers (Goel et al. 2018); WhatsApp has onequarter of a billion Indian users (Confessore and Dance 2018).

CONCLUSION Disinformation creeps under our cognitive defences, it beguiles, eludes the evidentiary demands that we would normally exact in a different, non-leisure context. Thus, ‘there is the role of the Internet as lie factory and incubator of fabrication’ (Massing 2009). In such a climate, irrational, irrationalising, both credulous and incredulous, believing in both nothing and everything, the arrival of the ‘hollohoax’ is no surprise either: those fitful but recurrent attempts (most disgracefully through the midwifery of a genuine historian, David Irving), to prove that the Holocaust, the murder primarily by industrial process of six million Jews, was a fiction.

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The real value of disinformation is that it provides a source of authority for the government, which is then self-projected as the benevolent protector against subversive threats. And no successful autocracy can survive in rude health without the occasional or even permanent incorporation of disinformation into its propaganda: the enemy has to be found, retained, built up into something truly menacing. Regimes believe in the efficacy of disinformation; it is a kind of foundation principle of their republic. They seek self-perpetuity, which is why they are amoral in the defence of their power: they may not shrink from murder, but disinformation is part of their political technology and they will never discard it. The enigma of disinformation is that it often serves its producer rather than its intended consumer, both now and in history; leaders, regimes, whole groups of people believe their own lies. Hence in China under Mao: if the party leaders wish to make even the best minds swear that black is white, it was because they wanted to believe it themselves. Mao did not wish to know about terminal disaster. Every season had to produce a bumper harvest, every factory ever higher production figures, and every scientific experiment more extraordinary results, because that is what he wanted to hear. (Spence 2005)

And sometimes in history, more often than we perhaps realise, it is difficult to separate truth from fiction. One should never, for example, interfere with the founding myths of a regime whether they happen to be false, or true. A British officer, Reginald TeagueJones, was accused by the Bolsheviks of ordering the White Russian massacre (September 20, 1918) of the 26 Baku commissars who were the original martyrs for the Soviet state (Minassin 2014). His denials did not matter and Teague-Jones was forced into hiding for the rest of his long life, dying one year before the collapse of the Berlin Wall (November 1989). The Soviet Union celebrated those glorious deaths in literature, monument and art and they never forgot who

was ‘responsible’. The (complex) truth was irrelevant. But at the present moment, disinformation possesses a ubiquity and intensity that even threaten the fabric of democracy: disinformation seems to saturate everything such that nothing, no information source, remains entirely credible. Deceit is a resource of countries as well their private citizens, but in seeking to deceive others, they also lie to themselves so that information is tainted at source and, consequently, policy is dysfunctional. Authority is challenged. Deluded individuals affirm increasing faith in their own expertise, whether medical, rejecting the MMR vaccine for their children for example, to pedagogical, replacing state schools with their own home-schooling. The rise of individualism is a fact of our time but disinformation incentivises it. It is possible to be overly pessimistic and perhaps this destructive phenomenon is merely evanescent. It may be that we have simply experienced a mighty era of disinformation, perhaps the greatest in history. In time to come – perhaps – this malignant methodology will be much weakened by a more sceptical public and a greater alacrity of exposure.

REFERENCES Angell, M (2009), Drug companies & doctors: A story of corruption. New York Review of Books, January 15. Applebaum, A (2012), Vladimir’s tale. New York Review of Books, March 29. Associated Press (2018), Father of six-year old boy killed in Sandy Hook shooting sues conspiracy theorists who claim the massacre which left 26 people dead was really a ‘FEMA drill’. Daily Mail, December 4, 2018. BBC News (2017), Bowling Green Massacre: Trump aide cites non-existent attack. BBC News, February 3, 2017. BBC Trending (2016), The saga of ‘Pizzagate’, the fake story that shows how conspiracy

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theories spread. BBC Trending, December 2, 2016. Bennett, G (2018), The Zinoviev Letter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bible, The, Joshua at the Battle of Jericho, Joshua 6 1: 27 Ben-Itto, H (2005), The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers. Borchers, C (2018), I proved to be right: Trump again refers to an imaginary attack in Sweden. Washington Post, March 6, 2018. Bromwich, D (2010), The curveball of Karl Rove. New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010. Confessore, N and Dance, G (2018), Battling fake accounts, Twitter to slash millions of followers. New York Times, July 11, 2018. Dale, H (2015), Putin’s propaganda machine pumps out lies. Newsweek, June 13, 2015. Deer, B (2011), How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. British Medical Journal, 342:c5347. Dimbleby, D (2018), On a Russia in crisis and the holes in Russia’s defence. Sunday Times, June 10, 2018. Dowd, M (2003), The Xanax cowboy. New York Times, March 9, 2003. Economist, The (2016), Yes I’d lie to you. The Economist, September 10, 2016. Egan, T (2016), The dumbed down democracy. New York Times, August 27, 2016. Fernandez Armesto, F (2006), In times of deceit. Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 2006. Garber, M (2018), The lasting trauma of Alex Jones’s lies. The Atlantic, August 3, 2018. Glenza, J (2018), Russian trolls spread disorder over vaccine safety, The Guardian, August 24, 2018. Goel, V, Raj, S and Ravichandran P (2018), How WhatsApp leads mobs to kill in India. New York Times, July 21, 2018. Hastings, M (2010), Drawing the wrong lessons, New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010 (a review of Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan). Institute of Modern Russia (2012), The propaganda of the Putin era (Part Two): The Kremlin’s tentacles. December 5, 2012. Jenkins, R (2001), Churchill. London: Pan.

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Knightley, P (2000), The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from Crimea to Kosovo (revised edition). London: Prion Books. Klein, E (2012), Block Obama! New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012. Link, P (2013), China: capitulate or things will get worse. New York Review of Books, October 24, 2013. Lohr, S (2018), The attraction of false news and why it is spreading so fast. New York Times. March 10, 2018. Macintyre, B (2017), Putin and the Russian art of Kompromat. The Times, April 1, 2017. Maheshwari, S (2016), In fake news, ads are costly to conscience. New York Times, December 27, 2016. Manjoo, F (2018), Once nimble Facebook trips over calls to control content. New York Times, July 20, 2018. Massing, M (2009), The news about the Internet. New York Review of Books, August 13, 2009. McKibben, B (2004), Crossing the red line. New York Review of Books, June 10, 2004. Minassin, T T (2014), Most Secret Agent of Empire. London: Hurst Publishers. Nickerson, R S (1988), Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2): 175–229. New York Times (no author) (2003), Made in China/A Bush Tableau Demurs. January 23, 2003. Nordhaus, W (2012), Why the global warming sceptics are wrong. New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012. O’Shaughnessy, N J (2004), Politics and Propaganda; Weapons of Mass Seduction. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. O’Shaughnessy, N J (2017), Putin, Xi, And Hitler: Propaganda and the paternity of pseudo democracy. Defence Strategic Communications (the official journal of NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence) Vol 2 (Spring). Rawski, T P (2002), Beijing’s fuzzy math. Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2002. Shane, S (2017), To sway vote, Russia used army of fake Americans. New York Times September 8, 2017. Shane, S and Goel, V (2017), Fake Russian Facebook accounts brought $100,000 in

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political ads. New York Times, September 6, 2017. Shear, M D and Hebberman, M (2017), Volume rising in nativist talk from President. New York Times, August 18, 2017. Solon, O (2017), How Syria’s white helmets became victim of an online propaganda machine. The Guardian. December 18, 2017. Spence, J (2005), A portrait of a monster. New York Review of Books. November 3, 2005 (a review of Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday). Stille, A (2010), The corrupt reign of Emperor Silvio. New York Review of Books, April 8, 2010. Taylor, P M (1990), Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomson, O (1999), Easily Led: A History of Propaganda. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Thomas, E and Newsweek Staff (2004), Election 2004., New York: Public Affairs.

Tomasky, M. (2011), Republican days of wrath. New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011. Turnbull, W, Miller, D T and McFarland, C (1988), Self-inference processes. The Ontario Symposium, 6(6): 115. University of Western Ontario, editors J M Olsen and M P Zanna. Tversky, A and Kahneman, D (1978), Prospect theory: An analysis of decision making under risk. Econometrica 47(2): 263–292. Vaidhyanathan, S (2018), Facebook’s dangerous friends. New York Times, July 13, 2018. Vosoughi, S, Roy, D and Aral, S (2018), The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380): 1146–1151. Watson, R (2004), Kerry and Fonda war protest picture is an internet fake. The Times, February 18, 2004. York, C (2018), Whitewashing war crimes: How UK academics promote pro-Assad conspiracy theories about Syria. Huffington Post, August 22, 2018.

5 Post-Truth and the Changing Information Environment Ignas Kalpokas

INTRODUCTION Post-truth is perhaps best described as a manifestation of ‘a qualitatively new dishonesty on the part of politicians’ who, instead of being merely economical with the truth, ‘appear to make up facts to suit their narratives’ (Mair 2017: 3), leading to ‘the diminishing importance of anchoring political utterances in relation to verifiable facts’ (Hopkin and Rosamond 2017: 1–2). Hence, post-truth is qualitatively new in the sense that facts are not simply twisted or omitted to obfuscate reality but, instead, new realities are discursively created to serve a political message. Consequently, the traditional standard of truthfulness – anchoring utterances to verifiable facts – has lost its importance: the very distinction between factual truth and falsehood has become irrelevant (see also Kalpokas 2019). In this sense, it is wrong to claim that ‘post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie’ (McIntyre 2018: 9) since

nobody (even, arguably, the propagators of post-truth narratives themselves) expects the facts to change – what matters is only public preference for one set of facts over another. Crucially, since factual correctness has become unimportant (thus also making the term ‘lie’ counter-productive), there is no need for the facts to change. As correctly noted by Holmstrom (2015: 124), ‘[t]ruth, as in a fact or piece of information, has no intrinsic value’. Instead, the value of a truth-claim is discursively created through a story that captivates the target audience. In this situation, one might reasonably claim that ‘truth is simply a matter of assertion’ (Suiter 2016: 27); however, that assertion must be effective (people have to start believing in the assertion). Indeed, it is this effectiveness of assertion that has become the key indicator and measure of truthfulness. In order to demonstrate how the shift towards post-truth has happened, this chapter opens with the discussion of mediatisation and a shift from the Information Age, ushered by the advent of the

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Internet, to the Experience age, brought about by ubiquitous socialised connectivity and the associated an overflow of information and data. Following that, the key psychological, technological, and political aspects of posttruth will be elucidated to get a multifaceted picture of the present condition.

MEDIATISATION AND AFFECT It is already becoming something of a truism that today ‘the social world is not just mediated – it is mediatized’ or, in other words, ‘changed in its dynamics and structure by the role that media continuously […] play in its construction’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 15). In the broadest sense, mediatisation refers to the media coming not only to constitute an integral part of the operations of other institutions but also to subject those institutions to the media’s own logic (Hjarvard 2008: 106; see also Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013: 342). To that effect, ‘mediatization implies a process through which core elements of a social or cultural activity (like work, leisure, play etc.) assume media form’ (Hjarvard 2014: 48). Crucially, the ‘media’ of mediatisation have to be taken broadly because our experience of the lived environment is also made increasingly dependent on search engines, algorithms, and databases and their respective functions of retrieval, ranking, and organisation/storage (Andersen 2018). In other words, our ability to obtain and process information about a relevant aspect of the environment is progressively dependent not only on the straightforward supply of information (as in news media, social media etc.) but also on the ease of searching and retrieving that information which is itself determined by the algorithmic ranking of potential results (and the criteria that have been built into such algorithms) while the material basis of this world seems to be located in the organised storage of databases that, in effect, determine what is to be known about the world as a grand total.

Society as a whole (and not just disparate spheres) is increasingly becoming mediatised, namely, submitted to media logic, particularly to the media constituting ‘a realm of shared experience’, that is, ‘a continuous presentation and interpretation of “the way things are”’ (Hjarvard 2008: 126), thereby helping individuals build communal identities while simultaneously allowing for greater control over friendships and information exchanges through the ability to intentionally stage and articulate their interactions (Hjarvard 2008: 123–126). But perhaps even more fundamentally, the self has been mediatised as well. This development manifests itself on at least two distinct levels: digital personality (re)construction and mediatisation of communication. As for the former, the capacity to identify, sort, and label individuals in accordance with their likes, clicks, and connections enables ‘the construction of […] digital doubles or doppelgangers’, thereby creating ‘unprecedented opportunities to reach into the most intimate corners of everyday life and direct attention and action’ (Murdock 2017: 131). The existence of such datafied doppelgangers allows personalised tailoring of both services and information in order to maximise consumer experience and satisfaction. The second level, meanwhile, arises from the ubiquity and personalisation of media use, as manifested by near-permanent immersion in smartphones and other devices (Miller 2014). Consequently, not only our relationship with the environment becomes increasingly indirect, happening through media-rich devices, but also interpersonal communication and interaction get the same treatment, becoming, among other things, disentangled from the constraints of time, space, and physical conditions. Instead of direct communication, one resorts to rather nebulous interaction between digital doppelgangers. Such interactions are often non-dialogical and can easily be devoid of a verbal element (as in e.g. liking or sharing somebody’s social media post). In the above context, community-building must rely on ‘mediated feelings of connectedness’ (Papacharissi 2016) and online ‘flows

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of affect’ (Döveling et al. 2018). The latter is of utmost importance, being ‘something people engage in, a practice of relational nature’ (Döveling et  al. 2018: 2) and thereby providing a glue that bonds communities together through ‘flows of affect’ (Giaxoglou and Döveling 2018). Notably, not all of such communities are strictly intentional – they can be automatically created through algorithmic sorting of profiles in accordance with the digital traces that each person leaves through their online behaviour (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 168). No less importantly, the presence of dominant affective flows provides a normative and ordering input, setting some emotions as default at the expense of others (Döveling et al. 2018: 2) and thereby according dominant position to certain ideas, stories, and interpretations. Nevertheless, such prioritisation happens precisely on an affective basis and not courtesy of factual reality. That, as will be shown in the sections that follow, is one of the enabling factors of post-truth. Moreover, this relegation of factual reality has direct implications for actors who rely on public approval, such as politicians who have to partake in and source their agenda from mediatised affective flows (see Mazzoleni 2017: 142). In terms of communication, therefore, induction of the necessary affect, instead of strict facticity, becomes the main value factor of an utterance. Likewise, strategically inducing ritualised collective outbursts of shared affect to unite supporters both online and offline, such as the ‘Lock her up’ chants and hashtag ubiquitous in the 2016 Trump campaign, becomes crucial in mobilising and retaining the electorate – much more so than the actual substance (or lack thereof) underpinning the affect.

THE EXPERIENCE AGE Another major premise of post-truth (and one deeply intertwined with mediatisation) is

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the passing from the Information Age to the Experience Age (for a general discussion, see Kalpokas 2019). The change itself is relatively straightforward: while the Information Age (still the buzzword for many) was ushered in by the advent of the Internet, offering seemingly unlimited amounts of information at anybody’s fingertips, the Experience Age is a means of dealing with a predictable side-effect: information overload. Indeed, today’s media environment is characterised by abundance, interactivity, and mobility (Mazzoleni 2017: 140–141), creating a need to ‘drastically select from the environment […] to make it more manageable’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 113). The latter necessity is further amplified by the incessant nature of interaction with the media, caused by ‘the push towards constant connectivity and 24/7 living’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 108). In fact, a key problem is that not only we now face a lack of time in reacting to information and/or utterances directed at us but also, and perhaps even more importantly, we do not have the time to interpret and make sense of them (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 114). And if everything is happening and changing quickly, why waste time verifying and thinking – emotional connection acts as an effective substitute. In this new environment, what matters is a momentary experiential ‘click’ that either does or does not happen as we are skimming through all the different options competing for our attention. And those options include a broad range of media, from reputable news websites to conspiracy theory websites to messaging and gaming apps. An option simply has to offer greater consumer satisfaction than any competitor. That is the reason behind, among other things, the emphasis on parties, movements, politicians, and ideas being new, fresh, bold, and breaking the mould, such as in as was the case with, for example, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Austria’s Sebastian Kurtz, or new political forces in Spain (first Podemos and then, on the opposite side of the spectrum, Vox).

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We are, essentially, entering a pleasure economy in which the main object of competition is attention and the key resource is data. The intense competition over information arises from the density of today’s media landscape and is reinforced by the dominance of ‘entertainment, popular culture, consumption, and massive amounts of information’ (Dahlgren and Alvares 2013: 54). Moreover, since the media of today ‘offer intense experiential immersions with strong affective valences’ (Dahlgren and Alvares 2013: 54), it should come as no surprise that consumers of the media’s offering expect simply being entertained by and engaged with content in a pleasurably experiential way (Newman 2016). In this context of ample attractions and distractions and competing valences, the pinnacle of power becomes attracting, managing, and retaining attention as such (Harsin 2015: 332). Indeed, our attention is a scarce resource that cannot be dedicated to everything and anything simultaneously; however, since audience attention generates revenue, it has become an object of fierce competition in which content related to news and public affairs is merely one of many options at hand (Stroud 2017: 479), again having to strive to outperform competition in terms of generating pleasurable experiences. Customer experience is now the key driver and generator of value, meaning that the customer must be at the centre of the offering not only in terms of product design but also in terms of purchase and consumption experience, which must be as unchallenging, comfortable, and pleasurable as possible and feel seamless and tailored. It is an expectation familiar to almost any consumer of today. After all, we can get the product anyway (at least in economically advanced societies), so we buy experience. Hence, with consumer experience having become ‘a key competitive differentiator’, necessitating the feeling of being ‘uniquely understood and important’ (Wladawsky-Berger 2018), the Experience Age can also be called the ‘me age’ as competitive advantage typically belongs to the

kind of content that ‘makes the consumer a star’ (Newman 2016). Aiming to create the most pleasurable experiences possible, the sellers (of goods, services, information, or ideas) tend to submit themselves to the centrality of the customer’s ‘me’, striving to ensure that every consumer of their offering receives the highest degree of personal(ised) satisfaction (with the processes of acquisition, consumption, and post-consumption – i.e. the feel-good factor about having consumed) as possible. To do that, acquisition (collection or purchase) and interpretation of huge amounts of data is key – one must know what the consumer is like, what they think, wish, expect, and desire in order to satisfy such demands that may, even at the time of satisfaction, still be merely subconscious. That, in turn, leads to further growth of consumer expectation of ‘me’-centric satisfaction with whatever they are engaging in, including consumption of news content. Moreover, emotions and experiences are themselves crucial driving factors of human action. As d’Ancona (2017: 31) rather dramatically puts it, ‘emotion is reclaiming its primacy and truth is in retreat’. Nevertheless, that should not come as a surprise. After all, ‘[i]t is the behavioural impulses generated by emotions that give or deny humans the energy to act on their perceptions’ (Markwica 2018: 87), which in itself is natural given that affects, emotions, and other subconscious processes appear to make up around 98 per cent of brain activities (see e.g. Franks 2014). Hence, even when engaging in a debate (on political or any other topics) and striving to prove something, one must also keep in mind what counts as proof in the eyes of the target audience – and that is usually emotion. Likewise, as already stressed with regards to mediatisation, in group formation and creation of following (which are, of course, of utmost importance in politics), ‘emotional resonance acts like a conduit bringing people together’, turning emotion into ‘a relational resource used for alignment’ (Döveling et al. 2018: 4). And that emotional-experiential

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aligning only further consolidates the present condition as the Experience Age, making it reasonable and logical to structure (political or other) programmes around emotions. Likewise, emotional alignment and personal experience, in a characteristic me-centric fashion, is becoming the key criterion for truthfulness, as characterised perhaps most (in)famously by Michael Gove, one of the figureheads of the Brexiteers: ‘People in this country have had enough of experts’ (YouTube 2016). In this line of thinking, expert knowledge is elitist and out of touch, whereas the allegedly more authentic experience and gut feeling of the people is taken to be the proper representation of reality. Same applies to Rudy Giuliani’s much-derided quip that ‘truth isn’t truth’ (NBC News 2018) – in a post-truth environment, truth indeed only acquires its truth status if it is experienced and felt as truth (same applies to statements that have no relationship with verifiable facts whatsoever).

INFORMATION (SELF-)TAILORING Changes to the way we access information are also of crucial importance. As people rely on social media for accessing information, what they see is determined by their friends’ sharing patterns and algorithmic judgement based on their own previous activities, leading to the formation of filter bubbles (see e.g. Mair 2017: 3). In other words, we are under dual constraints: first, our social media feeds are bombarded with content that our friends have interacted with, and the more homogenous our friend circle is, the more one-sided the information feed will be; and second, since the display of content is based on algorithmic judgement of what we like, the actual scope of vision is further narrowed down to prioritise content which is deemed to give us the pleasure of opinion confirmation (or be ‘relevant’ in corporate-speak) at the expense of the few dissenting voices. And it seems

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that such homophily of contacts is a rule rather than an exception – we are drawn to connect and interact based on perceived similarity of attributes, thereby giving rise to similarity of opinions and a need of cognitive closure (Song and Xu 2018). Of course, the social media filter bubble is quite likely a mere extension of the offline one as most people generally tend to immerse themselves in an environment that is congruent with what they hold dear; nevertheless, the crucial difference online is ‘the intensity and richness of technologically mediated social relationships through which information trickles’, that is, it is one of scale (Laybats and Tredinnick 2016: 204). Moreover, not only we can choose which friends we want to interact with and which ones to ignore (by filtering our online contacts) but also, as more and more activities – from shopping to government services to work – can be conducted online and do not necessitate leaving home, we can afford to minimise even the possibility of chance encounters, closing ourselves within our comfort zones. Once that is the case, it becomes extremely likely that unless we consciously seek information (about politics or any other sphere), we get dragged by the opinions and content shares of our friends. And since the ubiquity of news appears to be leading to a newsfinds-me approach whereby the intention to purposefully seek information is replaced by the expectation that general media use suffices because any important information will be encountered anyway (Gil de Zúñiga et al. 2017), the reliance on key nodes within our networks for information cues is only going to grow, decreasing competition between available truth-claims. The filter bubble further reinforces a psychological aptitude known as confirmation bias, meaning that we are likely to prioritise information similar to what we already believe instead of challenging our beliefs (see e.g. Mair 2017). As a result, ‘opinioncongruent information is rapidly and involuntarily associated with truthfulness’ and

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vice versa (Gilead et  al. 2018: 7; see also Ball 2017: 179). This is the aptitude that algorithmic ranking of content taps into: as we derive pleasure from getting our opinions confirmed, feeding us with such content makes perfect business sense, increasing consumer satisfaction and enticing us to spend more time on the platform, leading to higher advertising revenue. However, the nature of information access on social media (and online more broadly) also gives more agency to individuals to actively seek information: instead of being forced to consume several catch-all outlets, as was the case with traditional media, we are now capable of sourcing our information from outlets that tend to agree with our opinion (and the democratisation of information supply, brought about by the Internet, means that there are now outlets catering for even the most obscure tastes), while, in a clear display of me-centric behaviour, ignoring everything else. Indeed, confirmation bias does not involve merely passive acceptance or discarding: we are inclined to actively look for information that sustains our opinions (Ball 2017: 180). Hence, in the post-truth era, individuals are empowered to select and immerse themselves in a reality of their own choice, ultimately reinforcing the trend that ‘facts and objective evidence are trumped by existing beliefs and prejudices’; in this context, not only ‘it becomes permissible to believe whatever one wants’ but also ‘beliefs become harder to change because contrary evidence fails to find traction’ (Lewandowsky et  al. 2017: 361–362). The preceding clearly shows the me-centricity of putting oneself and one’s own opinions forth as the benchmark of veracity. Likewise, it is not at all surprising that corrections issued by fact-checkers are of very limited effectiveness: people tend to continue holding their beliefs despite being exposed to corrections; in fact, sometimes belief in misinformation might even increase, particularly when it relates to deeply held beliefs (Lewandowsky et al. 2017: 355; McIntyre 2018: 48). That is easy to understand – if individuals feel like

their pleasure in the ‘me’ is threatened, they leap to its defence. The above manifestation of me-centricity is, clearly, technologically enabled. In this case, the enabling factor has been the rise of the new media and the ensuing decline in importance of traditional journalistic practices and institutional news supply more broadly; in the face of such weakness of traditional media behemoths, the entire information ecosystem becomes fragmented (and virtually non-curated) and as a result ‘segments of the population are exposed to different facts, different spectra of opinion and different ideas about the legitimate boundaries of political discourse’ (Hallin 2018: 8). This change allows for accounts and counter-accounts of trends, events, or phenomena to be circulated and pitted against one another, turning society into ‘a continually evolving assemblage mixing diverse accounts’ that are themselves subsequently ‘remixed, circulated, and reproduced’, ultimately leading to a condition in which ‘[t]he dualisms of true/false, virtual/ real, or authentic/fabricated […] are being questioned and boundaries between these become blurred’ (Döveling et  al. 2018: 3). Likewise, whereas in the traditional media environment verifiability and source authority carried substantive weight, in the current condition, attention is more readily apportioned in accordance with popularity indicators, such as likes, comments, and shares (Stroud 2017: 482), once again implying the importance of immediate pre-cognitive ‘click’. In this context, political struggles easily blend with not only highly partisan thinking but also various shades of conspiracy theories, from ‘Pizzagate’ of the 2016 US presidential elections (the fake news story that the Clintons and their associates ran a paedophile ring from a Washington DC pizzeria) to the Hungarian government’s obsession with the financier George Soros and his alleged plots to foster immigration and otherwise destroy Hungarian cultural identity (see e.g. Rankin 2019).

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MAXIMISING AUDIENCE SATISFACTION Misinformation tends to be more effective in reaching and convincing target audiences partly due to its novelty effect that attracts human attention and motivates one to demonstrate being ‘in the know’ and partly because it is specifically designed to satisfy our desires and needs (Ball 2017: 242; Vosoughi et al. 2018). In that case, convincing audiences might well be unnecessary: one would merely need to frame pre-existing convictions in a way that serves the communicating actor’s interests while simultaneously reaffirming them. In other words, posttruth political actors embrace as their strategy ‘openly tailoring a pitch to a selected segment of the population by entertaining its members with fantasies or myths that have a particular appeal to them’ (Davis 2017: 115). In this situation, it does not matter whether a post-truth politician adheres to the facts or not; ‘it does, however, matter that he conveys adherence to your values’ (Davis 2017: 117). And for that adherence to take place, one needs to make use of enormous amounts of data about target populations. Obtaining such data is not particularly difficult: we already live in a world characterised by superabundance of information, collected through the use of ever-more devices (Libicki 2017: 51) and courtesy of our own track record of media use. Such data can be easily obtained on a commercial basis and subsequently employed to determine an audience’s preconceptions, stereotypes, fears, wishes, and so on, in order to construct a truth-claim that can in advance be trusted to ‘stick’. Moreover, since post-truth-claims are unconstrained by verifiable facts, they can be tweaked as and when necessary in response to audience sentiment analysis, giving them competitive advantage in maximising customer satisfaction in comparison with more fact-bound assertions (see, generally, Kalpokas 2019). As already implied previously, the logic of maximising consumer satisfaction through playing along with the confirmation bias

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of target audiences is embraced by political and other actors who benefit from the ‘strategic extremism’ of their own positions (Lewandowsky et al. 2017: 359–360). Hence, what matters while uttering a statement is not whether it is factually correct but whether the audience would like it to be correct (Lockie 2016), particularly if more accurate utterances would be less palatable. Consequently, it pays off to maximise consumer satisfaction through embracing our tendency to engage in motivated reasoning, whereby our hopes and wishes for something to be correct affect our cognition of what is correct, making us adjust reality-perceptions to feelings rather than vice versa (McIntyre 2018: 45). In other words, seeing is not believing – feeling is. And even if part of the target audience has at least a suspicion that the statements uttered are not strictly factual, such statements are likely to still hold true for them on an alternative – emotional – level; so as long as the audience likes the utterances in question, the issue of relation to facts remains marginal (Horsthemke 2017: 276). Here the notion of satisfaction also merits further clarification: it is not necessary for the message itself to be pleasurable – it only needs to confirm preexisting convictions. Pizzagate can serve as an example again: there is certainly nothing pleasurable in imagining that children are sexually abused by leading politicians or anybody else. Nevertheless, satisfaction is derived here from the fact that the story offers confirmation of deeply held beliefs about the wickedness of elites and provides justification for one’s lack of trust in the political system. Hence, it is the satisfaction of confirmation that one has always been right, and if the facts do not necessarily stack up, they can be ignored by both senders and, even more importantly, the recipients of the message in exchange for that satisfaction. Submission to confirmation bias to the extent that even suspected or known nonveracity is subservient to the pleasure of opinion confirmation is yet another manifestation of the me-centricity of the Experience

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Age: once again, consumer satisfaction validates a version of reality. That, in turn, leads to politicians adopting signalling behaviour to appeal to both true believers and those more hedonistically inclined. While the true believers are likely to accept a truth-claim simply because it confirms and validates their opinions, stereotypes, and preconceptions, the hedonists expect a signal that pinpoints to them where the greatest pleasure is located. The latter would still embrace a political actor’s platform because it conforms to their opinions, stereotypes, and preconceptions, but perhaps without taking at least some of the claims, particularly the more egregious ones, literally: for example, while they may not embrace, word for word, a candidate’s claim that all illegal immigrants are rapists, drug dealers, and otherwise criminals, such an allegation would still make emotional sense and be a cause of pleasure as a confirmation of a more generalised dislike for illegal (or any) immigrants and/or the feeling of being threatened by those who are different. Hence, even when not taken literally, such claims send a clear signal that the communicator is on ‘our’ side and is ready to please. And the more egregious the claim, the more unmissable the signal is. As Davis (2017: 85) observes, ‘sometimes, what you think is bullshit is actually a costly signal delivering useful information’. In other words, such statements simply operate on a different register of sense.

COLLECTIVELY AFFORDING POST-TRUTH It is also worth noting that once a truth-claim penetrates our filter bubble, online or offline (although, as d’Ancona [2017: 49] correctly notes, this ‘huddling’ effect is particularly strong online), it is likely to be picked up by numerous friends sharing similar opinions and, therefore, embracing the truth-claim, causing the echo chamber effect, whereby we

are bombarded with the same information echoing from multiple directions (because multiple friends are interacting with it), giving the (most likely false) impression that everybody is talking about it and unanimously expressing their approval, thereby implying that one ought to believe in that truth-claim as well. This herd instinct is also subtly reinforced on social media through expansive opportunities for gratification: individuals get locked into an ‘affective feedback loop’ that offers ‘a potentially infinite cycle of inputs/outputs, expressions/rewards’: we demonstrate our allegiance to the group by positively interacting with our peers’ content or uploading contextually appropriate content ourselves only to be immediately gratified with positive response or, if such response is lacking, we are at pains to perform better as soon as possible, thus motivating ourselves to conform with the group (Boler and Davis 2018: 83–84). There is even evidence that, to reduce cognitive dissonance, we are capable even of convincing ourselves that what the majority claims to be true actually is true, even if that contradicts our own observations (McIntyre 2018: 39). Moreover, once convinced, ‘people tend to persist in beliefs that they believe to be widely shared’, regardless of whether they actually are shared or not, the latter belief being easily sustained within an echo chamber (Lewandowsky et al. 2017: 362; see also McIntyre 2018: 38). The incapacity to adequately consider all new information is not an aberration – instead, it seems to be a natural condition. The human mind has not evolved to be an encyclopaedia that contains all the necessary information; instead, it specialises in being ‘a flexible problem solver’ that does not overburden itself with information but extracts what is most useful in particular situations (Sloman and Fernbach 2017: 5). For that, humans need to only understand the apparent causes, implying that ‘ignorance is inevitable’ (Sloman and Fernbach 2017: 12, 257). As today’s world is even more complex than ever before and competition over attention is

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fiercer than at any time in the past, the necessity of being selective in the acquisition of information is even more pressing. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that truth becomes functional, that is, one has to quickly decide what best serves the necessity to adapt to and survive in one’s immediate environment. In other words, truth is what immediately works. Hence, although knowing the truth might be seen as an advantage that contributes to survival, as McIntyre (2018: 55) suggests, in fact, what matters for survival is what works, not necessarily what is, and if we can survive long enough on what works (and, as an additional benefit, gives us pleasure), then Truthwith-a-capital-T can be ignored reasonably safely. It also transpires that humans have survived believing in various sets of verifiably untrue ideas at least since as far back as the earliest known cultural artefacts date. Moreover, in today’s developed societies, survival and at least some basic necessities are largely taken for granted, meaning that there is simply more adaptive leeway available: one is capable of surviving even while thinking on false premises. If, for example, in a hunter-gatherer society thinking that a predator is harmless (because one cannot be bothered to fight it off or run away) would not be a successful adaptive strategy, today holding factually incorrect views is much less likely to cause an existential threat (except for some very extreme false views). Even more so, given the mediatisation of social relationships and of the self, most premises of human action (and interaction) have become fluid and open to interpretation as well as deliberate construction. Keeping that in mind, it would be more surprising if proliferation of competing truth-claims and disentanglement of utterances from facts had not happened.

AFFILIATION AND AFFECT The condition described above naturally leads us to ‘a polarizing war of facts’ (Lockie

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2016: 235), in which not factual evidence and logical reasoning but ‘popularity and tribal affinity’ have become paramount in embracing or rejecting a truth-claim (Hannan 2018: 224; see also Horsthemke 2017: 275). Indeed, as stressed by Gilead et al. (2018: 7), while the capacity to draw a distinction between factual truth and mere opinion is key to proper deliberation, it is also evident that as far as human psychology is concerned, this distinction is rather murky. Hence, due to the availability of always yet another ‘alternative’ set of facts, communities can easily split themselves apart through belief in affiliative truths that are ‘affective and social in creating communities of both supporters and protesters’ (McGranahan 2017: 243). Such truths tend to be value and virtue-laden, capable of inciting a sense of righteousness among supporters, thereby leading to ‘emotional contagion’ (Brady et al. 2017). For their supporters, such truths are also aspirational, presenting a better picture of themselves or of the future than the one which would be possible if relying on verifiable facts (McGranahan 2017: 246). The resulting affective investment in one’s favourite version of reality also goes counter to some of the simplistic attempts to reduce post-truth into a kind of relativist quasipostmodern condition, characterised by ‘a challenge […] to the existence of reality itself’ (McIntyre 2018: 10). In fact, the existence of reality as such is not denied – instead, something that is taken for reality is believed in and vehemently defended. While from a panoramic societal perspective Truth-with-acapital-T is made irrelevant through the proliferation of multiple believed realities, each one of them has not lost its reality status for its adherents. Even (and, perhaps, especially) in situations where both sides are engaged in mutual derogation with the effect of a dizzying destabilisation of meaning (such as Trump’s and his opponent’s ceaseless mutual accusations of spreading ‘fake news’), the emotional component of belief becomes of utmost importance (see, generally, Farkas

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and Schou 2018). Indeed, if there are no stable points of reference and nothing makes any factual sense, the argument that gives utter visceral identification and sense becomes even more valuable, acting as a buoy in the unpredictable stormy waters. Moreover, reliance on emotion while conveying a message seems to also give an efficiency boost as emotional response tends to be quicker than a reasoned one (Davis 2017: 135). Notably, emotion in itself can be read as meaningful social information that immediately conveys prevalent and imitable attitudes that are to be observed, inducing ‘affective reactions and/or cognitive inferences’ and thereby enabling fast social coordination (Song and Xu 2018: 6). Affective investment in a truth-claim is further encouraged by communicators through their use of emotional cues in order to attract attention to and prolong engagement (Suiter 2016: 27). In a situation where the facticity of truth-claims has become subservient to their effectiveness, grounding one’s claims in shared emotions instead of facts is not a disadvantage or a deficiency any more: on the contrary, and characteristically to the Experience Age, ‘getting people to share and engage with content is vital’ while ‘[e]motional connection is often critical to making this happen’ (Suiter 2016: 27). After all, popularity has now become a truth arbiter with a power that appears to have become superior to logic, proof, and impersonal fact, possessing a persuasive supremacy in a discursive economy that runs on attention attracted by content (Hannan 2018: 220). An illustration of the trend is the rapidly growing popularity and mainstream acceptance of trolling: once confined to the darker corners of online fora, it can now ‘rightly be said to be the new normal’; moreover, whereas the original trolls, due to their subversive (and often perverse) behaviour have tended to embrace the Internet’s anonymity, it is currently no longer the case: trolling has become a skill consciously honed by public figures, including top politicians (Hannan 2018: 220), making

trolling ‘a media spectacle’ and ‘a new genre of political speech’, so ubiquitous that ‘new norms and expectations have quickly developed around it’ (Hannan 2018: 220). And that is merely one further consequence of reasoned argumentation giving way to experience and immediate consumer satisfaction.

CONSTRUCTING A NARRATIVE Finally, it must be noted that post-truth-claims do not come as mere agglomerations of facts and data; instead, they come as narratives that generate meaning. That, again, taps into human psychology where narratives serve as ‘a device […] to slot information into a meaningful form’ (Davis 2017: 138). Since posttruth is not constrained by the necessity to adhere to verifiable facts, it can be easily weaved into a narrative that provides quick, easily accessible, and palatable explanations of the surrounding world. That is a key competitive advantage against more factually correct assertions that need to follow empirical facts which are often non-pleasure maximising or frustratingly inconclusive and difficult to understand. Nevertheless, as known from strategic communications literature, people need a narrative because it ‘provides explanations’, that is, it ‘describes the past, justifies the present, and presents a vision of the future’ (Holmstrom 2015: 120). In other words, there is a good reason why ‘most of us find anecdotes more convincing than statistics’ (Ball 2017: 179): the former tells us something meaningful about the world by storying select aspects of it. Of course, some kind of evidence is necessary but when one is presented with a coherent narrative that literally makes sense, such a narrative itself becomes evidence, or self-evidence (Baron 2018: 196). An apt example here could be the claim that Britain pays 350 million pounds a week to the EU. Although unfounded, it quickly found resonance with those concerned with the regulatory and financial

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burden of EU membership or simply seeking to rationalise their Euroscepticism. Any narratives, however, must be specifically tailored for the Experience Age, namely, be catchy, consumer-oriented, and provoking affective investment. As Hannan (2018: 220) insightfully notes, in the present communication environment ‘[l]engthy, detailed disquisitions’ are ineffective, thereby according competitive advantage to post-truth-claims that are governed by creative, rather than representational, values and are, consequently, capable of answering ‘the need for simplicity and emotional resonance’ and giving ‘visceral meaning’ to the object that is being narrated (d’Ancona 2017: 17). Seeking a quicker and more satisfying emotional ‘click’, audiences are more than likely to skip suspiciously lengthy well-reasoned arguments in favour of ‘an instant gratification of feeling as knowing’ (Harsin 2017: 517). Indeed, it can be confidently claimed that ‘what matters to win a referendum or an election is not evidence (i.e. facts) but meaning’ (Baron 2018: 73). Information, in its pure form, tells very little, if anything – it is sense and purpose that move people to action instead. In a similar way, politicians, taken at face value, are not exciting enough to elicit attention. As a result, conveying a personal image – that is, narrating the self (as opposed to, say, an electoral manifesto) through affect-inducing personal imagery that imbues the politician’s face with meaning and facilitates connection on a personal-emotional basis is becoming an ever-more prominent communication strategy, observed in the United States already with Obama but also in seemingly unlikely countries, such as Sweden (Metz et al. 2019). Notably, what both fact-checkers and less post-truth-savvy communicators misunderstand in this context is that ‘[m]ore and more pure information or facts only muddles our understanding of the world’, increasing the desire for clear-cut stories which ‘provide them with relevant information, talking points, and an explanation of how the topic in question fits into their worldview’ (Holmstrom 2015: 121),

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almost unavoidably meaning preference for post-truth narratives. And once a narrative captivates the target audience, it ‘crystallizes what were just vague inclinations into solid ideas or “truths”’, thereby ‘reinforcing opinions, hardening prevailing stereotypes and creating automatic reflexes’ (Holmstrom 2015: 123). In other words, the narrative becomes true through its own effects. Another distinct advantage of post-truth narratives is their stability. While experts are far from infallible and ‘have been wrong on a number of very significant things’, thereby being forced to revise their accounts of the world in major ways (Baggini 2017: 38–39), post-truth is shielded from changes in the availability of facts. Hence, paradoxically, it is truth that is malleable and changing in the wake of new evidence, while post-truth can afford to remain stable (as long as it is popular) because it does not need evidence or any other support, except its own popularity. This reassuring stability, of course, only adds to posttruth’s appeal. In the end, as Davis (2017: 40) concedes, arguing with post-truth politicians and their supporters on a factual basis is futile – had they thought that facts were important, they would have checked them up themselves. And if they have not, then it must be the feeling of the narrative that matters.

CONCLUSION To wrap up, post-truth is taken to refer to a general condition of detachment of truthclaims from verifiable facts and the primacy of criteria other than verifiability in the audiences’ decision to affiliate themselves with a truth-claim. Such claims are pitched to audiences as narrative fictions that constitute their own lived realities and explain the world. By being aspirational, these narratives also empower their adherents. In an environment where getting audience attention is crucial, the effectiveness in asserting a truth-claim in itself becomes the key criterion of truth. Essentially, something becomes true because

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people would like it to be true while rejecting alternatives that do not confirm pre-existing opinions. In this context, polarising affiliative content enables the communicators to break through the clutter that has filled today’s information landscape. On the side of the audience, meanwhile, ‘online huddling’ of the similar and the ensuing filter bubbles are particularly effective in making the audiences convince themselves of the valency of the message. Even if such self-convincing does not take place fully, at least one can choose a narrative that makes them feel good. Hence, it is possible to conceive of a truth market where the most attractive (enjoymentmaximising) proposition lures in the most customers. Moreover, the propositions themselves are not made randomly but, rather, are informed by extensive knowledge of the target audience, in particular – of its feelings, tastes, anxieties, preconceptions, and stereotypes, thereby maximising the likelihood of collusive audience participation. It should by now be clear that post-truth must be taken seriously, not as a mere aberration. Hence, instead of self-righteously rejecting post-truth as ‘deplorable’ (McIntyre 2018: 9; see, similarly, also Baggini 2017, Ball 2017, or d’Ancona 2017), we have to devise strategies for living with it because simply denigrating it will not make it go away. As emphatically stated by Lewandowsky et al. (2017: 356), posttruth ‘is not a blemish on the mirror’ – instead, ‘the mirror is a window into an alternative reality’. Being rooted in the current technological and societal context that has amplified hardwired aptitudes of human psychology, it can be said to describe an increasingly prevalent mode of relating to one’s social and political environment, cutting through traditional divisions, such as ideological allegiances.

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6 The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda Alicia Wanless and Michael Berk

INTRODUCTION As propaganda methods continue to evolve in the Digital Age, acquiring greater reach and arguably stronger influence on target audiences, it is paramount that our conceptual understanding of these processes and underlying ‘sender-receiver’ dynamics follows suit to avoid negative pitfalls associated with unscrupulous use of such techniques in a public domain. Throughout most of the 20th century, propaganda, and its applied uses in public relations, advertising or wartime psychological operations, was typically perceived as a unidirectional, top-down effort by governments, corporations, militaries or other organised interest groups to influence the cognition and behaviour of target audiences, whether in a home country or abroad. The proliferation of information communication technologies (ICTs), in particular, social media, coupled with unprecedented access to means of communication and resulting

interconnectivity of populations across borders, has not only enhanced methods of propaganda communications and reach, but also changed the dynamics of how target audiences engage with propaganda. As endusers are increasingly ‘plugged-in’ to communicate with each other, seek knowledge or information or share their stories and experiences, their increasing exposure to persuasive content has been matched by their own ability to generate and spread such content. As a result, the traditional and established boundary between producers and consumers of propagandistic content no longer seems to be clearly delineated. The confluence of these important dynamics and what it means for our ontological understanding of modern propaganda, political communications and liberal democracies constitutes the focal point of this chapter. The Internet and technological advancements that enable, facilitate and define modern communications play an extremely important role in these dynamics. Through

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authentication and management of preferences, end-users acquire access to various online products and services, but at the same time, give away their location, personal data and other information that whether by itself or in conjunction with other data can be used to discern users’ life choices, preferences or worldviews. This wealth of data, when aggregated by internet giants and social media platforms as ‘user profiles’, has become a hot commodity coveted by companies, governments and savvy propagandists who create and distribute tailored messaging through growing networks of websites and online communities to unsuspecting target audiences. Propagandists use a variety of means to reach and engage target audiences in the creation and spread of persuasive communications, including behavioural advertising, the manipulation of internet algorithms, targeting and provocation of online echo chambers and communities, as well as through winning the attention of traditional media coverage. Astroturfing and botnet amplification obfuscate staged activities to make them look authentic, creating the appearance of organic user engagement. Often such efforts blur the lines between what is real and what is not in the information space, raising numerous questions regarding the construction of individual and collective reality(ies) and important repercussions for socio-cultural cohesiveness of modern societies. What is more worrisome, however, is that such activities create ample opportunities for skilled propagandists to perform their craft with a much greater focus, reach and influence, and thus set agendas for and influence national politics or policy choices. At the same time, modern propaganda can no longer be viewed as a traditional top-down process alone. Target audiences are no longer mere passive consumers of such targeted persuasive content, but are also active in its creation, modification, spread and amplification, often inadvertently furthering the agenda of propagandists whose messaging resonates with their worldview. It is such degree and

intensity of audience engagement with persuasive content that savvy propagandists seek through adjusting content presentation, its formats and delivery methods. This chapter explores the emergence of a qualitatively new phenomenon in propaganda studies – ‘participatory propaganda’ – a particularly pervasive combination of modern propaganda techniques first identified during the US 2016 presidential election and subsequently found in online political activity in the UK and Canada. The systemic integration of various techniques afforded by ICT advancements, harvesting of user profiles and savvy use of behavioural sciences through a ‘participatory propaganda model’, allows a propagandist to purposely reach out to specific audiences and not only engage them directly, but what perhaps is less apparent, reach through them to their own networks multiplying the propaganda effects manifold. By referencing numerous academic studies exploring each of the constituting aspects of the model in depth, as well as previously conducted studies into online political activities in the US, UK and Canada, the chapter presents this new theoretical concept in propaganda studies and raises some of the ethical implications its application could mean for liberal democracies.

THE EVOLVING NATURE OF PROPAGANDA Propaganda, in its basic definition, is the use of persuasive information to manipulate a target audience into a behaviour desired by the propagandist (Bernays, 1928; Lasswell, 1948; Ellul, 1965; Marlin, 2013; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). While deployed throughout human history, the use of propaganda techniques during and in the aftermath of World War I by all sides involved in that conflict gave propaganda, its methods and adepts a negative connotation. The ability of mass propaganda campaigns to

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galvanise through available media popular support for the war effort in Germany, UK, US, Russia and other countries demonstrated the relative ease with which such techniques could affect the course of political actions. In particular, the widely acknowledged manipulative nature of propaganda has put its practice at odds with liberal democracies, where such influencing of public opinion called into question the political agency of voters and their decision-making during elections (Irwin, 1919; Lippmann, 1922). Indeed, using manipulation, such as playing on emotions to win an argument, has long been derided in political theory, ‘from Plato to Habermas’ (Dryzek, 2000: 52). However, this did not stop public relations pioneers from seeing propaganda as an acceptable means in the hands of professionals and experts to manage public opinion, ironically citing concern for how easily perceptions could be manipulated to justify its use (Lippmann, 1922; Dewey, 1925; Bernays, 1928). While the use of persuasive communications abounds in liberal democracies, the word ‘propaganda’ and associated techniques came to be viewed as something ‘associated mainly with totalitarian regimes and war efforts’ (Ross, 2002, 17), and as such, a threat. Instead of ‘propaganda’, liberal democracies conducted public affairs and public relations at home (Moloney, 2006) and public diplomacy or information operations abroad (Garrison, 1999). Regardless of this substitution of terms, the means and techniques used worldwide to spread persuasive communications remained fairly similar throughout most of the 20th century, which is why ‘propaganda’ will be used throughout this chapter as a generic term to imply all forms of communications that intend to sway opinions and behaviours towards a goal desired by a communicator. Before the internet, propaganda was typically distributed in a top-down fashion since both the content creation and means of delivering it (newspapers, radio, TV or movie industry) were often controlled by either government or corporate interests. The

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propagandist (be it the government, corporate, military or political) would issue persuasive messaging with a specific outcome desired among the target audience (the general public). This static format of ‘senderreceiver’ communications is changing in the Digital Age. The internet, social media and various widely available technological tools have drastically altered this traditional format by democratising access to information and means of communication. The increased ability of average users to produce, alter, disseminate and amplify the spread of persuasive messaging blurred the previously apparent division between propagandist (sender) and target audience (receiver). At the same time, the internet and ICTs have greatly increased the speed, reach and scope of how audiences could be engaged and persuaded into spreading propaganda. One such concept that outlines a top-down, unidirectional flow of content using internet technologies is ‘computational propaganda’. Wooley and Howard described this new method of spreading persuasive communications as: the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. Autonomous agents, equipped with big data about our behavior collected from the Internet of things, work over social media to engage with us on political issues and advance ideological projects. Computational propaganda involves software programs that are interactive and ideologically imbued. They are interactive within the context of a platform. (2016: 4886)

By examining the role and activities of a propagandist and technological capabilities at their disposal, computational propaganda offers an important glimpse into the world of modern organised persuasive communications. It demonstrates how the combination of technologies and new techniques derived from the use of these technologies can, in combination with human operators and their creativity, facilitate and significantly increase the volume and speed with which propagandistic content can be generated and disseminated among

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target audiences. However, it leaves outside the scope of its focus the potential roles of audiences, as propaganda objects and subjects, which they play in the generation and spread of propaganda. As actors who partake, create, amplify or reject persuasive messaging in line with their own worldviews and ­preferences, a greater understanding of audiences’ attitudes, behaviours and actions is required for a more nuanced analysis of the multi-­ faceted nature of propaganda in the Digital Age.

AUDIENCE IS THE AMPLIFIER The traditional and prevailing attitude in media and communications studies during the 20th century towards the role of the general public was that of simply ‘a vulnerable and persuadable lot at risk from propaganda’ (Brooker & Jermyn, 2003: 7). This unidirectional, ‘senderreceiver-effect’ behaviourist approach to communications has dominated much of ­ ­propaganda research, until ‘the discrediting of transmission stimulus-response models and their replacement by transaction models’ starting in the 1940s when a receiver’s role in the communications process was acknowledged to be more active (Weaver et  al., 2006: 11). The persistent behaviourist understanding of communications positioned audiences as passive and shaped by their external environment, ‘conditioned to act in certain ways by positive and negative stimuli’ (Baran & Davis, 2011: 81). In contrast, transactional theories of communication viewed audiences as rational actors who ‘chose to align with the message content and its senders’ subject as a result of some perceived benefit – be it personal, political, economic, social, or even pleasurable gain, for example, in doing so’ (Weaver et al., 2006: 12). In Bandura’s social cognitive theory, for example, the audience has agency: People are self-organizing, proactive, self-­ reflecting, and self-regulating, not just reactive

­rganisms shaped and shepherded by environo mental events or inner forces. Human self-­ development, adaptation, and change are embedded in social systems. Therefore, personal agency operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. In these agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social systems. Personal agency and social structure operate as codeterminants in an integrated causal structure rather than as a disembodied duality. (Bandura, 2001: 266)

This does not mean that audiences cannot be or are not manipulated by propagandists, but simply that they are also not merely passive consumers waiting to be shaped by external agents or messages. As rational actors who possess opinions, skills and means to create and disseminate persuasive messaging, average users can, and do, participate in shaping of the information environment in the Digital Age. It is that active audience engagement with persuasive communications that modern propagandists seek for at least three aims: segmentation, amplification and obfuscation.

Segmentation One of the important elements in target audience management for a propagandist is the ability to identify and infiltrate or create online communities with membership that aggregates around a particular interest or hobby. Sharing similar views that match their preexisting perspectives, members in such groups, called ‘echo chambers’, consume little oppositional content which makes them susceptible to focused targeting and increases the chances for content receptivity and its further amplification. By correctly identifying group profiles along ‘issues of concern’ in a larger target audience and segmenting it accordingly, propagandists can customise content to each group and inject it in line with campaign objectives, monitoring the elicited response and adjusting the content or its regularity at will. Digital technologies enable the quick creation of echo chambers, also known as ‘filter

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda

bubbles’ (Breitenbach, 2017), through algorithms that sort information (Bakshy et  al., 2015) or through choices individuals make about content consumption (Grömping, 2014; Bessi et al., 2016). Once inside an echo chamber, a user is fed content fitting pre-existing views and preferences, such as politically affiliated messages (Wall Street Journal, 2016). Moreover, ‘political echo chambers not only isolate one from opposing views, but also help to create incubation chambers for blatantly false (but highly salient and politicized) fake news stories’ (Pennycook et  al., 2017). During the 2016 US presidential election run-up, echo chambers supporting Trump shared fake news (BBC, 2016; Dreyfus, 2017), with some hyper-partisan, right-wing Facebook communities feeding followers with 38% of fake content (Silverman et  al., 2016). Online echo chambers also help obfuscate fake or misleading content, and so long as that material conforms to the target audience’s pre-existing views, it will likely be consumed and shared further without much consideration for the original source. In addition to echo chambers, propagandists may use increasingly sophisticated tools already deployed in behavioural advertising to analyse, segment and target audiences. Marketers, for example, collect information about what people do online to position extremely targeted ads in front of users (Matthew, 2017). This tracking information is used to segment target audiences based on psychographics (Psychometric Centre, 2017), an extremely accurate way to predict how a user thinks and what might provoke them into action (Cohen, 2017). According to numerous media reports published in April and May 2018, these tactics were used by Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US presidential election. While the techniques the company employed to acquire data on audience members, namely harvesting information on Facebook users and their unsuspecting friends through a personality survey (Wylie, 2018), were questionable, the vision for the future of marketing

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as described by the now defunct firm’s CEO, Alexander Nix, are spot on the trend: Today communication is becoming ever increasingly targeted. It’s being individualized for every single person in this room. So, you will no longer be receiving adverts on products and services that you don’t care about, rather you will only receive adverts that not only are on the products and services or in the case of elections issues that you care about most but have been nuanced to reflect how you see the world. We are able to match offline data to cookies to drive digital advertising, social media banners and the like. We can obviously use this data to inform direct mail purchases. So, a husband in a household can receive a piece of mail but his wife can receive a different piece of mail possibly on the same issue. Most excitingly of all probably is the fact that we can take this data and match it to set top box viewing data, that’s television or cable data. Every time you watch TV, the programs you watch are being recorded and information is being sent back to your cable provider and we can match what you watch in a way that we can begin to select programs to advertising that have the highest density of target audience that we are trying to reach. (2016)

Cambridge Analytica is not alone in using such techniques. Indeed, behavioural advertising is a big business: 75% of the world’s most popular websites are tracking visitors (Lerner et al., 2016). Companies such as Zeta Global track upwards of 600 million people with thousands of pieces of data per person (Ellett, 2018), using billions of tracking cookies across the internet (Hof, 2017), which helps advertisers to deliver extremely targeted messaging. Indeed, by 2017, Zeta Global had built up 3,000 data points per person on average in their database (Johnson, 2017). Likewise, Nix had claimed Cambridge Analytica had built up ‘4 or 5000 data points on every adult in the United States’ (2016). While propaganda campaigns aim to elicit a particular behaviour offline, such as influencing who a target audience should vote for, engaging identified audience segments in the creation, adaptation and spread of persuasive messaging is an equally desirable objective. People are more likely to believe those they view as familiar to them (Garrett & Weeks,

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2013) or those they deem to be influential (Turcotte et al., 2015). As a result, the more detailed and accurate audience segmentation is, the more customised content appealing to these segments can be. This allows propagandists to engage more people in amplifying propagandistic messaging further through their networks – an ultimately more effective and subtle approach than relying solely on computational propaganda.

Amplification Engaging as many people as consumers of persuasive messaging as possible with a view to influence their opinions and behaviours is the ultimate goal of every propagandist. The increased spread, or amplification, of such communications also plays an important role in artificially shaping the information environment by demonstrating massive support for the propagandist’s campaign. In this regard, while computational propaganda (botnets) can manipulate real time news feeds to promote specific content (Mustafaraj & Metaxas, 2010), the engagement of average users in heavy automation of supportive posts on social media, through tools such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Buffer, enables or at least contributes to, a more organic amplification effect. For example, the Washington Post featured one of Trump’s more prolific Twitter supporters during the 2016 election, Daniel John Sobieski, who maintained two accounts with 65,9341 and 28,4642 followers respectively and has tweeted nearly two million times across both accounts since starting in December 2009. As the feature noted, ‘Sobieski’s two accounts … tweet more than 1,000 times a day using “schedulers” that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops’ (Timberg, 2017). Such heavy automation can make authentic accounts appear fake, depending on how behaviours are defined and distinguished (Gilani et  al., 2016), but since their

authenticity can be proven, they could successfully appeal the shutting down of their accounts (Burnett, 2018). Consequently, users who overtly display their perspectives on social media platforms on politically identifiable issues would constitute a prime target for propagandists since they are more likely to spread such messaging further. Propagandists deploy several methods to engage or encourage audiences to spread messages. Websites with persistent pop-up windows encourage visitors to sign up for email lists (Albright, 2016a) that are used to mobilise support at events or fundraise (Plouffe, 2010). Audiences have been asked to turn over their accounts to campaigns, a pitch made particularly to those with significant followers (Katalenas, 2016). One online community, the United States Freedom Army (who believes the Left is engaging the Right in a civil war), offered its members a monthly directive on how to spread their content on Twitter and elsewhere in support of Trump during the 2016 election (Lotan, 2016). Amplification can be sought for support and opposition actions alike, and beyond social platforms. Thus, followers can be encouraged to troll others online (Buckels et  al., 2014; Cheng et  al., 2017) to stifle debate in favour of their preferred candidate. Requests to re-post materials across multiple websites or hyperlink between sources will result in boosting content in Google search returns (Moz, 2017), and if nothing else, can bury opposing information from appearing in the first pages of returns (Wanless & Berk, 2017). This gaming of search engines can propel a topic to trend online and win traditional media coverage (Mustafaraj & Metaxas, 2010), which in turn will generate more social media posts and so on. While similar effects can be achieved through computational propaganda, authentic audience members who spread source material in this manner, particularly referencing back to it in comment sections on articles and social media posts as part of coordinated attacks (Berk & Wanless, 2018), constitute a more

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda

coveted audience for propagandists. This becomes particularly important as social networks target and remove fake accounts more aggressively. Not only does such audience engagement enable manipulation of internet algorithms for better content placement, it plays on the cognitive bias of ‘social proof’ in a broader public, whereby people mimic the behaviour of those like them (Amblee & Bui, 2011). A combination of the factors outlined previously achieves amplification through authentic audience engagement and spreading of persuasive content in a more valuable way to a propagandist than using fake bots.

Obfuscation Engaging audiences in the creation, personalisation and spread of messaging helps propagandists to obfuscate its origins and increase receptivity, especially when spreading provocative content, such as strategic leaks aimed at generating outrage among a target group (Briant & Wanless, 2019). This can have significant consequences for a target audience’s cognitive and behavioural choices as propagandistic messaging coming from peers can seem more credible, and as a result more acceptable (Nielson, 2015). Obfuscation through audience participation makes the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate actors in the information space very challenging, especially when monitoring and analysing online debate. During the 2016 US presidential election, the Russian-based Internet Research Agency created and operated Facebook pages on controversial issues such as racism that pretended to be American (USA v. Internet Research Agency, 2018). According to Facebook’s Chief Security Officer: approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 – associated with roughly 3,000 ads – that was connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages…The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a

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particular candidate. Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological­ spectrum – touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. (Stamos, 2017)

In turn, Twitter identified some 3,814 accounts connected with the same outfit and notified ‘677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period’ (Twitter, 2018). Subsequent research indicated that ‘between 2013 and 2018, the IRA’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns reached tens of millions of users in the United States’ (Howard et  al., 2018), with ‘187 ­ million engagements’ across the three platforms, affecting 20 million accounts (DiResta et al., 2018). While these statistics are staggering, Benkler et  al. (2018) caution that ‘evidence of sustained effort is not the same as evidence of impact or prevalence’ (254) and in their own sweeping study of the media environment around the elections concluded that the ‘U.S. media ecosystem dynamics’ more than Russian activities shaped the information space during the election (65). In sum, obfuscating origins of persuasive communications masks the identity of content creators and facilitates content adoption among unsuspecting audiences. At the same time, obfuscation presents concerns regarding the intent or veracity of such content, its impact on the integrity of a national information space and agency of audiences who rely on information to make informed political or other decisions.

PARTICIPATORY PROPAGANDA As we demonstrated so far in this chapter, the continuing development of advanced ICTs and their organised, systematic and, often, manipulative application in persuasive communications and computational propaganda

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by savvy propagandists enables the co-opting of audiences into subsequent creation and proliferation of such messaging to their own networks. This qualitative ‘enhancement’ of propaganda techniques expands the engagement of audiences beyond the initial, target group and actively solicits their participation in propagating the original message, which significantly increases its reach and potential influence. The participatory engagement of audiences can in some ways be equated to popular engagement in other fields in the Digital Age, such as in citizen journalism where anyone with a smartphone and access to the Internet can record, write and upload content that may become a breaking news story (Borger et  al., 2013). Drawing on Jowett and O’Donnell’s3 definition of propaganda, this more engaging form of organised persuasive communications can be termed ‘participatory propaganda’ and defined as: The deliberate, and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions and direct behaviour of a target audience while seeking to co-opt its members to actively engage in the spread of persuasive communications, to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

The important nuance that warrants the introduction of this new term into propaganda studies is that while the original goal of a propagandist remains the same (to influence the behaviour or cognition of the target audience), an added objective of every propagandistic message becomes to galvanise its spreading through target audience’s networks. In practical terms, as case studies below will demonstrate further, this means that the combined application of various ICTs and behavioural analysis to segment, obfuscate and amplify persuasive messaging will make it extremely difficult for an average user to recognise propagandistic messaging or factual information and make informed decisions based on it. Such pollution of the information environment will have important consequences for political behaviour of

Western electorates and may lead to increasing polarisation of societies due to propagation of narrow-interest or antagonistic messaging by individuals consuming content in echo chambers. Participatory propaganda moves beyond a traditional, unidirectional ‘one-to-many’ form of communication, to a ‘one-to-manyto-many more’ form where each ‘target’ of influence (an individual or group which is the object of persuasion) can in theory become the new ‘originator’ (subject) of content production and distribution, spreading persuasive messaging to others in a ‘snowball’ effect. The original propaganda message triggers, reinforces or exacerbates pre-existing sentiments associated with the message in a way that prompts the consumer to actively engage in its propagation through available social networks, both on and offline. Even if modified through the consumer’s own interpretation, the core message is likely to remain within the original narrative and take on a ‘new life’ (e.g. a new wave of content dissemination). Throughout the process, computational propaganda methods could be used to amplify messaging and conduct online monitoring to follow and assess its spread, allowing the propagandist to adapt strategies in a constant feedback loop and insert additional content, as and if required. The analysis of online political campaigns highlights the growing participation of audiences in amplifying propagandistic messaging. Applying Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition, a political campaign can be viewed as a form of propaganda: the ‘deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions’ (e.g. popular opinions of voters) such that it ‘directs behaviour to achieve a response’ (e.g. support for a candidate in the form of online participation and voting), furthering ‘the desired intent of the propagandist’ (e.g. to win in elections). As political campaigns begin to increasingly engage with voters online, they become increasingly more participatory.

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda

In researching the 2016 US presidential election, a model of participatory propaganda has emerged in pro-Trump online support that was distilled into seven steps: 1) Starting with behavioural advertising, conduct hyper-targeted audience analysis to identify or confirm target segment profiles and determine what specific messaging will provoke a group to act in ways that benefit the campaign (Nix, 2016; Wylie, 2018). 2) Create relevant provocative content that elicits action. Such content can include fake news, leaks, memes (Hern, 2016; Schreckender, 2017; Wanless & Berk, 2017) or so called ‘dark Facebook’ posts that are only visible to a specific target audience (Green & Issenberg, 2016). 3) Purposely spread content through online echo chambers identified in the audience analysis (BBC, 2016; Silverman et al., 2016; Dreyfus, 2017) to reach target audiences and obfuscate the origins of (provocative) content. 4) Amplify content through bots (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016; Kollanyi & Howard, 2016) and seeding across multiple websites to game online algorithms for better organic placement in newsfeeds and search returns (Albright, 2016b; Solon & Levin, 2016). 5) Encourage followers to act by further creating and spreading supportive content (Gallucci, 2016; Kang, 2016), as well as attacking the opposition (Chmielewski, 2016; Marantz, 2016). 6) Win traditional media coverage (Patterson, 2016), a move that can be facilitated by reaching out to segregated, insulated but interconnected online media networks divided along partisan lines (Benkler et al., 2017). 7) Constantly monitor, measure and adapt campaign efforts for maximum effect (Wylie, 2018).

The various tactics outlined above emerged, at first, as disparate activities observed during our own research into the 2016 US presidential campaign in conjunction with a review of scholarly studies that largely focused on separate aspects of either user behaviours or persuasion techniques. Categorising these activities in order of a strategic campaign management process with a view to achieve maximum propagandistic effect crystallised some of the theoretical possibilities of the

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participatory propaganda model, which the case studies below were aimed to quiz further.

Case Studies To investigate this model and its repercussions for increased audience engagement, social network and content analyses were conducted focusing on Facebook activity, the most used platform in the US (Smith & Anderson, 2018), the UK (Sweney, 2018) and Canada (Gruzd et al., 2018), which were also countries that at the time of analysis had upcoming elections. For the initial case studies on the US and UK sets, data was collected using the publicly available Facebook Graph API with the help of an online application – Netvizz (Rieder, 2013). Only publicly available data was used, including public posts to primary Facebook pages and the secondary pages these pages ‘Liked’. Facebook page ‘Like’ data was analysed using Social Network Analysis (SNA) (Scott, 1988) and visualised using the opensource SNA software, Gephi (Bastion et al., 2009). SNA has shown to be an effective method of analysing online group dynamics, information diffusion processes, and political polarisation in social media (Gruzd & Roy, 2014; Gruzd & Tsyganova, 2015). Facebook pages and groups have been analysed to identify echo chambers (Bakshy et al., 2015; Grömping, 2014; Del Vicario et  al., 2016), and content analysis has been conducted to assess Right-wing populist rhetoric in media (Bos et al., 2010; Sheets et al., 2015). US: Data from 17 Facebook pages collected one month prior to the 2016 ­ ­election (7 October to 7 November 2016) was analysed. The pages included three that supported Trump’s candidacy, as well as seven conservative-leaning and seven liberalleaning media outlets to assess how they interacted in wider networks and what topics were covered (Wanless & Berk, 2017). While the results obtained during this research are

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relevant for this chapter, analysis below will refer to the pro-Trump network only. The digital tactics outlined in the participatory propaganda model above were used as a frame for investigation. The three pro-Trump pages were selected as a sampling of those supporting his candidacy, with one purporting to be a grassroots coalition backing the candidate (Citizens for Trump), another (Eagle Rising) found through a literature review as a group spreading fake news (Silverman et al., 2016) and a third standing out as a node in initial, exploratory network analysis (Wake Up & Reclaim America).4 All three pages were part of a network of 5,416 pages with 100,208 connections, or edges, between them. These three seed pages shared provocative content: all referenced Wikileaks, who in the lead up to the election had posted more of the leaked Podesta emails to its website; two shared memes, accounting for nearly half of all posts by Wake Up & Reclaim America; and all shared uncorroborated news content, including that Hillary Clinton secretly called for Trump’s assassination, had suffered a brain seizure and that she was a racist (Wanless & Berk, 2017: 17). Such content was seeded across multiple websites likely contributing to the higher placement in search returns for attacks on Clinton, such as the first page of results for the query ‘is Hillary Clinton a racist’ consisting only of posts suggesting she was. Previous studies already showed that such gaming of online search returns can sway voter decisions (Epstein & Robertson, 2015), while algorithms can be used to enable echo chamber development (Algorithm Auditing Research Group, 2016). All three pages in this study also attempted to mobilise followers to action, encouraging them to vote for Trump, and actively engaged with prominent nodes in the Right-leaning news networks (Fox News and InfoWars) by sharing news items. In summary, the case study demonstrated that five steps of the Participatory Propaganda model (provocative content, pushed through echo chambers, amplification through bots and content

seeding, encouragement to act and winning media coverage) were used to support the 2016 Trump campaign. A similar analysis was conducted during the 2017 UK General Election as well as on Canadian political Facebook pages, with two key alterations: an increase in the number of initial pages analysed with representation from both the Left and Right sides of the political spectrum. UK: The initial pages for analysis were identified searching for keywords on Facebook associated with political party names or issues that represented political leaning in the UK (e.g. for/against Brexit). From this initial list, a total of eight were selected based on the following criteria: recent postings; claiming to be community-driven; espousing clear political views; and number of followers. Four pages on the Left side of the political spectrum (Very Brexit Problems, Britain For All, Momentum and Tory Free Zone) and four pages on the Right (Brexit Britain, Brexit News, The Political Movement UK and Conservative Britain) (Wanless, 2017a). All but Momentum shared provocative content to entice audiences to share it further. The Left-leaning Facebook pages, except Momentum, shared content that was satirical, often uncorroborated, or fake. One typical example included a viral fake news article from The Canary, a self-proclaimed independent and progressive news site, reporting that Manchester would be banning the newspaper The Sun (an article eventually retracted and deleted from its website). The article was posted to Britain For All and enjoyed 14,000 reactions, 636 comments and 7,249 shares. All of the Right-leaning Facebook pages shared some content that was not factual. One example included an article that claimed 23,000 jihadists were in the UK, which was shared by three out of four of the Rightleaning pages in this study. While the article claimed that intelligence officers had identified many more terrorists, a point that was covered by RT, Breitbart and The Times, it was described quite differently by Radio

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda

Free Europe, which quoted Home Secretary Amber Rudd explaining ‘that intelligence agencies were monitoring 3,000 suspected extremists and had a wider pool of 20,000 people of interest’ (RFE/RL, 2017). All but one of the pages analysed (Very Brexit Problems) shared mainstream media links that reflected the page’s political leanings, reinforcing the echo chamber effect in respective political groups. All but one Left-leaning page (Very Brexit Problems) encouraged followers to take specific actions including motivating young people to vote (Britain For All), attending rallies (Tory Free Zone) and take pledges and tag friends (Momentum). The same was true for all of the Right-leaning pages who told people to vote for Theresa May (Brexit Britain) and the conservatives (Brexit News), candidates dedicated to leaving the EU (Conservative Britain) or UKIP (Political Movement UK). Finally, both the Conservative and Labour parties benefited from highly automated Twitter activity in the lead up to the election, with slightly increased traffic supporting the latter (Kaminska et al., 2017). These findings demonstrated that of the seven identified steps in the Participatory Propaganda model, at least four (provocative content, echo chambers, amplification through bots and algorithms, and encouragement to act) were present in campaigns supporting parties on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum. Canada: Similar analysis was carried out on 20 Canadian Facebook pages, representing both the political Left and Right evenly (Wanless, 2017b). The period analysed (17 June to 16 July 2017) was roughly about two years prior to the federal elections scheduled for October 2019 and was chosen to gauge whether some of the Participatory Propaganda steps may be identifiable in the early political activity online.5 The Right-leaning pages (Canada First, Drain the Canal, Conservative Tomorrow, The Canadian Daily, Canadian Political Memes, Share This Canada, Debate Post, Canadian Liberals, Canada Proud and

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Elect Conservatives) appeared to be operating in a coordinated manner. On the Left, however, the identified pages (Enough Hate, Occupy Canada, ShitHarperDid. com, Leadnow.ca, Fight for $15 & Fairness, Recognition2Action, Born Rebels, Idle No More, Sustainability the Musical and Black Lives Matter – Toronto) appeared to be acting with less coordination. More than half of all posts on the Right-leaning pages criticised the Liberal government and all pages shared posts criticising and mocking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his Liberal party and Liberals in general. These posts often featured humorous memes and attempts to engage users by posing questions or asking them to tag Liberal friends in the comment section. The Right-leaning pages often shared the same posts, including a series of posts telling followers that a million Likes on a post will result in Trudeau’s resignation. Beyond sharing the same content and each other’s posts, the Right-leaning pages were also tapping into official political organisations. Through a page called Elect Conservatives, the Rightleaning Facebook pages connected in a pagelike network into the Conservative Party of Canada and affiliated political figures, helping to spread their messages. The research also revealed a network of geographically associated Facebook pages that included Canada Proud, Saskatchewan Proud, Manitoba Proud, BC Proud, Proud Albertan and Ontario Proud. Most of these Pages appeared to be dedicated to criticising those provincial governments that were not Conservative at the time, a theme which was also manifested in half of the Right-leaning Pages analysed. Based on the analysis, four steps out of seven in the Participatory Propaganda model were identified in this case, including pushing provocative content through online communities, amplification through seeding of content and encouraging followers to action. The results stemming from all the case studies above demonstrated that activities associated with respective steps in the Participatory Propaganda model were present

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in all three jurisdictions. Some of the activities, such as targeted provocative content, amplification through computational propaganda techniques, calls for action attempting to galvanise users’ reactions and strong engagement with media were easily identifiable. Other activities, such as hyper-targeted audience analysis or continuous monitoring of how messages spread, were impossible to ascertain empirically without approaching the group administrators involved. However, based on indirect evidence (e.g. short time delays in posting the same content on different pages), it is possible to surmise that these steps could be present in the background as critical elements of a typical strategic campaign design and management processes. The considerable degree of resource mobilisation and organisational coordination required to engineer a campaign that involves some, or all, of the Participatory Propaganda steps point to this inevitable conclusion. While the empirical evidence gathered during this research demonstrated that steps associated with the Participatory Propaganda model are being deployed to influence target audiences, all analysis was done through the prism of the ‘would-be propagandist’. In the remainder of this chapter, we will explore another crucial element of participatory propaganda – how audiences engage in this process, as well as outline the challenges it poses to democracies and further directions for relevant research.

WHEN PEOPLE PARTICIPATE IN PROPAGANDA In order to illustrate how audiences engage with online propaganda in the political context, a case study was undertaken to analyse comments and shares on five political Facebook pages in the month (7 May to 6 June 2018) leading up to the Ontario provincial election on 7 June 2018. These pages included the three major official provincial party pages (Provincial Conservative – PC, Liberal and New Democratic Party – NDP), as well as Ontario Proud (pro-Conservative) and North99 (pro-Liberal). The latter two pages were created by two former political staffers from the Conservative and Liberal parties, respectively (Yun, 2018), purporting to be grassroots-driven and among the most popular political Facebook pages in Canada (Platt, 2018). According to the social analytics tool, Social Insider, both Ontario Proud and North99 have double the following of the respective political parties they support (Figure 6.1) and garner significant audience engagement (Figure 6.2). Both Ontario Proud and North99 operate with the intent to engage their audiences. In the top 20 posts6 during the period analysed, 70% of Ontario Proud’s posts and 85% of North99’s asked followers to take a specific action, whereas the parties did so less frequently (NDP 55%, PC 35% and Liberals 15%).

Liberal PC NDP North99 Ontario Proud 0

50,000

1,00,000

1,50,000

2,00,000

2,50,000

Figure 6.1  Total number of page followers, as of 6 June 2018

3,00,000

3,50,000

4,00,000

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97

Liberals PC NDP North99 Ontario Proud 0.0

5000.0

10000.0

15000.0

20000.0

25000.0

Figure 6.2  Follower engagement on page, 7 May to 6 June 2018

In order to assess how audiences engaged, the top two posts with political messaging directly related to the election were selected for each of the five Facebook pages using Social Insider.7 On one post, the 50 most recent public comments were analysed, on the other post, only shares were examined. The publicly available profiles for those users who commented or shared were also manually examined, totalling 500 Facebook accounts, respective comments or shares. Each comment and share were reviewed and coded as being either supportive, rejecting or ambiguous in relation to the original Facebook page post. The user’s profile was examined for authenticity (based on interactions with other users and whether or not they had family within their network) and to ascertain if they were regularly posting or sharing other political content to their wall. On average, across the five Facebook pages, the majority of users engaging with posts were authentic (67% of those who made comments and 97% of those who shared). Overall, users who posted comments were more likely to be supportive of posts made by Ontario Proud (63%) and North99 (65%), in comparison to comments on the political pages (PC 19%, NDP 13%, Liberals 17%), which may indicate a greater level of trust for pages that are perceived as grassroots rather than official party pages where more debate usually takes place. On average, 44% of all commenters and 68% of all sharers across all five pages regularly posted other political

content on their Facebook walls, suggesting that they are active in propagating their political views to friends online. Authentic users, who were politically engaged (Figure 6.3), showed their support for the original post by sharing it to their network (64% of users in the study). This finding supports other academic research arguing that content that resonates with users will have higher chances to be promoted (Garrett & Weeks, 2013). Most of the sharing was done with little alteration of the original post, and only two to nine shares (4% to 18%) in each group had a user comment ‘introducing the post’ to their networks. The same, however, cannot be said about users who simply comment on posts as their level of ‘support’ was relatively low, at only 14% (Figure 6.4). Since message amplification is another aim in participatory propaganda, we also examined how many secondary shares the original post received beyond the first group of 50 users who shared it (the first information wave). Table 6.1 below demonstrates the second information wave that was achieved in each group as 10% to 52% of users chose to re-share the original group post to their own networks, in turn, increasing the message amplification. Depending on the group, content appeal and, likely, communications and behavioural profiles of users, the second information wave added anywhere between 14% and 80% amplification to the first round of shares. Since many Facebook users’ settings do not allow viewing their profiles and

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Liberals PC NDP North99 Ontario Proud 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Figure 6.3  Shares: support + real + political

Liberals PC NDP North99 Ontario Proud 0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

Figure 6.4  Comments: support + real + political

Table 6.1  Measuring the second information wave Original post by a group

Number of shares (A)  on the original post from a group (1st wave)

Percentage of (A) whose post was re-shared (2nd wave)

Number of shares on the re-post (A) (2nd wave)

Total shares in 1st and 2nd waves

North99 Ontario Proud NDP PC Liberal

50 50 50 50 50

52% (26) 22% (11) 26% (13) 10% (5) 32% (16)

40 (+80%) 20 (+40%) 18 (+36%)   7 (+14%) 34 (+68%)

90 70 68 57 84

The Audience is the Amplifier: Participatory Propaganda

1st Wave

2nd Wave

North99 100 80 60 40 20 0

Liberal

PC

99

Ontario Proud

NDP

Figure 6.5  Message amplification

activities unless they are ‘Friends’, we were not able to pursue the analysis further beyond this point to gauge the existence of possible third or even fourth waves. However, the amplification percentages observed even in this small sample suggest the importance of engaging audience participation in furthering the propagandist’s objectives (Figure 6.5). This preliminary analysis illustrated that authentic audience members are engaging with persuasive content, and moreover, propagating views that resonate with their own political perspective on their personal Facebook walls. Elements of the Participatory Propaganda model such as hyper-targeted audience analysis and targeting of echo chambers (followers of perceived ‘grassroots’ pages in this study), are instrumental in achieving higher rates of engagement as knowing user profiles and interests enables the creation of customisable content that appeals to target audiences. If monitoring of user activities and reactions to content on social media channels can be further automated through technological means, the spread of original posts could be followed and adjusted in line with campaign goals. The study also raises questions around how political propaganda is presented to voters online. As noted above, while both Ontario Proud and North99 position themselves as grassroots, the men who launched these pages are former political staffers – one for the federal

conservative party and the other for the provincial Liberal party in Ontario, blurring the line between what is authentically ‘of the people’ and what is driven by bigger political agendas.

CONCLUSION The internet and various ICTs are enabling propagandists to engage with target audiences in novel ways, drawing followers into participating in the creation, adaptation and ­amplification of persuasive messaging. Such intensified engagement appears to constitute a qualitatively more enhanced technique of propaganda delivery that is significantly more ‘pervasive’ – not to mention potentially very dangerous for liberal democracies. Audience participation adds an additional layer of complexity for distinguishing between legitimate (regulated and limited) and illegitimate political communications. Abundant opportunities for obfuscating propaganda sources through ICTs have significantly increased the geographic reach for propagandists, enabling the likes of the Internet Research Agency in Russia to engage and provoke politically active and ‘plugged-in’ audiences in the United States. The use of such techniques raises serious questions about influence operations across borders, what may be acceptable

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under international law and how can the negative impact could be mitigated? At the same time, tools and methods described in the Participatory Propaganda case studies are already in use on domestic audiences by various narrow-­ interest and political groups. While the integration of behavioural advertising has already greatly increased the ability of propagandists to persuade target audiences, the likely addition of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in the not too distant future are likely to afford propagandists another significant advantage, but also must raise questions about the acceptability of extremely targeted messaging that manipulates emotions and known cognitive biases. Lastly, another important conclusion emerged during our work on these case studies. The identification of the Participatory Propaganda model, and initial observations regarding its systemic nature and far-reaching pervasiveness, would not have been possible without the combination of empirical studies and analyses of over 70 academic studies published on disparate aspects that constitute the model between 2015 and 2018 alone. Following the traditional separation of disciplines into specialised silos, most of the studies analysed could not, or did not, produce results and conclusions that make it easier on the reader to recognise the systemic nature of what human interactions in, and with, the continuously changing information environment mean for everyday life. At the same time, the increasing operationalisation of empirical findings in behavioural and computer sciences, psychology and other relevant disciplines in the information space by savvy propagandists everywhere necessitates an equally holistic and systematic approach to propaganda studies. The improved understanding of new means and methods of influencing public and individual opinion could then be used to update the relevant subjects in public education curricula and educate voters in liberal democracies as a means of strengthening democratic principles and improving public discourse on critical issues.

Notes 1  See:  @gerfingerpoken  https://twitter.com/ gerfingerpoken followers as of 2 July 2018. 2  See:  @gerfingerpoken2  https://twitter.com/ gerfingerpoken2 followers as of 2 July 2018. 3  The original definition of propaganda by Jowett and O’Donnell reads ‘Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist’. (See Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015: 7.) 4  As of June 2018, all of these pages remain active on the Facebook platform, suggesting they are not part of the Internet Research Agency network. 5  This posed challenges for identifying relevant pages, so the process used in the UK study was modified. Drawing from patterns observed in the US and UK in naming of pages on the political Right, such as ‘America First’ and ‘Britain First’, a similar page was identified in Canada (Canada First). An equal process on the Left proved to be more difficult. Ultimately, a page that had been actively campaigning against the last conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, emerged, named Enough Hate. Beginning with these two pages, nine more were identified on either side of the political spectrum for being either publicly liked or having had posts re-shared by the initial seed page and those connected to it. 6  Social Insider ranks posts by engagement levels, including comments, reactions and shares. 7  Non-election related posts aimed at gaining new followers, such as Ontario Proud’s top overall performing post for the period, a patriotic boast about Canada’s oceans, lakes, coastline with pictures and a call to action of ‘Share if you are Canada proud’ were ruled out.

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7 Computational Propaganda and the Rise of the Fake Audience Aaron Delwiche

INTRODUCTION SOCKPUPPETS, BOTS, AND THE RISE OF THE FAKE AUDIENCE On 11 September 2014, troubling news was reported via social media: terrorists had attacked the Columbian Chemicals Plant in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. Scores of Twitter users claimed to have witnessed the explosion, and one citizen journalist posted grainy gas station surveillance video that had apparently recorded the incident (Chen, 2015). Soon, users were retweeting screenshots of CNN articles about President Obama launching retaliatory airstrikes in Syria and Iraq (Borthwick, 2015). A Wikipedia page documented the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion, a Facebook account linked to the Louisiana News reported ISIS had officially claimed responsibility, and a low-fidelity video clip supposedly created by the terrorist organization was posted on YouTube (Doctorow, 2015;

Trewinnard, 2016). Disturbing text messages were sent to the phones of local residents, urging them to flee the area. It was a hoax. A press release from Columbian Chemicals established that there was no explosion, and residents were not threatened by toxic fumes (Fedrigon, 2014). Authorities stopped panic from spreading, but the scale of the deception was remarkable. Adrian Chen (2015) described the operation in the New York Times as ‘a highly-coordinated disinformation campaign involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention’. This was clearly not the work of a single individual, and Chen argued that it ‘must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off’. Three months later, Chen noticed that the same Twitter accounts linked to the Columbian Chemicals hoax were posting disinformation about an alleged Ebola outbreak in Atlanta. He eventually traced the

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posts back to a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). At the IRA office in St. Petersburg, more than 400 ‘professional trolls’ were paid to propagate political opinions in online forums (Thomas, 2015). Relying on proxy servers to conceal their IP address, these workers went to great lengths to create fully rounded online personas, embedding propaganda messages into ‘what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person’ (Chen, 2015). This Russian disinformation operation, and others like it, were thrust into the spotlight as analysts attempted to make sense of disinformation circulated during the 2016 US Presidential election. The IRA was financed by ‘a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence’, and these disinformation efforts were part of a coordinated attempt to influence the outcome of the election (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2017). In September 2017, Facebook identified 470 fake pages and accounts linked to the IRA, turning all related information about these efforts over to the Special Counsel charged with investigating the possibility of interference in the 2016 election (Lapowsky, 2017). On 16 February 2018, the Department of Justice indicted 13 Russians and the Internet Research Agency for waging ‘information war against the United States of America’. According to the 37-page indictment, two of the Russian propagandists (Aleksandra Yuryevna Krylova and Anna Vladislavovna Bogacheva) had visited Louisiana in June 2014, three months before the Columbia Chemicals Plant hoax. In December 2018, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) made public two reports which analyzed the IRA’s social media campaigns in exhaustive detail (Shane and Frenkel, 2018). In one of these reports, researchers affiliated with the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford University demonstrated that more than 30 million Americans shared IRA Facebook and Instagram posts with others in their social network between 2013 and 2018

(Howard et  al., 2018). According to these analysts, Russian propaganda efforts were originally confined to Twitter, but the IRA quickly leveraged the potential of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to spread their messages. Across all of these platforms, the goal was to divide and polarize American voters while undermining faith in the integrity and significance of electoral politics. Researchers were surprised to note that Russian propagandists intensified their activities after their election interference was exposed. In fact, ‘engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters’ (p. 3). Two years after Donald Trump’s surprising electoral upset, propaganda experts worried that the same tactics would be used to manipulate voters during the US midterm elections (Syeed, 2017). These concerns turned out to be warranted. A month before the midterms, Twitter deleted more than 10,000 fake accounts that were disseminating disinformation and encouraging citizens to stay home on election day (Bing, 2018). In one study, information security researchers found that a range of influence agents, including bots, sockpuppets, and partially automated fake accounts, were responsible for approximately 25% of the support expressed on Twitter for political candidates in Arizona and Florida (Morpheus Cyber Security and APCO Worldwide, 2018). In a database of Russian propaganda tweets collected by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren (Lacour, 2018), researchers found evidence that Russian trolls and sockpuppets attempted to influence the outcome of the Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke (Conger, 2018). In December, Defense Secretary James Mattis publicly criticized Russian president Vladimir Putin for ‘mucking around’ in the US midterm elections (Segers and Gazis, 2018). The Russian attempt to sway the hearts and minds of American voters is an important story, but obsessive focus on a single

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nation-state has caused many analysts to overlook an even more serious development. The emergence of radically new propaganda techniques has inflicted considerable damage on the cultural practices associated with online participatory cultures. Racing to make sense of these developments, researchers have landed on ‘computational propaganda’ as a useful term for understanding how hidden persuaders have adapted to the information landscape of the early 21st century (Sanovich, 2017; Woolley and Howard, 2017; Bradshaw and Howard, 2018). However, many of these definitions focus heavily on computation, placing less emphasis on the human component. Propaganda always targets human beings, and it is most effective when real people agree to pass it on to others. For the purposes of this paper, computational propaganda is defined as the attempt to influence public opinion and behavior via strategic synthesis of social media platforms, autonomous agents, micro-targeting, and datamining, with active participation from targeted individuals who help perpetuate the message. As Bradshaw and Howard note, this phrase encompasses ‘the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, illegal data harvesting and micro-profiling, the exploitation of social media platforms for foreign influence operations, the amplification of hate speech or harmful content through fake accounts or political bots, and clickbait content for optimized social media consumption’ (p. 4). Computational propaganda targets social media channels which are ostensibly designed to enable free, authentic communication between citizens of global civil society. As a result, we are witnessing the rise of a ‘fake audience’ composed of insincere actors controlling fake online identities known as sockpuppets, artificially intelligent bots trained to emulate the behavior of actual human beings, and cyborg entities who combine elements of both categories. Sockpuppets are ‘online identities (or personas) created to mislead others by

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pretending to be different from the operator of the identities, who typically wishes to remain hidden’ (Desai et al., 2014, p. 4). Depending upon their motivation, skill, and technical resources, a single puppet master can control five, ten, or even 20 different identities at a time. Bots are ‘algorithmically controlled accounts that emulate the activity of human users but operate at a much higher pace (e.g., automatically producing content or engaging in social interactions) while successfully keeping their artificial identity undisclosed’ (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016). These ‘automated social actors’ (ASA) are intrinsically deceptive because they deliberately conceal their artificial nature (Abokohodair et  al., 2015). Increasingly active in online spaces, human actors (sockpuppets) and artificially intelligent actors (bots) attempt to convince authentic human users to propagate their messages. Fake audiences have been mobilized by Russian propagandists (Calabresi, 2017), fascist social movements (Marwick and Lewis, 2017), and the Chinese government (King et  al., 2017), but the technologies which underpin these operations are not limited to a single nation-state, social movement or political perspective. Computational propaganda is deployed with increasing frequency by governments, corporations, and social movements on all sides of the ideological spectrum (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018). This problem is much larger than a single election, and it poses a serious threat to global civil society. Although data-mining and micro-targeting are crucial elements of computational propaganda, this chapter focuses primarily on those aspects of computational propaganda which undermine the integrity of participatory culture. It might seem counterintuitive to characterize these developments as the ‘fake audience’. After all, in the most reductive models of the mass communication process, a sender distributes a message to a mass audience composed of undifferentiated receivers. In most published work on the topic, bots

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and sockpuppets are characterized as senders. However, from the standpoint of other online participants, the opposite is true. Bots are programmed to simulate human behavior and those who control sockpuppets adopt entirely fictional identities. In both instances, the deception has a single goal: convincing other members of the online community that they are ordinary citizens. These dishonest entities pretend to be fellow audience members and are perceived as such by those who encounter them (New York Times Editorial Board, 2017). A recent Pew Research Center study (2018) shows that 68% of American adults consume at least a portion of their news through social media, and Facebook ‘is still far and away the site Americans most commonly use for news’ (p. 3). Yet Facebook and other social media platforms do not actually hire reporters to generate news according to commonly accepted journalistic practices. When adults say they get their news from social media, they are really saying that they rely on stories shared by others in their personal social networks. This ‘news’ can take different forms, including posts shared by one’s friends and family (e.g., personal anecdotes and observations, links to articles in established media outlets, and memes/ images about current events), articles that appear in one’s news feed because a user has chosen to follow a particular media outlet, and/or sponsored posts that appear in the feed as a result of highly targeted advertising. The rise of the fake audience in digital spaces such as Facebook is a significant concern for propaganda researchers because these spaces were originally envisioned as a refuge from mass persuasion. In the mid1980s, bulletin board systems and the nascent Internet were widely hailed as alternatives to the relatively narrow range of political views expressed by corporate media outlets and government news agencies (Bowen, 1996). Decentralized information networks promised a many-to-many communication framework in which ideas emerged organically

from the ground up. Even as the Internet gold rush paved the way for the commercialization of cyberspace, users believed that the voice of the individual citizen was being heard. Whether they took the form of consumer reviews on e-commerce sites, crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia, or conferencing systems which allowed users to upvote and downvote other posts, these digital spaces expressed messy, grass-roots democracy and were seen as a viable alternative to slick commercial messages. At the heart of all this optimism was an unspoken belief in the existence of an audience that was sincerely committed to authentic conversation. In order to understand how these things have changed, it helps to take a closer look at the rise of sockpuppets, trolls, and bots.

Sockpuppets and ‘Trolls’ Fake online identities controlled by human beings with the goal of deceiving other people are not a new phenomenon. Ever since the earliest days of the Internet, individuals have adopted fake online identities for personal or political reasons. When global computer networks were smaller, slower, and powered by dial-up modems, it was relatively easy for users and moderators to know when someone was attempting to deploy multiple fake identities. Today, sockpuppetry has become an increasingly common strategy ‘used by groups seeking to amplify their voice beyond their active membership’ (Thomler, 2011), feeding upon the very factors which made it easier for ordinary citizens to express themselves online (e.g., user-friendly web publishing, inexpensive domain hosts, and free e-mail addresses). Sockpuppets are sometimes referred to as trolls, but the term is a misnomer. Trolls provoke anger and fuel discord because they enjoy watching other people feel bad (Craker and March, 2016), but this is just one of many possible motivations driving sockpuppets. The word ‘troll’ has become the most widely

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used term to describe this phenomenon in the popular press, but it is simply inaccurate. Not all trolls use sockpuppets, and not all sockpuppets are wielded by trolls. While trolls attempt to inflict grief on other users, sockpuppets are deployed to achieve multiple communication objectives. For example, they have been used to create the illusion of false consensus (Hofileña, 2016; Kumar et al., 2017), propagate shareable content to a target audience in the run-up to an election (Caruncho, 2016; Harkinson, 2017), demoralize political opponents (Stone and Richtel, 2007; Ressa, 2016), discredit political opponents (Thomler, 2011), counteract negative messages (Folkenflik, 2013), marginalize authentic participants by isolating them within a wall of noise (King et  al., 2017), distract or redirect public attention (Desai et al., 2014; Ressa, 2016), influence online polls, crowd-sourced rating systems, and other measures of the public agenda (Maity et al., 2017), undermine the ability of citizens to discern truth from fiction (Courtney and Paul, 2016), and subvert collaborative projects such as Wikipedia (Solorio et al., 2013; Kumari and Srivastava, 2017). Sockpuppets are used by public and private actors around the world. These phony identities have been deployed by allies of the Duterte regime in the Philippines in order to persuade voters and intimidate critics (Hofileña, 2016; Ressa, 2016), by the cofounders of Reddit to inflate the perceived size of the conferencing system’s user base (Cherader, 2012; Morris, 2012), by the public relations department at Fox News to counteract criticism in the blogosphere (Folkenflik, 2013), by the CEO of Whole Foods to anonymously boost the company’s stock (Stone and Richtel, 2007), by GOP strategists in New Hampshire to convince Democrats that they should not attempt to unseat the incumbent Representative Charles Bass (Moulitas, 2008; Stone and Richtel, 2007), by Russian propagandists seeking to erode support for Hillary Clinton (Shane, 2017), by

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Democratic researchers ‘experimenting’ with disinformation tactics in the 2017 Senate election in Alabama (Timberg et  al., 2019), and by progressive Democrats who created fake Facebook pages in the same election in order to make it appear that some GOP voters wanted to abolish alcohol sales in Alabama (Shane and Blinder, 2019). Sockpuppets were an essential component of the Internet Research Agency’s attempts to influence online conversations before and after the 2016 election. According to internal documents leaked to Buzzfeed’s investigative news division, the Internet Research Agency’s ‘brand advocates’ are required to maintain at least six Facebook accounts and ten Twitter accounts while growing social networks that include thousands of followers (Seddon, 2014). These jobs are usually occupied by young people who pretend to be alienated citizens, weaving their political opinions into comments on more mundane lifestyle topics (Bugorkova, 2015). In one remarkable instance, a Russian soldier in Ukraine pretended to be a 42-year-old housewife in the United States (Calabresi, 2017). In an interview with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, a former IRA puppetmaster named Marat Burkhard detailed his experience writing pro-Russian comments on municipality websites. According to Burkhard, he and his colleagues followed a familiar pattern when attempting to discredit critics of the Russian government. First, a ‘villain troll’ would disagree with a pro-Russia post, challenging authority figures. Second, a ‘link troll’ would enter into debate with the villain, linking to a supposedly relevant pro-government video or website. Finally, a ‘picture troll’ would chime in by posting an easily shared image. By staging an online ‘discussion’ between sockpuppets, these propagandists give other users the impression that the original pro-Russia post was correct. ‘Villain, picture, link’, explained Burkhard. ‘[I]n this way, our little threesome traverses the country, stopping at every forum, starting

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with Kaliningrad and ending in Vladivostok. We create the illusion of actual activity on these forums. We write something, we answer each other’. Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to Russia. The People’s Republic of China operates an enormous domestic propaganda unit that is believed to be the largest sockpuppet operation in existence (Gallagher, 2017; Lau, 2016). The government’s ‘50-cent army’ fabricates nearly 450 million social media comments each year in an attempt to push the party line. Chinese citizens are aware of this practice, and the term wumau (50-center) is often used in Chinese social media sites to describe someone who works for the government or who holds extremely pro-government views (Farrell, 2016; Lau, 2016). Rather than provoking arguments with political opponents, the human beings who control these sockpuppets seek to neutralize political threats by redirecting attention away from real-world collective action (King et al., 2017). The United States has also used fictional online identities as part of a psychological warfare operation in Iraq called Operation Earnest Voice. In 2011, the United States Central Command awarded a US$2.7 million contract to Ntrepid to develop an ‘online persona management service’ that would allow 50 service personnel based in the United States to control up to ten separate identities each. The contract required that ‘each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history, and supporting details’ (Fielding and Cobain, 2011). The proposed system relied on a private server to ensure anonymity and used traffic mixing protocols to camouflage user data by blending it in with traffic from realworld users. In a US Senate hearing, General James N. Mattis explained that the software was an attempt by the military to ‘adapt to this new domain of [cyberspace] warfare’ (Bazley, 2011). Sockpuppets are sometimes used in tandem with affiliated applications that are designed to generate the illusion that

public sentiment leans in a particular direction. In the UK, the Joint Threats Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) – a unit of the Government Communications Headquarters – has developed a number of tools that can be used to ‘manipulate and control online discourse’ (Greenwald, 2014). Internal documents leaked by Edward Snowden list dozens of applications and gadgets that British intelligence could use to shape the conversation (Joint Threats Research Intelligence Group, 2012). According to a JTRIG (2012) wiki-page titled ‘JTRIG tools and techniques’, these applications included: Sylvester (a ‘framework for automated interaction and alias management on online social networks’), Birdsong (enabling ‘automated posting of Twitter updates’), Fusewire (enabling forum monitoring and allowing ‘staggered postings’), Bomb Bay (providing ‘the capability to increase web site hits/rankings’), Clean Sweep (making it possible to ‘masquerade Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries’), Gateway (‘artificially increase traffic to a web site’), Gestator (amplifying video messages ‘on popular multimedia websites’), Slipstream (‘ability to inflate page views on websites’), and Underpass (‘change outcome of online polls’). The JTRIG story has received little attention from scholars, but it is a remarkable example of how computational propaganda enables the creation of fake audiences. Whether manipulating the results of online polls or fabricating web traffic in order to distribute content more widely, these tools usurp power of authentic media audiences and can be used to paint a completely false impression of public sentiment. Nation-states are not the only entities interested in these technologies. Fringe social movements view sockpuppets as an ideal vehicle for conducting asymmetric information warfare. In June 2017, white nationalists based in the United States attempted to sway the French presidential election in favor of Marine Le Pen by using online forums as a

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launch pad for a massive propaganda effort (Harkinson, 2017). According to the group’s instructions: The plan is this: If only 12 dedicated artists created 3 accounts each, we could effectively identify and manipulate HUNDREDS OF LOCAL NEWS PAGES and target specific LePen and Macron voting strongholds to promote LePen’s message and create an overwhelmingly negative image of Macron. And that only requires 12 people. It’s so fucking easy bro … Step 1. Create a Frenchlooking FB account. See post for a guide on how to properly do this. Step 2. Find memes, get French translations, and copy pasta in our discord server or links in the post. Step 3. Use the catalog to find Facebook pages and coordinate with others in the Discord server. Step 4. Crash this EU … with no survivors. It’s that easy! NOW GET TO WORK, FAGGOT. THERE’S A WAR ON.

Organizers urged their fellow information warriors to create Facebook identities that would be unlikely supporters of the National Front (‘ideally young, cute girl, gay, Jew, basically anyone who isn’t supposed to be pro-[FN]’) and maintained a list of the names of all the fake accounts on a Discord server (Broderick, 2017). The group also recommended targeting anti-Islam and antiimmigration memes toward supporters of the center-right candidate while aiming antiglobalism memes at supporters of the socialist candidate (Harkinson, 2017). These sockpuppetry efforts did not tip the election in LePen’s favor, and Macron won the 2017 French Presidential election with 66.7% of the vote (Alderman, 2017). According to European journalists, this propaganda campaign ‘barely registered’ with French voters because the messages were written primarily in English and because larger media outlets did not amplify the signal to a wider audience (Scott, 2017). However, despite these failures, LePen’s victory ‘marked a historic high for the French far right’ (Alderman, 2017). Sockpuppets did not disappear from the French political landscape in 2017. Researchers linked to the cyber security firm New Knowledge argue that sockpuppets attempted to amplify popular rage during

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the ‘Yellow Vests Movement’ in December 2018, with more than 200 monitored accounts propagating more than 1,600 tweets and retweets every day (Blakely, 2018). Of course, as most propaganda scholars would argue, the attempt to persuade is not the same thing as effective persuasion. French researchers at the University of Toulouse acknowledge the possibility that sockpuppets had some small effect but argue that ‘it would be a mistake to attribute the rise of the Yellow Vests to social manipulation and fake news’ (O’Brien, 2018).

Bots Sockpuppets are arguably the most important component of the fake audience, but they are often deployed in tandem with bots. In the most generic sense, a bot is a piece of algorithmically controlled software which operates without human intervention. Many bots are not used for deceptive and malicious purposes. Maintenance bots keep the web humming by fetching user feeds, mining search engines for keywords, and monitoring websites for updated content (LaFrance, 2017). Twitter bots can be used to automatically retweet certain hashtags or phrases, reply to certain types of tweets, follow users who mention a certain phrase or hashtag, follow users who follow another user, and pull and repost publicly available information about users (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016). When bots are used to strengthen online communities, they are usually upfront about their synthetic nature. For example, when users of the Grateful Dead subreddit mention a specific concert, an account named Herbibot helpfully posts links to public domain recordings of that concert, prefacing each message with ‘beep. ima bot. below are links to the show(s) mentioned in your comment. beep’. These harmless bots can be thought of as ‘legitimate synthetic entities’. Rather than worrying about these ‘legitimate synthetic entities’, propaganda scholars

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should focus their attention on bots who attempt to influence behaviors and beliefs of online users. These bots emulate human behavior while concealing their own artificial nature and political objectives. When deployed for political aims, bots can be used to conceal influence, polarize political discussions, and propagate disinformation (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016). They can also be used for misdirection (encouraging audiences to focus on other types of content) and to create information smokescreens that conceal activities from scrutiny (Abokohodair et  al., 2015). When deployed in combination with sockpuppets, bots can be used to increase the likelihood that a particular Twitter message will emerge as a search result when users search for certain keywords as well as to ensure that certain topics emerge as ‘top trends’ for all users (Agarwal et  al., 2017). Increasingly, multiple bots are deployed at the same time, creating a composite structure known as ‘a botnet’ (Gallagher, 2017). The terrorist group ISIL uses botnets to disseminate gruesome images from beheading videos and to spread other propaganda messages (Al-Khateeb and Agarwal, 2015). Bots have been used by governments to demobilize opposition in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, Syria, Tibet, Turkey, and Venezuela (Woolley, 2016), and bots were responsible for approximately one out of every five tweets posted during the run-up to the presidential election (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016). Limited to 140 characters, Twitter bots are not the ideal tool to use for developing narrative frames but they are ideal for bringing ‘propagandariddled’ blog content to ‘as many eyeballs as possible’ (Agarwal et al., 2017). Abokohodair et  al. (2015) ‘captured a Twitter based botnet in the wild’ and analyzed more than 3,000 tweets in Arabic and English in an attempt to identify key behavioral characteristics of botnets. Based on this data, the authors make a distinction between core bots and peripheral bots (Abokohodair et al., 2015). Core bots tweeted often (posting a tweet every 1.8 minutes) and they only

retweeted content posted by other members of the network. Most of these core bots were either short-lived bots (retweeting often and not lasting more than six weeks) or long-lived bots (retweeting often and persisting until Twitter shuts down the account). However, the authors also identified the existence of a core generator bot which posted more than 2,100 original tweets each week but seldom retweeted. Peripheral bots retweet messages created by the core bots and play an essential role in enhancing the perceived legitimacy of those messages. Intriguingly, these accounts are most often not bots. Instead, they are controlled by ‘legitimate human users’ who have been lured into the bot network and are ‘unwittingly complicit’ in attempts to propagate the botnet’s persuasive messages. Some might find it reassuring that bots cannot succeed without human intervention. Even the most sophisticated network of bots relies on human beings (whether sockpuppets or human beings who have been fooled by a bot) in order to establish the network’s legitimacy. Analyzing the failure of the Columbian Chemicals hoax to spread, the data scientist Gilad Lotan notes that messages must be ‘embedded within existing networks of information flow’ in order to propagate (Borthwick, 2015). In the case of the Columbian Chemicals hoax, the deception was easily detected. The fake Wikipedia account was created by a brand-new user and lacked a credible edit history, and the Twitter bots had not attempted to conceal the fact that all of their messages were sent from a broadcast automation tool called ‘Mass Post’ (Doctorow, 2015). Similar findings were reported by researchers who deployed bots in the context of the May 2015 UK general election (Murthy et al., 2016). Researchers found that the bots were much less successful than anticipated because they lacked friends, followers, and a history of social interaction. They had no meaningful social capital. In order for bots to succeed, they must be followed. This is where sockpuppets come in.

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The line which separates bots from sockpuppets is increasingly blurry. As Agarwal et al. (2017) observe, the fragmented Internet landscape ‘creates a gap-filled territory for exploitation by social bots and hybrid human/ bot collaborations that engage in information conflicts, or “trolling”, and in the dissemination of messages’. For example, software developers patented persona management software capable of converting a single message into one or more writing styles randomly selected from a ‘persona repository’ (Chen et  al., 2009). Individuals claiming to be linked to the hacker group Anonymous described this software as a tool for weaponizing sockpuppets ‘in order to influence the face of revolutions that are based within social networking sites’ (Nouveau, 2011). We already know that individuals rely on scripts and macros to operate multiple identities (Thomler, 2011) and we can expect to see more of these ‘cyborg puppetmasters’ in the future.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT FAKE AUDIENCES? Fake audience technologies are not the totality of computational propaganda, but they are arguably the most significant component. As Bradshaw and Howard (2018) note, computational propaganda also encompasses ‘the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, illegal data harvesting and microprofiling, the exploitation of social media platforms for foreign influence operations, the amplification of hate speech or harmful content through fake accounts or political bots, and clickbait content for optimized social media consumption’ (p. 4). However, all of these techniques are tightly connected. Misinformation is spread on social media platforms by people or bots who pretend to be real members of the online audience. Data is illegally harvested from the interactions of these insincere audience members with real

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human beings, and this data is then used for sophisticated micro-targeting. Ever since communication researchers first grappled with the significance of emerging technologies, they have attempted to understand the role of the audience in the mass communication process. During the past century, communication researchers have developed more nuanced understandings of how individual audience members interact with media content, recognizing that media audiences are not passive. Over the past three decades, individual audience members have used emerging technologies to create highly customized media environments, to interact with each other over great distances at dizzying speeds, and to gain a greater voice in democratic decision-making. Confronted with the impressive scope and apparent power of the telegraph, the radio, and film, researchers initially viewed audiences as passive and pliable. For example, in his groundbreaking analysis of World War I propaganda, Harold Lasswell (1938) relied on the metaphor of the hypodermic needle, comparing allied propaganda to a ‘subtle poison’ that ‘industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people’ (p. 217). Similar claims about the passivity of media audiences emerged in Payne Fund studies exploring the ways that movies influenced children. In one of the most famous studies, the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1933) argued that cinema induces a form of ‘emotional possession’ which causes audience members to lose control over their feelings, thoughts, and actions (p. 74). These early claims about strong media effects would ultimately inhibit attempts to combat persuasive communication. In many intellectual histories of the field of communication, propaganda scholars are said to have believed that messages functioned like ‘magic bullets’ that would directly inject their messages into the minds of a passive audience. As J. Michael Sproule (1989) has persuasively argued, ‘Far from viewing audiences as passive, alienated and irrational receivers

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whose limitations threatened democracy, the propaganda analysts reflected the progressive view that democracy required increased popular participation’ (p. 226). Sproule also notes that the magic bullet myth served as ‘convenient ideological bridge’ from propaganda scholarship to administrative ‘communication research’ that replaced the term propaganda with the euphemism ‘effects research’ (p. 226). The global, digital civil society which continues to connect human beings in the second decade of the 21st century was not the inevitable output of technological determinism. It was created by empowered audiences who used communication tools to develop farflung human associations that transcended the limits of physical distance. Alienated by slick marketing, disinformation, and clear biases of mainstream media outlets on both the left and the right, citizens fled into the comforting embrace of online communities, hoping they could escape an onslaught of persuasive messages. Successful for a time, these active audiences managed to accomplish great things. Consider the value of the participatory project known as Wikipedia. With more than 123,000 editors, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia is a stellar example of the good things accomplished by empowered audiences (Giles, 2005). And this is just one of many examples, from user-generated sites like Deviant Art to open source programming communities and thousands of online support groups for human beings struggling with illness, substance abuse, and mental health problems. In forums and comments sections around the globe, citizens have used the Internet to engage in the most fundamental behaviors of democracy: voluntary association and free expression. Social media platforms and other digital networking tools have become popular in an era characterized by deep skepticism of traditional media outlets. For many users, crowd-sourced rankings, trending links, and user-generated content are viewed as

trustworthy because these metrics are supposedly untarnished by corporate influence and government control. Meanwhile, in digital spaces dedicated to the discussion of sensitive or controversial topics, users share personal stories, fears, jokes, and theories about the world. Even though participants conceal their real-world identities with fanciful usernames, they still expect a certain amount of honest self-expression. Internet users have learned that people are not always who they appear to be online, and we are aware of the existence of immature bots, but we also assume that most people aren’t attempting to deceive us. Sadly, all of these online experiments are threatened by the malignant growth of the fake audience.

REFLECTIONS ON NEXT STEPS The fake audience poses a serious threat because so many people have become highly dependent on the Internet and social media for news about the world. As one information security researcher explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Internet users ‘have emerged as an ideal vector of information attack’ (Waltzman, 2017, p. 4). In a provocative 2015 article authored for the NATO journal Defence Strategic Communications titled ‘It’s time to embrace mimetic warfare’, Jeff Giesea (2015), who later deployed many of these techniques in support of the Trump campaign, argued that this type of information warfare is ‘about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space’ because ‘it’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same’ (p. 71). The rise of the fake audience has been facilitated by two important characteristics of networked communication technologies. The first of these is anonymity. Ever since the Internet first emerged in the public consciousness in the mid-1990s, citizens have understood that individual users are able to

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conceal their identity when surfing online. Online anonymity is key to understanding the punchline of the most widely reproduced New Yorker cartoon of all time (‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’), and it serves as a useful narrative engine for romantic comedies and television thrillers, but it also makes it possible for users to communicate with one another about a wide range of sensitive topics. The second characteristic is accessibility. Decentralized computer networks also lowered barriers to individual participation. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Tumblr, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram are used by different types of people to satisfy different types of needs, but all of these applications share at least one thing in common: these services are ‘free’ to anyone who has an Internet connection. These two essential characteristics of our global communication system have been consciously exploited by deceptive individuals and groups who deploy sockpuppets and bots for financial and political reasons (Thomler, 2011; boyd, 2017b; Waltzman, 2017), but anonymity and accessibility must be preserved. One of the most remarkable things about our contemporary propaganda environment is the speed with which it is changing, demolishing traditional assumptions that have underpinned propaganda research for decades (Paul and Matthews, 2016). In large part, this is because computer processing speed continues to accelerate at an astounding rate. In 2012, when the Internet Research Agency began disseminating propaganda via Twitter, high-end workstations were powered by eight-core processors and the average Internet speed in the United States was 6.7 Mbps (Streams, 2012). Six years later, highend workstations boast central processor units with 48 cores and the average Internet speed in the United States is approximately 26 Mbps (Mills, 2018). These numbers will seem laughably slow to readers in the near future, but they highlight an essential fact. The tools for creating, analyzing, and disseminating computational

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propaganda are significantly faster and more powerful than just a few years ago. Creating fake audiences is easier than ever before, and these trends are likely to continue accelerating at a logarithmic rate (Cranz, 2018). The speed with which things are changing poses a serious challenge for researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike. How can we combat fake audiences in a time of rapid technological and political change? What can we do to fight back while preserving the freedom which makes the Internet such a promising tool for human communication? Because of these rapid changes, we need to be looking for solutions that transcend specific technologies, focusing instead on core principles of logic, ethics and democratic inquiry. If we can work together to implement the following seven recommendations, the rise of the fake audience can be reversed – or at least held at bay.

1. Encourage Social Network Providers to Continue Deleting Fake Accounts Motivated by a combination of self-interest and civic responsibility, leading social network providers have intensified their efforts to identify the fake accounts exploited by bots and sockpuppets. In the summer of 2018, Facebook announced that it had identified more than 652 fake accounts based in Russia and Iran that were part of a coordinated disinformation campaign (Solon, 2018a) and Twitter reported that it had purged more than 70 million fake accounts as a direct response to the use of bots and sockpuppet accounts by Russian propagandists during the 2016 election (Timberg and Dwoskin, 2018). In December 2018, YouTube purged a ‘noticeable’ number of fake accounts, deleting more than 1.2 million channels and millions of videos for violating the company’s spam policies (Velasco, 2018). These companies should continue identifying fake accounts by analyzing user profiles

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and public messages for indicators that are likely to signal deception. Researchers and practitioners agree that there is no reliable solution for consistently detecting bots and sockpuppets all of the time (Desai et  al., 2014; Kumar et  al., 2017). At times, this approach may seem futile. Even if one sockpuppet army is detected and squashed, it is a drop in the bucket compared with those that continue to operate (Owens, 2013). Ferrara et al. (2016) propose three types of strategies for detecting bots and sockpuppets: those that rely on social network information, crowd-sourced initiatives using real human beings, and machine learning approaches which ‘teach’ computers to recognize likely bots. Unfortunately, the same strategies can also be deployed by those who engineer the fake audience in an attempt to escape detection. ‘As we build better detection systems’, the authors predict, ‘we expect an arms race similar to that observed for spam in the past’ (p. 103). However, the adaptive strategies of fake audiences should not be a reason to stop tracking them. The battle may not be easy, but it is essential.

2. Insist That Social Network Providers Comply with Minimum Standards Set Forth in the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation Algorithms can be developed to spot many of these characteristics, but human intervention is needed to avoid false positives. If a user is mistakenly accused of being a sockpuppet, it could seriously damage their credibility (Solorio et  al., 2013) and provide the basis for a libel lawsuit. Unfortunately, leading social networks have not offered much in the way of due process for authentic human users whose accounts and messages are deleted. Mistakes do happen. During the past three years, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a news anchor in the Philippines, and a

Danish member of Parliament have had content removed due to a ‘misapplication of Face­ book’s Community Standards’ (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2018). Recently, a small group of scholars and activists developed a set of standards known as the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation. These standards call on providers to a) ‘publish the numbers of posts removed and accounts permanently or temporarily suspended due to violations of their content guidelines’ quarterly ‘in an openly licensed, machine-readable format’, b) ‘provide notice to each user whose content is taken down or whose account is suspended about the reason for the removal or suspension’, and c) ‘provide a meaningful opportunity for timely appeal of any content removal or account suspension’ with ‘notification of the results of the review, and a statement of the reasoning sufficient to allow the user to understand the decision’ (Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Account Moderation, 2018). In November 2018, a coalition of 88 public interest organizations including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom Forum, and Human Rights Watch signed a public letter urging Facebook to comply with these principles (Kaser, 2018). Noting that Facebook did not add any sort of mechanism for appealing account deactivation until 2011, the signatories called ‘on Facebook to provide a mechanism for all of its users to appeal content restrictions, and, in every case, to have the appealed decision rereviewed by a human moderator’ (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2018).

3. Enlist the Participation of Smaller Social Networks, Blogging Platforms, and Independent Websites For the most part, researchers and policymakers have focused on solutions that can be implemented by the most popular social

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networking sites. While this is a logical starting point, these social sites do not represent the totality of the Internet (Guta, 2018) and many users have turned away from the larger players. According to a Pew Internet Research study conducted in September 2018, 42% of US adults have significantly curtailed their use of Facebook while 26% of adults deleted the Facebook application from their cell phone (Perrin, 2018). The number of teenagers using Facebook dropped by 20% between 2015 and 2017 (Solon, 2018b) and hundreds of thousands of users have pledged to abandon Tumblr in response to policies that prohibit the depiction of human genitals or ‘female-presenting nipples’ (Leskin, 2018). There is no evidence that these users are giving up their digital lives; they are merely focusing their attention elsewhere. We do not know if users will relocate to existing platforms such as Newgrounds and Mastodon, if they will take up residence in forums and comments sections linked to independent websites, or if they will create entirely new virtual communities, but we do know that propagandists and fake audiences will be quick to follow them. We should educate smaller operators about these trends and teach them to recognize tell-tale signs of the fake audience. For example, those who moderate forums, comment sections, and mailing lists can help limit the spread of sockpuppets by implementing e-mail verification links, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) tools, and scripts that scan logs for recurring IP addresses (Desai et al., 2014).

4. Educate People About Cognitive Biases Which Make All of Us Susceptible to Persuasion Research shows that users tend to rely on cognitive heuristics (mental shortcuts) to evaluate the credibility of online information, often assuming that ‘if a number of people

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use information, recommend it, and agree with it, then it is credible’ (Metzger and Flanagin, 2013, p. 217). Waltzman (2017) argues that cognitive hacking efforts such as those that unfolded during the election are facilitated by ‘unprecedented speed and extent of disinformation distribution’ and a savvy reading of the audience’s ‘cognitive vulnerability – a premise that the audience is already predisposed to accept because it appeals to existing fears or anxieties’ (p. 3). Propaganda experts affiliated with the Rand Institute note that Russian propaganda efforts are particularly effective because people take cognitive shortcuts to deal with information overload (Paul and Matthews, 2016). As Ferrara et al. (2016) explain in the context of bots, a serious problem is ‘the fact they can give the false impression that some piece of information, regardless of its accuracy, is highly popular and endorsed by many, exerting an influence against which we haven’t yet developed antibodies’ (p. 99). These cognitive antibodies require educational initiatives such as those described below.

5. Update the Media Literacy Curriculum to Address Fake Audiences, Source Credibility, and Source Diversity Just like propaganda scholars, media literacy educators are racing to adapt to the changing propaganda landscape (Hobbs, 2018) Unfortunately, the media literacy movement has not yet developed a set of principles or lessons that specifically focus on computational propaganda and fake audiences. If we train students to recognize that sockpuppets and bots are pervasive in digital spaces, they might be more inclined to rely on more sophisticated heuristics for evaluating information or turn to multiple sources to verify a claim. For example, research shows that sockpuppets tend to rely on singular first-person pronouns, shorter sentences, shorter messages,

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and profanity when conversing in discussion forums (Kumar et  al., 2017). We also know that user profiles can often be recognized by profile pictures of ‘sexy-looking persons’, cover photos of gardens or landscapes, and fewer than 50 friends (Hofileña, 2016). These findings should be part of the media literacy curriculum. Admittedly, media literacy efforts have encountered challenges. As boyd (2017a) points out, media literacy educators have tacitly assumed that there is some sort of universal agreement that sources such as New York Times and scientific journals are credible. Most of us over the age of 30 can actually imagine what a physical edition of Time Magazine or Wall Street Journal once looked like, but younger people do not necessarily have the same touchpoints. Even when students question their sources, they are not particularly good at establishing source credibility. How can we expect students to differentiate the Washington Post from the (fake) Denver Guardian if they do not understand journalistic practices? Audience literacy also requires consuming information from a range of diverse sources. In order to overcome recent trends toward tribalism, ‘we need to enable people to hear different perspectives and make sense of a very complicated – and in many ways, overwhelming – information landscape’. Meedan.Com has launched a crowd-sourced participatory effort for verifying user-generated content and authenticating breaking stories. We can train users to use tools such as these when confronted with breaking news stories and potentially dubious user accounts.

6. Teach Users of All Ages to Recognize Bots, Sockpuppets, and Other Aspects of Computational Propaganda The media literacy curriculum is an excellent starting point for reaching younger people who are fortunate enough to encounter such

lessons in the classroom, but the vast majority of human beings on this planet are older than traditional students. For this reason, we should continue to develop educational resources which are accessible to people of all ages. In the late 1930s, long before the advent of the personal computer and cell phone, our planet was faced with the rise of fascist movements around the globe, militant skirmishes between the far right and the far left, economic uncertainty, genocide, and isolationism. During these tumultuous years, propagandists exploited every single communication channel they could find, including electronic media (film, radio, and telegraph), print media (books, magazines, newspapers), and other cultural artifacts (opera, theatre, and popular music). In response to these developments, a group of social scientists, artists, educators, and policymakers joined together to form the Institute of Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Between 1937 and 1942, the IPA distributed educational bulletins to thousands of classrooms, churches, and fraternal organizations throughout the United States, training citizens to recognize the seven most common propaganda devices (Sproule, 1996; Delwiche, 2018). Inspired by the IPA’s example, the site Propaganda Critic uses nonpartisan examples and accessible prose to explain contemporary propaganda to people around the globe. Launched 25 years ago, the site was recently updated to include dozens of articles, games, and videos which teach users about bots, sockpuppets, data-mining, micro-targeting, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies (Delwiche and Herring, 2018). Some users might be interested in exploring more complicated tools that can be used to spot bots and trace the propagation of false claims. Botometer, a tool created by the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS), evaluates the likelihood that a given Twitter account is likely to be a bot (Barakat, 2014). Hoaxy,

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created as a joint project of the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS), can be used to track the cumulative number of shared stories over time and to visualize diffusion networks as claims spread from one person to the next (Shao et  al., 2016). These are both useful tools, but they only work with Twitter.

7. Resist the Lure of Surveillance-based Solutions Some might call on network providers to conduct more active surveillance of individual accounts to stop the rise of fake audience members, but such an approach raises many ethical concerns. For example, in August 2017, analysts associated with the German Marshall Fund created a dashboard that monitors hundreds of accounts believed to be directly or indirectly controlled by the Russian government (Syeed, 2017). Should Facebook and Twitter use this type of system to keep a closer eye on the fake audience? This might seem like a sensible strategy, but it poses risks to innocent users. What happens when authentic users are caught up in this digital dragnet simply because they were duped by bots and sockpuppets? The tactical advantages of this type of surveillance must be weighed against the drawbacks of living in a world in which the propagation of dissenting opinions is carefully monitored by social network providers. As Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (2012) argues, freedom of expression is a fundamental value of participatory cultures (p. 278) and it should not be undermined simply to identify potential members of the fake audience.

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that would require all Internet users to link their online identities to their real-world identities. This would be a terrible idea for many reasons. It would exclude anyone whose immigration status is in question, it would neutralize the experimental, creative energy that has powered some of the most exciting digital projects, and it would deter individuals struggling with private personal issues from seeking help online. It would also put dissidents and political activists at great risk of retaliation on the part of repressive governments. In the wake of the Arab Spring, Egyptian dissidents who were unmasked were ‘disappeared’ and citizens in Bahrain lost their jobs (Comninos, 2011).

CONCLUSION We are facing a new kind of audience, one that is increasingly comprised of fake, automated actors. Confronted with this phenomenon, we have two choices on how to proceed. We can learn how to tell the difference between the real and the contrived, or we can shut down freedom and anonymity for all. Just as acts of physical terrorism should not stop us from gathering for parades, concerts, and public demonstrations, the existence of the fake audience should not cause us to abandon the democratic aspirations which fueled the growth of the Internet. In the coming days, we must all take time to educate ourselves and others about the rise of fake audiences and the steps we can take to combat them. Together, we can turn social media back to a space comprised of authentic actors engaged in meaningful conversations.

8. Preserve Anonymity

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Center (10 September), at: www.journalism. org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2018/09/ PJ_2018.09.10_social-media-news_FINAL. pdf, accessed 3 January 2019. Maria Ressa, 2016. ‘Propaganda war: Weaponizing the Internet’, Rappler (3 October), at: www.rappler.com/nation/148007-propagandawar-weaponizing-internet, accessed 24 June 2017. Sergey Sanovich, 2017. Computational Propaganda in Russia: The Origins of Digital Misinformation. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Account Moderation, 2018. Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Account Moderation, at: https://santaclaraprinciples.org/, accessed 8 January 2019. Max Seddon, 2014. ‘Documents show how Russia’s troll army hit America’, BuzzFeed (2 June), at www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/ documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hitamerica, accessed 14 June 2017. Grace Segers and Olivia Gazis, 2018. ‘Mattis says Putin tried to “muck around” in November’s midterm elections’, CBS News (1 December), at: www.cbsnews.com/news/ defense-secretary-mattis-says-putin-triedto-muck-around-in-novembers-midtermelections/, accessed 3 January 2019. Scott Shane, 2017. ‘The fake Americans Russia created to influence the election’ New York Times (7 September), at: www.nytimes. com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebooktwitter-election.html, accessed 16 September 2017. Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, 2019. ‘Democrats faked online push to outlaw alcohol in Alabama race’, New York Times (7 January), at www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/politics/ alabama-senate-facebook-roy-moore.html, accessed 7 January 2019. Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, 2019. ‘Russian 2016 influence operation targeted AfricanAmericans on social media’, New York Times (17 December), at: www.nytimes. com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html, accessed 4 January 2019. Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer (2016). Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online

Misinformation. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (WWW ‘16 Companion), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, pp. 745–750. http://doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890098 Olivia Solon, 2018a. ‘Facebook removes 652 fake accounts and pages meant to influence world politics’, Guardian UK (22 August), at: www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/ aug/21/facebook-pages-accounts-removedrussia-iran, accessed 1 January 2019. Olivia Solon, 2018b. ‘Teens are abandoning Facebook in dramatic numbers, study finds’, Guardian UK (1 June), at www.theguardian. com/technology/2018/jun/01/facebook-teensleaving-instagram-snapchat-study-usernumbers, accessed 8 January 2019. Thamar Solorio, Ragib Hasan, and Mainul Mizan, 2013. ‘A case study of sockpuppet detection in Wikipedia’, Workshop on Language Analysis in Social Media (LASM) at NAACL HLT, pp. 59–68. Also at: https://pdfs. semanticscholar.org/9922/59f813546f91a1 1d153a4ee8eb3dbd6cfbb2.pdf, accessed 24 June 2017. Brad Stone and Matt Richtel, 2007. ‘The hand that controls the sock puppet could get slapped’, New York Times (16 July), at: www.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/technology/ 16blog.html, accessed 24 June 2017. Sproule, J. M. (1989) ‘Progressive propaganda critics and the magic bullet myth’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication. Routledge, 6(3), pp. 225–246. doi: 10.1080/ 15295038909366750. Kimber Streams, 2012. ‘Global internet speeds creep back up in 2012, U.S. lags behind South Korea, others’, The Verge (9 August), at: www.theverge.com/2012/8/9/3230626/ akamai-global-internet-speed, accessed 8 January 2019. Nafeesa Syeed, 2017. ‘Pro-Russian bots sharpen online attacks for 2018 US vote’, Bloomberg (1 September), at: www. bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-01/ russia-linked-bots-hone-online-attack-plansfor-2018-u-s-vote, accessed 15 September 2017. Craig Thomler, 2011. ‘Battle of the sockpuppets (part of the discussion at Media140 Brisbane’, eGov U (27 April), at: http:// egovau.blogspot.com/2011/04/battle-of-

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sockpuppets-part-of.html, accessed 24 June 2017. Timothy Thomas, 2015. Russia’s 21st century information war: Working to undermine and destabilize populations. Defence Strategic Communications: The Official Journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, volume 1, number 1, pp. 11–26. Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin, 2018. ‘Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk’, Washington Post (6 July), at: www. washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/ 07/06/twitter-is-sweeping-out-fake-accountslike-never-before-putting-user-growth-risk/, accessed 1 January 2019. Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, Aaron Davis, and Elizabeth Dwoskin, 2019. ‘Secret campaign to use Russian-inspired tactics in 2017 Alabama election stirs anxiety for Democrats’, Washington Post (6 January), at: www. washingtonpost.com/business/technology/ secret-campaign-to-use-russian-inspiredtactics-in-2017-alabama-election-stirs-anxiety-for-democrats/2019/01/06/58803f26-04 00-11e9-8186-4ec26a485713_story.html accessed 7 January 2019. Tom Trewinnard, 2016. ‘Sockpuppets and spambots: How states manipulate social networks’, Meedan Updates (4 February),

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at: https://medium.com/meedan-updates/ sockpuppets-and-spambots-how-statesmanipulate-social-networks-c77ecdc46e0a, accessed 24 June 2017. Carl Velasco, 2018. ‘YouTube warns creators their subscriber count may fall as it purges spam accounts’, Tech Times (14 December), at: www.techtimes.com/articles/236356/ 20181214/youtube-warns-creators-theirsubscriber-count-may-fall-as-it-purges-spamaccounts.htm, accessed 8 January 2019. Rand Waltzman, 2017. ‘The weaponization of information: The need for cognitive security. Testimony presented before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Cybersecurity on April 27, 2017’, Rand Corporation, at: www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/CT473.html, accessed 24 June 2017. Samuel Woolley, 2016. ‘Automating power: Social bot interference in global politics’, First Monday, volume 21, number 4, at: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/6161/5300, accessed 26 June 2017. Samuel Woolley and Philip Howard, 2017. Computational Propaganda Worldwide: Executive Summary. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. At: http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/CasestudiesExecutiveSummary.pdf, accessed 8 January 2019.

8 Visual Propaganda and Social Media Hyunjin Seo

INTRODUCTION While visual imagery has been an important component of propaganda messaging for a long time, the increased availability of digital communication technologies has influenced how propaganda messages are constructed and disseminated in recent years (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015; Rose, 2012; Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). In this chapter, I use the term propaganda to refer to an ensemble of messages aimed at promoting a certain political or social agenda and thus influencing the target audience’s point of view (Cull et al., 2003; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). An increasing number of political actors use popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to share visual content as a part of their propaganda efforts. For example, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) has used YouTube and other social media platforms to disseminate graphic images, including beheading of Westerners (Martinez & Abdelaziz, 2014). Images of

Syrian civilians injured or killed during alleged chemical weapons attacks were widely circulated via social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Moreover, parties involved in conflicts use social media-based images to elicit emotional responses favorable to their sides (Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). The changing dynamics of visuals in propaganda efforts is in line with the growing popularity of visual content (Rose, 2012; Schwalbe & Dougherty, 2015, Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). Empirical data show that people are more likely to pay attention to and engage with content including visuals as contrasted with text only content (Alper, 2014; Conner, 2017; Seo, 2014). That is, people prefer attention-grabbing, emotioneliciting, and easy-to-digest content in this age of information overload where information is generated and shared via a variety of digital media channels. Consequently, organizations and individuals have invested more and more resources to develop compelling

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visual content to get their messages across in an effective and informationally efficient manner (Conner, 2017). This chapter examines how characteristics of a networked information society, including decentralization and nonmarket peer production (Benkler, 2006, 2011), influence ways propaganda messages are created and shared. In doing so, I will pay particular attention to how uses of visuals in propaganda efforts have evolved while providing historical perspectives as well as synthesizing recent examples. I argue that it is important to update theoretical frameworks in the area of visual propaganda to account for change brought about by digital communication technologies. Examining these issues will also provide useful insights for those who study or practice in the fields of international communication and visual communication.

PROPAGANDA IN THE DIGITAL MEDIA AGE The term propaganda originates from the Latin propagare meaning to ‘sow’ or ‘propagate’, and first appeared as the name of Roman Catholic congregation (i.e., College of Propaganda) in 1622 aimed at propagating the Christian faith and overseeing Christian missions abroad (Lewis, 2011; Moore, 2011, 8). While propaganda was considered to have a neutral meaning until the 19th century, it has since often carried a negative connotation of misrepresentation, as tactics employed by authoritarian states were labeled as propaganda in the 20th century (Goldstein, 2009; Lewis, 2011; Moore, 2011). In addition, its meaning has evolved to be primarily associated with the dissemination of political ideas and the promotion of a political agenda. The increased availability and affordability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have important consequences for developing and disseminating propaganda messages (Cull et  al., 2003;

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Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). In this chapter, I use the term ICTs as an umbrella term for digital communication technologies including the Internet, websites, and social media. The term social media is used to specifically refer to applications that allow people to create and share digital content (Ellison & boyd, 2013; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Seo et al., 2014). Leading social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, are important channels through which individuals and organizations engage directly with their target audiences without having to depend on traditional intermediaries like mass media. These are in line with characteristics of the networked information society – disintermediation, nonmarket peer production, and democratization of information – facilitated by ICTs (Benkler, 2006; Castells, 2011; Shirky, 2011). ICTs have brought about important changes in our society, particularly with regard to the ways we create and share information as well as we connect with others (Benkler, 2006, 2011; Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Castells, 2011). For example, an unlimited number of individuals can collaborate to produce and share information and ideas via wikis, blogs, and open-source software. These decentralized and low-cost digital communication channels allow citizens to participate in activities such as mobilizing people around causes which were traditionally reserved for centralized organizations (Bennett, 2004; Chadwick, 2006; Moezzi, 2009). As Benkler (2006) puts it, the Internet has changed ‘the cultural practice of public communication’ (p. 180). With more than 2.3 billion active users for Facebook and 330 million for Twitter worldwide as of 2018 (Facebook, 2018; Hootsuite, 2018), social media has emerged as an important venue for domestic and international political activities. Indeed, political actors in recent years used social media platforms to directly communicate with the public during election campaigns, conflict situations, and other important occasions (Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). For example, Israel and Hamas have

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used social media in the wake of renewed violence in Gaza since 2012 (Seo, 2014). The two sides launched social media campaigns as part of their efforts to create more favorable international public opinions. As of 2017, 92% of all UN member states had official Twitter accounts with a total of 356 million followers (Burson-Marsteller, 2017). In the same year, about 88% of the UN member states had Facebook accounts with a combined total of 283 million followers. As of 2014, 68% of all heads of state and government had personal accounts on the platform (Burson-Marsteller, 2014). Emphasizing the opportunities of direct communications with the public afforded by digital communication technologies, US President Donald Trump said, ‘Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here … I have over 100m [followers] between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Over 100m. I don’t have to go to the fake media’ (Barber et al., 2017). That is, political actors are increasingly ‘aware that their every action is being critically examined within this new electronic arena, and like the actors that most politicians are, they are adjusting their postures and policies to make the most of their exposure’ (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015, 303). The influence of social media is expected to grow. The latest report from the Pew Research Center shows that the use of social media among US adults has increased from 7% in 2005 to about 70% in 2018 (Smith & Anderson, 2018). Social media platforms are popular in emerging and developing nations as well (Poushter, 2016). In this sense, it is essential to enhance our understanding of how social media and other communication technologies are affecting propaganda and persuasion efforts by different actors of society.

SOCIAL MEDIA-BASED VISUALS IN PROPAGANDA Visual imagery has been a key component of propaganda for a long time (Green, 2014;

Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015; Rose, 2012). Examples include ancient coins emblazoned with images of emperors in Rome, political posters during World Wars I and II, and graphic images shared via social media by the Syrian government in the wake of the latest Syrian conflict since 2011. These visuals are designed to create ‘awe and respect’ and ‘a sense of potency’ to enhance persuasion effects while generating emotional responses to the topic or subject (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015, 327; Rose, 2012). Images are often more effective than words in capturing the attention of the audience and crystalizing sentiments (Cloud, 2008; Edwards & Winkler, 2008; Goldstein, 2009; Rose, 2012). For this reason, political actors have used imagery as one of the primary ideological tools for shaping the public’s perceptions to their advantage (Cloud, 2008; Davis, 2005; Edwards & Winkler, 2008; Erickson, 2008; Hariman & Lucaites, 2008; James, 2006). Film, photography, and fine art have been utilized to support political agenda (Goldstein, 2009). As an example, the Nazis invested in producing films, photographs, posters, and art espousing Nazi ideologies and banned films and art not conforming to their ideology. The US Office of War Information during the Roosevelt administration used visual materials such as films and photography to influence public opinion. Green’s (2014) analysis of visual propaganda related to the German invasion of Belgium during World War I shows visual representations were used to manipulate public opinion in Britain. The changing communication environment has rendered visual propaganda ever more relevant and important. In this increasingly multi-channel and multi-device media environment, people gravitate toward content that grabs their attention with compelling visuals (Alper, 2014; Conner, 2017; Seo, 2014). The rising popularity of infographics, GIFs, photos, and short videos on social media reflects people’s information consumption preferences. For example, empirical data show that

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organic Facebook engagement (i.e., content that is not paid to be promoted) is highest on posts with videos and photos (Ahmed, 2017). In addition, there is a higher level of consumer engagement online with infographics compared with other types of content (Ahmed, 2017; Li, 2013). Visual imagery is popular in this time of fast-paced information consumption, as it is immediate, easy-todigest, and elicits emotion (Li, 2013). The use of visuals is more relevant and important when messages need to be communicated across different cultures and countries. Previous research shows that visual imagery significantly affects one’s perceptions of a culture and country that is not one’s own (Brantner et al., 2011; Cloud, 2008). For instance, a study of the 2009 Gaza conflict showed that visual framing of the conflict influenced viewers’ emotional responses, evaluations of communicative quality, and objectivity and perceptions of actor representation (Brantner et  al., 2011). In fact, social media-based visuals are increasingly utilized by governments in efforts to cultivate more positive perceptions of their country (Seo & Kinsey, 2012). Social media-based visual propaganda has been particularly prominent in conflict situations. During the November 2012 Gaza conflict, the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades utilized their official Twitter accounts to disseminate visual propaganda messages in an effort to garner international support for their own side (Cohen, 2012; Seo, 2014). During the latest conflicts in Syria that began with popular uprisings against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, President Assad and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition used Facebook pages to share propaganda images. The increased importance of social media in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region is in line with the rapid growth in the number of Internet users in the region (Internet World Stats, 2018; Seo & Thorson, 2012, 2017). Stories of social and political movements and conflicts

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in the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring in 2010 were often shared via popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as Internet penetration rates in the regions and around the world have increased significantly in recent years (Internet World Stats, 2018). Consequently, main parties in these conflicts used social media for their propaganda purposes and shared attentiongrabbing images to enhance propaganda effects. The following two sections consider two cases illustrating how visual propaganda was used in conflict situations in recent years. The first is the 2012/2013 confrontation between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades, and the second one analyzes conflicts between the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regime and Syrian opposition forces following the popular uprisings in Syria in 2011.

VISUAL PROPAGANDA DURING ISRAELI-HAMAS CONFLICT IN 2012 AND 2013 In the wake of renewed conflicts with Hamas in 2012, Israel launched a social media campaign to support its efforts to generate more favorable international public opinion. Israel used popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to spread information about damages and casualties in Israel caused by Hamas. Specifically, the Israeli Defense Forces posted on its official Twitter account (@IDFSpokesperson) images of Israeli soldiers and civilians killed or injured during the Hamas attacks. Hamas also launched a social media-based propaganda campaign. Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades used its official Twitter account (@AlqassamBrigades) to share graphic images of Palestinian babies killed by Israeli airstrikes, with one of its tweets asking ‘Where is the media coverage of Israel’s crimes in Gaza?’ (Cohen, 2012). Seo’s (2014) study analyzed how visual imagery was used

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for propaganda by the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades during the 2012 Gaza conflict to examine the role of visuals in international propaganda in this digital media age. Based on visual content analysis of 243 images shared via Twitter by the two sides from November 2012 to January 2013, the study found interesting differences and similarities in their use of visuals for social mediabased propaganda messages. In the Twitter images shared by the Israel Defense Forces, resistance was the most prominent theme, followed by unity, threats from enemy, destruction, casualties of own civilians, humanity, and casualties of own soldiers. Prominent images portraying resistance and shared by the Israeli Defense Forces include an illustration featuring Ahmed al-Jabari with a giant stamp reading ‘ELIMINATED’. Israel’s killing of the head of the military wing of Hamas on November 14, 2012, was the main source of the renewed conflict in 2012. The image was evocative of a Hollywood film poster, resulting in criticism that the Israeli Defense Forces was gamifying the war (Cohen, 2012). In contrast, casualties of civilians was the most frequently featured theme in the Twitter images shared by Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades. Many messages portraying the theme were very graphic, with one photo showing a parent crying in front of the body of a baby with a big hole in her skull. In addition, the official Twitter account of the Alqassam Brigades posted illustrations of innocent victims to support their message that Israeli leaders were ‘cold-blooded killers’. For example, some images described Netanyahu walking on Palestinian babies or torturing a Palestinian to bleed while asking the baby, ‘Tell me where are the Rockets. Confess’. While many Palestinian civilians were indeed killed during the conflict, these images also served to support Hamas’ efforts to portray Palestinians as ‘victims’ and Israelis as ‘aggressors’. In these Twitter images, different propaganda frames were used to enhance

effectiveness of the message (Seo, 2014). Frames refer to schemata of interpretation that enable individuals to organize, perceive, identify, and interpret information (Entman, 1993; Gamson, 1992; Goffman, 1994; Melki, 2014; Reese, 2007; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). A framing approach affects how the receiver of information understands or interprets the issue presented by making a certain aspect of an issue more salient. Visual imagery plays an important role in this identification of salience (Borah, 2009; Green, 2014; Schwalbe & Dougherty, 2015). For instance, an experimental research study by Brantner et  al. (2011) showed that visual framing of international conflicts influences how viewers emotionally react to those conflicts. In addition, an analysis of visual frames used by Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report in covering the 2006 Lebanon War showed that the news magazines focused on the war’s negative impact on Lebanon and its people by using military conflict and human interest frames (Schwalbe & Dougherty, 2015). Seo’s (2014) study found important differences in terms of using propaganda frames between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades. The majority of images posted by the Israel Defense Forces included the analytical propaganda frame, whereas a significantly high proportion of images by Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades featured the emotional propaganda frame. Specifically, Israeli images tended to emphasize factual elements concerning damages incurred to Israel during the conflict and threats from Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces frequently communicated messages by visually presenting data in Israeli tweets. In contrast, images posted by Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades often utilized an emotional propaganda frame by tweeting photos of sobbing parents in front of babies or children killed or injured by Israeli attacks. The Alqassam Brigades also posted on Twitter an image comparing a Caucasian girl sleeping on a comfortable bed holding a teddy bear

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with Palestinian children killed and laid in a hospital bed. In addition to engaging in a physical war on the ground, the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’ Alqassam Brigades were involved in information warfare using social media sites. They reacted to the other side’s posts or images on Twitter and called on citizens in their own country or in other countries to support their side and amplify their messages. With the increased use of social media worldwide, making real-time interactions with audiences and using compelling visuals in the process have become important components of propaganda.

VISUAL PROPAGANDA DURING SYRIAN CONFLICTS Another study examined the use of visual propaganda during the conflict in Syria in the wake of popular uprisings against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2011 (Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). Several years following the onset of the uprisings, the Syrian government and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, which represented Syrian opposition groups in international meetings (Bouchard, 2014), used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to promote their own agenda within and outside the country and refute the other side’s claims (Curry, 2013; Sadiki, 2012; Shehabat, 2012). Digital communication technologies have become increasingly important in Syria, although Internet penetration is still low as compared with other countries (Internet World Stats, 2018; Seo & Thorson, 2017). About six million people in Syria used the Internet with the penetration rate of 33% as of December 2017, compared with 30,000 Internet users in 2000 (Internet World Stats, 2018). An estimated 4.9 million people used Facebook as of December 2017. Seo and Ebrahim’s (2016) content analysis of images posted on Syrian President Bashar

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al-Assad’s official Facebook page and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (herein, Syrian Coalition) Facebook page provide useful insights into visual propaganda in the conflict situation. Their study analyzed images posted on the two Facebook pages from April 2013 to September 2014 covering key events surrounding the Syrian conflict including Syrian chemical weapons situations and the emergence of ISIS in the Middle East. Visual imagery on the Syrian government’s Facebook page often highlighted President Bashar al-Assad and portrayed him as a strong, fearless, and forceful leader who acts in the best interest of the Syrian people. In addition, unity within Syria and with foreign allies was the most frequently featured theme in the Facebook images. Many photos focused on President Assad’s diplomatic activities with foreign allies – for example, the Syrian President receiving an award by Russian officials for ‘defending his people’. In addition, the Facebook page posted images that helped convey the message that Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad is ‘a caring mother’ for the country. For instance, the Syrian First Lady was shown consoling civilians and children affected by the conflict in some Facebook photos, which conveyed the theme of humanity (Figure 8.1). Overall, the

Figure 8.1  An image posted to the Syrian President’s Facebook page

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Syrian government’s Facebook page stayed away from acknowledging political efforts by opposition forces while using visual imagery to suggest that life has continued normally throughout Syria thanks to President Assad. The Syrian Coalition’s Facebook page often featured images conveying the themes of threats from the Syrian government, casualties of civilians, unity, and victory, expressing their messages of reviving revolution in Syria. For instance, visual imagery portrayed sufferings of children, women, and the elderly,

and citizens’ participation in acts of defiance toward the Assad regime (Figure 8.2). Most visuals were aimed at encouraging solidarity and action among Syrian citizens by exposing government violence and torture. Visual imagery on the Syrian Coalition Facebook page also portrayed struggles of resistance in Syria to broader social issues, such as class struggles, homelessness, and food security. These images help convey an appeal to all corners of Syrian society to unite and revive the demands for democratic change,

Figure 8.2  An image posted to the Syrian National Coalition Facebook page

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political rights, and economic improvement many protestors made during the 2011 Syrian revolution. In terms of generating audience reactions on social media, the study found that visuals conveying the theme of causalities of civilians or military personnel were most likely to receive higher audience reaction (i.e., Facebook likes, comments, or shares). That was the case for both the Syrian President’s Facebook page and the Syrian Coalition Facebook page, even if those themes were instantiated differently by each side. The casualties of civilians theme on the Syrian Coalition Facebook page was often delivered with graphic images of children or adults killed by the Syrian government. This aspect was particularly the case in 2013 when the Syrian government allegedly launched chemical weapons attacks on civilians. On the Syrian President’s Facebook page, the casualties of civilians theme was visualized with photos of grieving families and friends of military personnel who were killed during fights against Syrian opposition forces. In addition, the study showed that images using the emotional or human interest frame were more likely to generate higher audience reactions compared with other types of propaganda frames. Visuals including these frames conveyed personal stories of specific individuals. Indeed, previous studies have shown that using personal stories in strategic communication is effective in influencing how people think about certain issues (Brantner et  al., 2011; Goldstein, 2009; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). Often times, images with the human interest frame on the Syrian Coalition Facebook page portrayed civilian sufferings. Probably for this reason, those images with the human interest frame garnered a higher number of comments and shares but a significantly lower number of likes. As ‘liking’ on Facebook is generally considered approving what is described in the image, Facebook users may not have wanted to ‘like’ the images. In this sense, examining specific types of audience reactions on social media is essential to

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developing a nuanced understanding of the interplay between content type and audience reactions to the content. Empirical research such as this is an important step toward developing solid methodological frameworks for analyzing social media-based visual propaganda and persuasive messages.

CONCLUSION New and emerging ICTs have significantly influenced the ways we create and share information as well as how we connect with others (Benkler, 2006, 2011; Seo et al., 2014; Smith & Anderson, 2018). With ICTs enabling direct interactions with and among their target audiences or stakeholders, governments and nongovernmental organizations have interacted with global publics via social media and other online-based communication tools as part of their efforts to understand, inform, and influence them. In some cases, organizations or individuals use these digital communication technologies for their propaganda purposes. While the use of propaganda has been an integral part of human history dating back to ancient Greece, developments in ICTs have affected techniques of propaganda (Cull et  al., 2003; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015; Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). In particular, visuals have become more relevant and important in propaganda messaging, as people are increasingly opting for easy-to-digest content and share attentiongrabbing images (Conner, 2017; Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016). Despite the significant role of visual propaganda, there is still insufficient empirical or theoretical research on this topic. While there are some empirical studies on this (e.g., Green, 2014; Rose, 2012; Schwalbe & Dougherty, 2015; Seo, 2014; Seo & Ebrahim, 2016), more research is needed to develop solid theoretical and methodological frameworks for analyzing visual propaganda and persuasive messages in the rapidly changing media

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environment. Previous theories of propaganda provide useful guidance in this (e.g., Cull et al., 2003; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015). However, more work is needed to better incorporate important changes brought about by ICT-facilitated social collaborative networks. For example, previous models of propaganda emphasize the role of mass media and one-way communication types, whereas increasingly active multi-path communications between and among the propagandist and publics is taking place via social media. As shown in Seo and Ebrahim’s (2016) study, increased interactivity between political actors and the public can result in strengthening or weakening political actors’ messages and introducing new information or arguments. Therefore, it is important to understand types of interactions between political actors and the public and outcomes of these interactions. Future research should examine how different levels of Internet connectivity and availability of digital communication technologies might influence creation and dissemination of propaganda messages and visuals. Equally important is to understand how characteristics of political, social, and cultural systems of a society play a role in this. Additionally, comparing propaganda tactics used in traditional media with those used in social media can provide useful context. To examine these and other related topics, a multilevel approach to visual propaganda in the digital media age would be helpful. Research in this area should have important implications for scholarly and policy communities in the fields of propaganda, persuasion, visual communication, and international communications.

Note Parts of this chapter have been reproduced from Seo, H., & Ebrahim, H. (2016). Visual propaganda on Facebook: A comparative analysis of Syrian conflicts. Media, War & Conflict, 9(3), 227–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635216661648.

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Burson-Marsteller. (2017). Twiplomacy Study 2017.https://twiplomacy.com/blog/twiplomacystudy-2017/ Castells, M. (2011). The rise of the network society: The information age: Economy, society, and culture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Chadwick, A. (2006). Internet politics: States, citizens, and new communication technologies. New York: Oxford University Press. Cloud, D. L. (2008). ‘To veil the threat of terror:’ Afghan women and the in the imagery of the U.S. war on terrorism. In L. C. Olson, C. A. Finnegan, and D. S. Hope (Eds.), Visual rhetoric: A reader in communication and American culture (pp. 393–411). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Cohen, N. (2012, November 21). In Gaza conflict, fighting with weapons, and postings on Twitter. The New York Times. Accessed January 2013 at http://goo.gl/LxQqsJ Conner, C. (2017). The data is in: Infographics are growing and thriving in 2017 (and beyond). Forbes. www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2017/10/19/the-data-is-ininfographics-are-growing-and-thriving-in-2017and-beyond/#7d1c2245137c Cull, N. J., Culbert, D., & Welch, D. (2003). Propaganda and mass persuasion: A historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio. Curry, C. (2013, September 5). Asma Assad star of Syrian President’s Instagram account. ABC News. Accessed September 2013 at http://goo.gl/NZZYn4 Davis, G. (2005). The ideology of the visual. In M. Rampley (Ed.), Exploring visual culture: Definitions, concepts, contexts, (pp. 163–178). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Edwards, J. L., & Winkler, C. K. (2008). Representative form and visual ideograph: The Iwo Jima image in editorial cartoons. In L. C. Olson, C. A. Finnegan, and D. S. Hope (Eds.), Visual rhetoric: A reader in communication and American culture (pp. 119–137). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. Erickson, K. V. (2008). Presidential rhetoric’s visual turn: Performance fragments and the politics of illusionism. In L. C. Olson, C. A.

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Finnegan, and D. S. Hope (Eds.), Visual rhetoric: A reader in communication and American culture (pp. 357–374). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Facebook. (2018). Company information: Statistics. https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ Gamson, W. A. (1992). Talking politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1994). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Boston, MA: Northwestern University Press (Originally published 1974). Goldstein, C. S. (2009). Capturing the German eye: American visual propaganda in occupied Germany. London: University of Chicago Press. Green, L. (2014). Advertising war: Picturing Belgium in First World War publicity. Media, War & Conflict, 7(3), 309–325. Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J. L. (2008). Public identity and collective memory in U.S. iconic photography: The image of ‘accidental napalm’. In L. C. Olson, C. A. Finnegan, and D. S. Hope (Eds.), Visual rhetoric: A reader in communication and American culture (pp. 175–198). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media, New York, NY: Pantheon. Hootsuite. (2018). 28 Twitter statistics all marketers need to know in 2018. https://blog. hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/ Internet World Stats (2018). Internet users worldwide. Accessed January 2018 at www. internetworldstats.com James, B. (2006). Envisioning postcommunism: Budapest’s Stalin monument. In L. J. Prelli (Ed.), Rhetorics of display (pp. 157–176). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. (2015). Propaganda and persuasion (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. Lewis, B. (2011). The end of modern history in the Middle East. Sanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Li, A. (2013, January 26). Rise of infographics: Marketing in the social media age. http:// mashable.com/2013/01/26/infographicsmarketing/

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Melki, J. (2014). The interplay of politics, economics and culture in news framing of Middle East wars. Media, War & Conflict, 7(2), 165–186. Moezzi, M. (2009, December 7). Iran’s green revolutionaries pack a powerful punch. NPR, Accessed January 14, 2010 at www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId= 121052945 Moore, C. (2011). Propaganda prints: A history of arts in the service of social and political change. Coventry: Herbert Press. Martinez, M., & Abdelaziz, S. (2014, October 3). ISIS video of 4th Westerner killing similar to others, but doesn’t run as long. CNN. Accessed October 2014 at http://goo.gl/3Yp3Io Poushter, J. (2016). Smartphone ownership and internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies (Pew Research Center). Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Accessed October 2015 at www.pewglobal. org/2016/02/22/social-networking-verypopular-among-adult-internet-users-inemerging-and-developing-nations/ Reese, S. D. (2007). The framing project: A bridging model for media research revisited. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 148–154. Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials. London: Sage. Sadiki, L. (2012, January 16). The professionalization of revolution in Syria. Al Jazeera English. Accessed January 2012 at http://goo.gl/ WZZEk Scheufele, D. A., & Tewksbury, D. (2007). Framing, agenda setting, and priming: The evolution of three media effects models. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 9–20. Schwalbe, C. B., & Dougherty, S. M. (2015). Visual coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War: Framing conflict in three US news

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9 Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda Jordi Xifra

INTRODUCTION In 1928, Edward L. Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, defined public relations as a process driven by powerful organizations seeking to gain favor for their products, services or ideas. This definition has dominated the field during the years since its publication in his famous book Propaganda, considered one of the first public relations books. In it, Bernays considered the existence of a positive propaganda, although this was not unique in the field. Indeed, as St. John III (2006) pointed out, today’s conception of propaganda ‘stems from the years immediately after World War I. Progressive criticism centered on how the government used lies and distortions to convince Americans to intervene in the war’ (p. 221). This progressive criticism has persisted so strongly that it has obscured an awareness that beneficial and ethical propaganda can serve to move audiences to consensus and action within a democracy. Public

relations pioneer Ivy Lee’s efforts to legitimatize propaganda have been studied by scholars – as Moloney (2006) noted, Lee’s contribution to public relations development was earlier than Bernays, but is not as commonly referred to as Bernays, who wrote 15 books. In 1913 and 1914, Lee orchestrated a propaganda campaign that sought public and governmental approval of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s request for a freight rate increase. This successful campaign influenced Lee’s thinking regarding both the theory and practice of an ethical propaganda campaign. This argument has an opposing (dark) side – today’s practice of public relations. Not a lot of research has been conducted in the field to show that public relations practitioners act as propagandists in the service of companies. Nonetheless, we do have some examples of how PR firms use public relations not only to maintain their clients’ hegemony (i.e., public relations as power relations, which is legitimate), but also in ways that follow the main principles of propaganda used by

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dictatorships: for manipulation and disinformation. The turning point came in 1990, when the world’s largest PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, was hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a group predominantly funded by the Government of Kuwait, to assist its campaign for US intervention in response to the invasion and annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The firm arranged for a Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah, to testify before the Human Rights Caucus of the United States Congress in October 1990 about events she had allegedly witnessed. She reported seeing Iraqi soldiers kill babies in a Kuwaiti hospital, before it came to light that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States and her story was false. Hill & Knowlton was accused of spreading false information to increase support for the Gulf War, which the company denied. The company received around US$10 million for their work for Citizens for a Free Kuwait. For all of the above reasons, and others we will present in this chapter, we agree with the following statement, which firmly stated the idea of corporate propaganda for the first time in public relations academia: US PR grew up in an intellectual climate pessimistic about mass democracy’s influence on public affairs. Its first use was to defend ‘robber baron’ US capitalism. It was then deployed effectively by the federal government in support of the First World War and of the New Deal. It became associated with ‘corporate propaganda’ and mass psychology as social control. Its US pioneers (Bernays and Lee) were supportive of these uses and saw PR’s linkage with propaganda positively. However, after the US experience of the fascist regimes between 1919 and 1941, and of the Cold War with communism after 1945, PR had no future as a publicly acceptable activity in a liberal democracy unless the conceptual link with propaganda was fractured. That fracture was achieved conceptually by Grunig and Hunt in 1984. (Moloney, 2006, p. 57)

In line with the above perspective, this chapter deals with today’s corporate propaganda as not only a new but also the most practiced form of public relations.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF A LACK OF AFFECTION Public relations scholars have been motivated to forge a clear distinction between the concepts of PR and corporate propaganda, or may only accept propaganda as a historical antecedent of contemporary public relations practice. Fortunately, a few scholars, such as L’Etang (2008), have explored the conceptual and historical connections between what is usually seen as the troublesome link between public relations and propaganda, and questioned why these concepts are hard to define in relation to each other. Despite this, other scholars, such as Moloney (2006) or Xifra and Heath (2015), have considered public relations to be a form of propaganda, or the two terms to be used interchangeably. For instance, Moloney argued that ‘public relations is weak propaganda “voicing” interests competing over policy, material, ideological and reputational advantage in a market, capitalist, liberal democracy’ (p. 9). However, as Bernays (1965) observed in his memoirs, the connotations of the term propaganda turned completely negative over the previous 200 years. From the perspective of public relations scholars, what are the reasons for this? We can find two main motives. Chronologically, the first is located in Europe, and the second in the United States. We find the first reason in the influence of the French personalist movement led by Mounier in European public relations. Indeed, the so-called European School of Public Relations, which proposed a Christian humanitarianism approach to public relations, has to be included as a part of the effects of Christian phenomenology on French postwar intellectuals, thinkers and scholars. The intellectual leader of this school was Lucien Matrat. According to Boiry (2004), as a professional Matrat considered the methods used by American oil companies to be too similar

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to those described by Ellul (1973) in his book on propaganda, and lacking respect for individuals. He therefore became interested in the ethical nature of public relations and its distinction from propaganda and advertising. With this in mind, Matrat constructed the bases of a theoretical body of work which was developed by a group of French professionals and academics constituting what is today known as the ‘European doctrine of public relations’, a term coined by Matrat himself (Ugeux, 1973). As Watson (2014) stated, Matrat was a major figure in western European public relations over a 30-year period, but has received little recognition elsewhere. He was considered the father of public relations in France and became a dominant figure in the Frenchspeaking world and in other countries such as Spain in the early 1970s. To Matrat (1971), adopting a public relations policy is, first of all, to reconcile the interests of the company and of those who depend on its implementation. To put a public relations policy into practice is, afterwards – and only afterwards – to initiate a communication policy capable of establishing and maintaining relationships of trust with the company’s group of publics. This is, according to Matrat (1971), the key that separates public relations from advertising and propaganda. From the moment when advertising becomes the strategy of desire that motivates the demand for a product or service and propaganda the conditioning strategy that replaces reflective actions with reflexive actions, public relations becomes the strategy of trust that awards communication its authenticity. The basis for this can be found in his position as a Public Relations manager for the Frenchowned Elf petroleum group. He considered PR methods used by American oil companies to be propaganda and lacking respect for individuals. He therefore became interested in the ethical nature of public relations and its distinction from propaganda and advertising. His enduring international influence

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is found in the Code of Athens, the ethical PR code adopted by The International Public Relations Association (IPRA), in accordance with his principle: ‘without ethical practice, public relations has no purpose’ (Matrat, 1975). The Code of Athens was based on the UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Matrat proposed it as a universal code of ethics for public relations and an important differentiator of public relations from what he considered lesser forms of communication such as advertising and promotional propaganda. Perhaps more interesting than the code itself is its function as a public relations strategy: Using a five-step strategy promoted by Matrat, IPRA had gained support from many national public relations bodies and had staged photobased presentation events that involved Pope Paul VI, the presidents of India and the Council of Europe and various heads of state and government ministers, as evidenced by numerous photographs in the IPRA archive … While these gave ‘name check’ value to the Code and promoted its acceptance in the public relations sector, Matrat’s strategy was more pragmatic in its desired outcomes than he had promoted earlier. (Watson, 2014, p. 712)

In fact, Matrat postulated that public relations was a form of positive persuasive communication when in comparison with advertising and propaganda. The effects of European totalitarian regimes institutionalizing propaganda affected a deeply Catholic intellectual such as Matrat, who sought refuge in public relations to justify persuasive communication and reject the one that had been created by the Catholic Church. It is not surprising, then, that the Code of Athens (whose intellectual contribution is minimal, since it is practically a plagiarism of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) found one of its most prominent prescribers in the highest spiritual leader of Catholicism. The event attended by Pope Paul VI was a symbolic act, which

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legitimized public relations as a form of Catholic communication above and beyond the perverted propaganda use made of it by European totalitarian states. The second reason for public relations scholars distancing themselves from propaganda was James E. Grunig designing the four models of public relations, perhaps the most important turning point in the academic history of the discipline. This theory permeated public relations research in the last 20 years of the twentieth century, to the point where it originated a critical theory whose authors, tired of the almost unified thinking prevalent among academics of the discipline, decided to embark upon new, intellectually much more fertile directions, and on which our chapter is based. Grunig introduced four behavioral models of public relations based on an analysis of the historical development of his professional practice. They constitute representations of values, goals and behaviors considered or used by organizations when practicing public relations and are the result of combining two dichotomous dimensions: the direction (unidirectional vs. bidirectional) and the balance (asymmetric vs. symmetric) of the effects pursued. The names of the models are: the press agent/publicity model; the public information model; the bidirectional asymmetric model; and the bidirectional symmetric model. In the press agent model, public relations performs the function of propaganda and disinformation. Professionals disseminate information regarding their clients that is often incomplete and distorted. It is a model of unidirectional communication, from the organization to the public. This propagandistic dimension is articulated by applying the principles of scientific propaganda developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – that is, those of simplicity, sympathy, synthesis, surprise, repetition, saturation, wear, dosage and unity of orchestration (Xifra, 2017) – and the use of

publicity. The model is the result of a very narrow vision of propaganda influenced by the use that the Soviet, German, Italian and Spanish dictatorships made of propaganda. Some authors have compared this model with another based on the spin doctor phenomenon (Sumpter & Tankard, 1994). Such a comparison clarifies its application to communication and highlights its manipulative aspect: the creators of image and advertising have known how to give the necessary effect to their stories. The concept of spin doctor is, therefore, a current vulgarization of the press agent of the late nineteenth century, as shown by: (1) spin doctors’ aims being reactive; (2) their use and abuse of new technologies – social networks, email, mobile phones, etc. – as a principal means of communication; (3) their clients consisting mainly of politicians, high public officials, public figures involved in judicial processes or, as was the case with pioneering press agents, people from the world of entertainment or sports; (4) their contacting journalists directly, instead of using techniques such as press releases, press conferences or corporate advertising; and (5) their tending to act without any ethical scruples, not trying to achieve too much notoriety and rejecting the term ‘spin doctor’. In the public information model, the purpose of public relations is the dissemination of information, not necessarily with a persuasive purpose. Professionals act, or should act, as if they were journalists integrated within the organization; that is, applying the principles of current information, with the function of transmitting information about it to the – internal or external – public. In this model, communication is also unidirectional, but with the difference with respect to the previous one that the information transmitted here is much more exhaustive. The bidirectional asymmetric model aims to scientifically persuade the public; that is, those professionals who practice bidirectional asymmetric public relations use methods and

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techniques from the social sciences to study the attitudes and behaviors of the public, with the aim of making them accept the organization’s point of view and behaving in a way that backs up its decisions. Communication in this model is, obviously, bidirectional: it flows to the public and from the public (feedback). Asymmetry is inferred from the fact that the effects of public relations are unbalanced in favor of the organization. In other words, the organization does not modify its behavior as a result of public relations, but seeks to modify the attitudes and behaviors of the public. Finally, the bidirectional symmetric model has been one of the backbones of contemporary public relations theory and become its dominant paradigm. For Grunig, it constitutes the ideal of public relations, the normative model par excellence, which has therefore generated most criticism, revisions and adaptations since its formulation in 1984. The author himself has adapted it, although he has not refuted it. According to Grunig, the public relations professionals who practice it act as mediators between the organization and the public in its environment. The goal is mutual understanding between the two parties. The theory and methods used are those of communication rather than persuasion. Symmetric bidirectional communication translates into a dialogue that should lead, in the words of Grunig and Hunt (1984), to the organization and its public modifying their attitudes and behavior following execution of the public relations program. This would be the ideal situation resulting from the exercise of public relations and is what the authors say when they consider the sympathetic effect between both subjects as being good: the organization and its public communicating sufficiently to understand each other’s position. In terms of relations with the press, one example is as follows: while the sending of press releases with no follow-up is a tactic of the press agent or public information model, the bidirectional symmetric model would

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include inviting journalists to develop their view of the facts (through a press visit, for example). An attempt was made to validate this paradigm through a macro-research project, the ‘Excellence’ study, a project funded by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and initiated in 1985. Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management was published seven years later and represents the first stage of the project, theory building, which was to be followed by empirical research. A project of this length and size would constitute a serious research effort in any discipline and, to date, stands out in the field of public relations (Pieczka, 2006, p. 348). The Excellence study contributed to shaping the dominant paradigm. However, ‘practitioners create discourses that present and justify their view of the world. When publics accept the practitioner’s view of the world, hegemony is created and publics cede power to the organizations’ (Coombs & Holladay, 2012, p. 881). Furthermore, power is frequently linked to Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony or ‘domination without physical coercion through the widespread acceptance of particular ideologies and consent to the practices associated with those ideologies’ (Roper, 2005, p. 70). Put another way by the same author: J. E. Grunig acknowledged that ‘the symmetrical model actually serves the self-interest of the organization better than an asymmetrical model because “organizations get more of what they want when they give up some of what they want”’ (J. E. Grunig, 2001, p. 13; J. E. Grunig & White, 1992, p. 39). Symmetrical communication can be seen as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. So, too, is hegemony, by definition. (Roper, 2005, p. 83)

Thus, symmetrical communication is also propaganda, and in particular corporate propaganda within the field of communication management, because hegemony is, along with ideology, an ontological pillar of corporate propaganda.

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THE ONTOLOGY OF CORPORATE PROPAGANDA: PUBLIC RELATIONS, CORPORATE IDEOLOGY AND HEGEMONY Propaganda is a communicative phenomenon of an ideological nature that aims to attain, maintain or strengthen a dominant position over the receiver, so that the message sender’s future aims regarding political power are met (Pineda, 2007). Ideology plays a functional role in meeting this aim. Hence, as well as it being a strategic process, the key elements of propaganda are ideology and hegemony. From this perspective, in the propaganda process, strategy can be considered as ideology by nature, and as hegemony as outcome as well. Despite having its linguistic origins in the seventeenth century, the link between propaganda and ideology was first introduced in the ancient Near East and developed by Assyriologists. For scholars of the period, the concept of ideology was based mainly on its dissemination through ‘propaganda’. This critical analytical approach is essential to the history of public relations and corporate communication, as it does not take an exclusively manipulative view of propaganda, but rather offers a new vision of propaganda as strategic reputation management for rulers. Indeed, as Xifra and Heath (2015) point out, the main sources of Assyriological data are written and iconographic texts with a notably rhetorical and persuasive dimension emphasizing the right, obligation and power of the state to educate the populace about matters of state and individual activities. Such documents and works of art function to legitimize the power of monarchs (Winter, 2010). Topics such as power legitimacy raise the opportunity to look more deeply into ancient societies to determine whether public relations was an important strategic and managerial option that included tools and tactics, but went far beyond that limited sense of public relations roots.

Written texts include royal inscriptions and official reports about military campaigns. As Laato (1995) pointed out, most of these texts were deeply influenced by the prevailing political and religious ideology, even military campaigns: The king was regarded as under the protection of the gods, and this was used to legitimate his position among his own people … It can be said that a social expectation connected with the religious and political legitimation of the king forced the king to provide a response. A successful military campaign provoked a positive response from society, especially when the society had the opportunity to celebrate its success. Official ceremonies were thus arranged when the victorious army of the king returned from battle. Another important way of reporting the victory was through inscriptions and reliefs which were displayed in public places. (pp. 199–200)

Examining documents such as these in the second half of the twentieth century, Assyriologists unanimously used ‘propaganda’ to label the form of strategic public communication used by the monarchs of the ancient Near East. This topic is one of the most studied by Assyriology, as evidenced by the collection of works published by Larsen (1979) including research on channels and messaging to legitimize power used by monarchs of the age. As Siddall (2013) pointed out, the Italian school of Assyriology was influenced by historical materialism and neo-Marxism. It applied the concepts of hegemony and ideology proposed by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. These themes focused research mainly on the use of strategically managed communication as a means to gain and augment power legitimation by kings in the ancient Near East. Vital to the historiography of public relations, such studies suggest that structural elements of public relations, such as prestige, reputation, policies, practices and publics, were present in the ideologically based communicative processes of early civilizations. Therefore, propaganda has been a structural element of ideology since the

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very beginning of civilization. That said, Marxism and postmodernism have muddied the two concepts. The Marxist influence is most apparent in the assumption that ideology is concerned only with power relations and therefore any official expression of it must be aimed at gaining and maintaining power. This influence has fostered panpropagandaism, which comprises those scholars who believe that in a given field of communication everything is propaganda. This school of thought is mainly represented by functionalist and critical theory authors. Authors such as Lasswell (1927) or Bernays (1928), who accept a variety of forms and techniques in communication under the concept of propaganda, represent the functionalist school. Thus, Bernays (1928) stated: ‘Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world’ (p. 26). While the pan-propagandaism of functionalists lies mainly in the procedural aspect, that of authors supporting the critical theory of propaganda basically lies in the ideological aspect. This is the case with French sociologist Jacques Ellul. Ellul’s contributions are crucial because, even though writing some time after the Second World War, he suggested that propaganda is not limited to totalitarian regimes but rather intrinsic to mass society and as such important for all kinds of regimes, including democratic ones. Ellul (1973) rejected the common view that propaganda was intrinsically evil or manipulative. His sociological approach took the study of propaganda beyond that of psychological persuasion. Central to his view was that education was a pre-requisite for propaganda and not the other way round (L’Etang, 2004). According to Ellul, propaganda was ‘an indispensable condition to the development of technological progress and the establishment of a technological condition’ (p. x). Specifically, he included public relations as part of propaganda because such work, ‘seek[s] to adapt the individual to society, to a living standard, to an activity…, to make him

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conform, which is the aim of all propaganda’ (p. 64). We can say the same with regard to strategic communication. The concept of sociological propaganda is fundamental to this approach: ‘a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and [is] rarely discussed. Basically, it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context’ (Ellul, 1973, p. 63). Accordingly, sociological propaganda combines extremely diverse forms: advertising, public relations and other forms of strategic communication, like publicity. Similarly, Sproule (1989) presented a historically grounded categorization identifying four responses to propaganda: the humanist response, which tries to increase citizen participation in politics; the professional response, which sees propaganda as necessary for a complex society and thus opens up opportunities for a cadre of communication specialists; the scientific response, which sees a shift in research in the field from qualitative to quantitative; and the polemical response, which is openly partisan and discredits the sources of some ideas, such as American anticommunism in the 1950s (L’Etang, 2004). Sproule’s framework – in particular, the professional response – is particularly useful in helping us to see the emergence of strategic communication as intrinsically connected to the deep structures of society. From the standpoint of public relations, these approaches have been reinforced with the idea of strategy as ideology. Certainly, if we want to distinguish between propaganda and corporate public relations, the criterion that the latter is a-ideological is false. As Shrivastava (1986) claimed, strategic management is an ideology and the discourse on strategy helps legitimize existing power structures and resource inequalities. From this standpoint, other scholars have defined corporate strategy as a set of discourses and practices that transform managers and employees alike into subjects who secure their sense of purpose and reality by formulating, evaluating and conducting strategy

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(Frandsen & Johansen, 2015). Such perspectives are consistent with the idea posited by Hallahan et  al. (2007): ‘Strategic communication also includes examining how an organization presents itself in society as a social actor in the creation of public culture and in the discussion of public issues’ (p. 27). This perspective links with the ideas of truth, knowledge and power of French philosopher Michel Foucault: For Foucault, truth was not something that was ‘arrived’ at through public discussion, but something that is ‘produced’ through discourse. … Discourse structures how we know, understand and speak about the world. Discourse is both a symbolic and constitutive system that structures knowledge and social practice. … This perspective shifts the role of public relations from information management and control to the production, contestation, and transformation of ideas and meanings that circulate in society. The task for public relations practitioners is to ensure that certain ideas and practices become established and understood and thereby attempt to gain the hegemonic advantage for their clients in this discursive struggle. … From this critical discourse perspective, public relations professionals are in the business of creating particular knowledge and identity positions which then influence the types of social relationships that are possible within and outside the discourse…discourse is the vehicle through which knowledge and truth circulate, and the strategic mode by which social, political and/or economic power is maintained or transformed. Key to the acceptance of these social meanings or interpretation of types of knowledge is the strategic linking of the dominance with self- or public interest – which in turn explains their social acceptance. In these terms, public relations practitioners are involved in the strategic attempt to have particular social meanings and interpretations of events, activities or behaviours. This discursive hegemonic conceptualisation of public relations makes it difficult to argue that there is any essential and substantive difference between PR practices and propaganda. (Weaver et al., 2006, p. 21)

To be more precise, an organization, as a social actor, strategically spreads – via strategic communication – one set of ideologies – for example, that of reputation, that of consumption – over other different or con­ flicting  ideologies. From this perspective,

public relations is a form of (political) propaganda – a form of ideological propaganda. That is, even if we accept the classical definition, according to which propaganda ­ disseminates political ideas, and assume that public relations also disseminates political ideas – in fact, it spreads capitalist ideas – then we can conclude that public relations (or corporate communication) is a form of propaganda. Thus, we can define the (persuasive) discourse of strategic communication as a form of (persuasive) political discourse. Public relations is (a form of) political communication. Indeed, strategic communication spreads and propagates capitalist ideology, the ideology of consumption, the idea that happiness depends on our relationship of trust with the organization and its products or services, the organization’s position in the reputation rankings; in short, our social status depends on the purchase and possession of brands, being members of a particular organization or attending special events. However, public relations cannot be defined as a way of freely expressing ideology. First, because public relations expresses – at least – one ideology. Second, because the absence of ideology is a form of ideology in itself: a way of expressing a viewpoint on social phenomena, a view shared by social groups aimed at fulfilling certain social objectives related to or opposed to other social groups through what is often the manipulative and strategic use of language and other semiotic resources. Not having a position – always allowing for this being possible – is in itself a way of taking a position; producing an a-ideological (or supposedly a-ideological) discourse is itself an ideological manifestation. As corporate management is largely a process of discourse, the analysis of strategic communication should focus on the role of discourse in securing and sustaining organizational inequalities through a process of ideology. Public relations is ideological – and manipulative as well – because, like other discourses used by groups aiming to achieve

Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda

certain socio-discursive goals in competition with other groups and discourses, it constructs and transmits a vision of the world which is opposed to other dysfunctional visions in the achievement of its social goals. In consequence, without necessarily falling into pan-propagandaism, public relations is propaganda, and corporate public relations is corporate propaganda. From the opposing viewpoint, political, economic, religious and all other types of power have produced and continue to produce a type of communication that can be referred to as propaganda. Nevertheless, this concept is also closely related to the long history of governments that have used public relations to serve the public within the framework of a rational and orderly society (Xifra, 2017).

THE STRUCTURAL DIMENSION OF CORPORATE PROPAGANDA Unlike public relations, there is no study in the communication theory about what is corporate propaganda. The consideration of public relations as a social sciences discipline that deals with the study of reality and the problems of communication between organizations and their public is a very new phenomenon, since it starts essentially in the Anglo-Saxon countries from the last quarter of the last century. The same happens with propaganda, which has been mainly analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective between mass communication research and social psychology (Le Bon, 1895, Tchakhotine, 1939). But unlike public relations, propaganda has not had a place in the university world like the one that public relations has had. Therefore, this section tries to cover this epistemological gap through a conceptual proposal of corporate propaganda that highlights its structural dimension as a structuring frame of the ontological elements exposed in the previous section.

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The defining task is very relevant in public relations field, because ‘definitions play crucial roles both in societal processes and in the minds of those who study and practice public relations’ (Gordon, 1997, p. 58). In addition: The critical writers about PR generally develop their conclusion of manipulation or propaganda without precise definitions of these phenomena, relying instead on their structural analysis of unequal power in the political economy and/or on their experience of PR. (Moloney, 2006, p. 69)

Corporate propaganda, like public relations, is a complex phenomenon. Researchers’ attempts to define public relations have not been precisely pacific. Some scholars prefer to collect the definitions of third parties than offer their own, although most do offer their personal vision. If we add to this the diversity of existing conceptual perspectives, their vulgarization and the confusion of the concept that this entails, deciding on a univocal idea of public relations is an arduous undertaking. In our case, the situation is yet more arduous, because there is no attempt to conceptualize corporate propaganda. Although there is nowhere to choose from, the different perspectives that we find in the domain of public relations are those that will guide us in our definition. The common denominator in most of the definitions that have been formulated is to consider public relations as a means of communication management to establish good relations and a mutual understanding between an organization and its public. However, these definitions appear to turn their backs on practice and ignore the fact that organizations use the practice of public relations to maintain, safeguard and defend their interests. In addition, many definitions do not mention that public relations is a persuasive form of communication, denying the evidence that persuasion is at the origin of the profession and has been ever-present throughout its still short historical trajectory. Not to mention the fact that, as we will state later, public relations is also a form of power and control.

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One of the more recent definitions is that provided by Coombs and Holladay (2010), for whom public relations is ‘the management of mutual influence relationships within a network of relationships of groups of individuals in a similar situation’ (p. 3), emphasizing that the influence is mutual. That is, it is not a definition formulated from the angle of the traditional actors – corporations – but also includes the perspective of those actors who are usually studied as mere recipients of messages, meaning activist groups or any other strategic public. In other words, the term ‘corporate’ does not refer to the promoting subject; it has a strategic dimension that points directly to communication as a function of organizations. A communication process that involves concessions between organizations and their stakeholders, and that is not at odds with the search for corporate hegemony. Indeed, Gramsci (1971) pointed out that if hegemony is to be maintained, such concessions cannot fundamentally alter core power relationships: But there is … no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading groups in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. (p. 161)

Corporate propaganda is how power relations are approached via communication. Corporate propaganda manages relationships by representing particular interests, more or less in accordance with the public interest. Hence, lobbying is perhaps the paradigmatic form of corporate propaganda, whose mechanisms are followed in other areas of relationship management between organizations and their publics. From this perspective, we define corporate propaganda as the management of a strategic communication process promoted by a social actor – as organization, brand, idea, cause or interest – to manage power relations with their public with a view to creating, maintaining or reinforcing their hegemony with respect to these publics.

Corporate propaganda is a persuasive communication process involving two main actors: the promoters of the process and the recipients of the messages that this process channels. The promoters of corporate propaganda are social actors. If these social actors are companies, they can act as brands. If they are civil society organizations, they can do so as causes or ideas. In public affairs, interest groups work to influence public authorities, interposing an interest that they wish to legitimize. However, regardless of how they present themselves, there is always an interest behind them. Every corporate propaganda process is driven by the defense of corporate interests, which allow the hegemonic system represented by communication between the corporation and its environment to be reinforced or stabilized. The recipient of public relations messages is the public, and in particular stakeholders; that is, those publics with a strategic dimension. Like traditional propaganda, the mass media are fundamental stakeholders in corporate propaganda; but so are other publics normally reserved for the theory of public relations or corporate communication, such as internal stakeholders. Stakeholders are those publics (people or groups) that affect or are affected by the activity of the organization. Coombs and Holladay (2010) opt for another term, ‘constituencies’, since it encompasses both stakeholders and organizations. Whatever name we wish to give them, it is worth highlighting that they must be strategic publics, because without publics relevant to the ideological strategy there can be no hegemony. Contrary to what the vast majority of public relations definitions formulated to date suggest, corporate public relations is not a neutral activity. The organizations and individuals that hire these services do so to defend their interests and obtain profits. This factor is crucial in understanding that public relations is corporate propaganda. The current practice of public relations has its economic justification in obtaining profits. Reputation,

Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda

a key concept in public relations, is not managed by corporate pride. Companies’ concern for their reputation is due to reputation constituting risk: a reputational crisis is an economic crisis. That is why corporate public relations are power relations. And power of influence is unequal among organizations, among stakeholders and between both. Influence is a type of power when one part of the relationship can modify the attitude or behavior of the other. From this perspective, public relations is ‘a struggle for communicative advantage’ (Moloney, 2005, p. 553) in which the role of discourse is to secure and sustain corporate inequalities through a process of ideology. In other words, it is corporate propaganda. Thus, corporate propaganda is a form of power, in the Foucauldian sense of the term; that is, ‘a relation of forces not identifiable with any form-institution. These forces, moreover, never appear on their own, but in relation to other forces’ (Cortés, 2010). Another key idea of Foucault’s thinking that is very useful in defining corporate propaganda is that of biopower. With this concept, Foucault referred to the practice of modern states controlling and managing human life through regulatory and discursive forces (Foucault, 1976; Macey, 2009). Biopower ‘is the power of regularization’ (Feder, 2007, p.62), and Holtzhausen (2002) and Place and Vardeman-Winter (2013) have shown that public relations professionals perpetuate rules and standardizing practices that help to conserve power for the already powerful organizations and their representatives. This notion fits perfectly with the idea of power formulated by Castells, who defines it as ‘the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favor the empowered actor’s will, interests, and values’ (Castells, 2009, p. 10). When power is exercised ‘by the construction of meaning on the basis of the discourses through which social actors guide their action’ (p. 10), corporate propaganda emerges, among other

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forms of strategic communication, such as, for example, advertising. Therefore, we must not renounce a relational view of corporate propaganda, as it will help us to explain power more effectively. From this standpoint, research by Edwards (2006) reveals the implicit deceit in the practice of public relations, which disguises the intentions of the organization, and consequently distorts relationships. Indeed, public relations practitioners, for whom language is at the heart of their work, act ‘as symbolic producers, transforming or disguising interests into disinterested meanings and legitimizing arbitrary power relations’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 230). This statement justifies the consideration of current public relations as corporate propaganda. The purpose of corporate propaganda is to create, maintain or increase the hegemony of the organization with respect to its stakeholders through the management of (power) relations with these stakeholders. A symbolic power, like the one in their day noted by thinkers from Étienne de La Boétie in his Discours de la servitude volontaire ou Contr’un (1576) to Thomas Hobbes in Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), including practically every one of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works, and that centuries later would be taken up and retouched by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. A power that is capable of being recognized, of obtaining recognition. A power (economic, political, cultural or otherwise) that has the authority to be ignored in terms of its true power, violence and arbitrariness. For this reason, the practice of corporate propaganda can in many cases be analyzed from the perspective of the symbolic violence discussed by Bourdieu: a violence that is exercised with the tacit complicity of those who suffer it (stakeholders) and those who exercise it (organizations), insofar as both are unaware of the suffering and exercising of this violence (Bourdieu, 1994). Corporate propaganda ‘exercises symbolic violence on target audiences through creating this misrepresentation in

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communications that masks the real organizational interest in the activity. By persuading audiences of a particular point of view, practitioners work to maintain or improve the position of their employing organizations in society’ (Edwards, 2006, p. 230). At this point, the concept of ‘social capital’ emerges, viewed as: ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 248). Organizations and stakeholders wish to manage their relations because of the social capital these generate. Social capital makes it easier for both organizations and their publics to achieve their objectives. In the field of corporate propaganda, this social capital is fundamental. Social capital is a concept that is close to one of the forms of legitimization inherent in Max Weber’s power: that of charismatic legitimization. According to Weber (1968), the concept of charisma revolves around two central ideas. On the one hand, the extraordinaryness of the charismatic leader and, on the other, the recognition he receives from his followers, who, despite not being the basis of legitimacy, create a legitimizing effect. That is, it is built through the relationships established with those being dominated (even if relationships between organizations and stakeholders are ones of power, not domination). What defines the Weberian charismatic leader is not only his objectively extraordinary qualities, but the recognition of his followers and how they perceive him. However, this will not always be a symbolic power. Thus, returning to Foucault’s philosophy, power would be characterized by not essentially being repressive, by being exercised more than it is possessed, and doing so in the game of mobile and asymmetric relations, and by affecting both dominators and dominated, since it passes through all the forces in the relationship (Foucault, 1980; Deleuze, 1986). In the field of corporate propaganda, the link between a

professional and a journalist (or a legislator in the field of public affairs) is a clear example of Foucauldian power, since, in the first place, it is exercised within the framework of a media relations strategy. Each has preferences and aversions, selects games or strategies and measures how to manage preferences to achieve the best result in the relationship with the other party, whose strategies are not usually known. Second, in order to obtain maximum information coverage, companies want the information to be published at a specific time, strategically selected, a time that should not be contrary to the interests of the medium. Both, then, have power. The power is not only in the hands of the organization that will receive news coverage, but the journalist will also have his interests satisfied, by informing his readers, listeners or viewers on a topic that they consider of informative interest. From the point of view of game theory, this is a classic duel, in which the strategy of each of the opponents is not known.

CONCLUSION L’Etang (2008) states: ‘The generation of multiple perspectives, however, somewhat complicates the definitional debate without particularly resolving it. There is the risk that the concept “propaganda” can become an empty concept or a shape-shifter – so broad as to be meaningless’ (p. 255). However, we believe the situation to be the opposite. That is to say, that the concept is fuller than ever, but that nobody wants to talk about it because of the negative connotations deriving from its use in the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. A good example can be found in British history. ‘Some practitioners acknowledge overlap between PR and propaganda, and in the UK, history shows that a number of practitioners moved quite smoothly from wartime careers in propaganda to civilian careers in public relations’ (L’Etang, 2008, p. 255),

Public Relations and Corporate Propaganda

thus implying shared practices and concepts. A clear reality therefore exists: both in the professional field and in the academic field, propaganda is limited to times of war or in the public communication of totalitarian states. This is the main reason why there are no corporate propagandists, even when the practice of current public relations has an ideological dimension that links it more to the concept of propaganda than to any other. In fact, the history of public relations is the history of propaganda or, in other words, the emergence of public relations was nothing more than the manifestation of the classic propaganda model in a new scenario derived from the Industrial Revolution, in which new actors emerged: companies. Thus, the propagandistic nature of public relations advocated by pioneers such as Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee should never have been lost due to a kind of academic and professional resentment that affected the field of public relations, which emerged as good persuasive communication, based on the truth. As if the truth were always good. Or, were the beheadings of the Daesh hostages not true? But nobody spoke of public relations in relation to Daesh, rather of propaganda, because it was the corporate propaganda of a terrorist organization. It is simply a matter of calling things by their name, without this meaning that there are strategic communication activities that can be considered closer to what was originally called ‘public relations’ than to propaganda. Sincerely, however, in a context of capitalist competitiveness like the one that has characterized the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, and an ethical – much more than economic – crisis, there is little space for corporate public relations, and there is much for adapting the techniques of classic propaganda to new contexts (so-called ‘post-truth’ being the latest great example of this). In this chapter, we have tried to present how the corporate propaganda concept better suits the designation of today’s corporate public relations practice, since, as Moloney

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argued: ‘the PR “voices” of dominant groups in society are heard more than those of less dominant groups; PR gives advantages to special interests at costs to the public interest; and this asymmetry of communication expresses and reinforces unequal power relationships’ (2006, p. 88).

REFERENCES Bernays, E. L. (1928). Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright. Bernays, E. L. (1965). Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays. New York: Simon & Schuster. Boiry, P. A. (2004). Des publics-relations aux relations publiques: la doctrine européenne de Lucien Matrat. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bourdieu, P. (1985). The forms of capital. In J. A. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1994). Raisons pratiques: Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil. Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (2010). PR Strategy and Application. Malden, MA: Willey-Blackwell. Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (2012). Fringe public relations: How activism moves critical PR toward the mainstream. Public Relations Review, 38(5), 880–887. Cortés, M. A. (2010). Poder y resistencia en la filosofía de Michel Foucault. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Deleuze, G. (1986): Foucault. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Edwards, L. (2006). Rethinking power in public relations. Public Relations Review, 32(3), 229–231. Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books. Feder, E. K. (2007). The dangerous individual(‘s) mother: Bio-power, family, and the production of race. Hypatia, 22(2), 60–77. Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.

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Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Panteon. Frandsen, F., & Johansen, W. (2015). The role of communication executives in strategies and strateging. In D. Holtzhausen & A. Zerfass (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Strategic Communication (pp. 229–243). New York: Routledge. Gordon, J. C. (1997). Interpreting definitions of public relations: Self assessment and a symbolic interaccionism-based alternative. Public Relations Review, 23(1), 57–66. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Grunig, J. E. (2001). Two-way symmetrical public relations: Past, present, and future. In R. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of Public Relations (pp. 11–30). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Grunig, J. E., & White, J. (1992). The effect of worldviews on public relations theory and practice. In J. E. Grunig (Ed.), Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (pp. 31–64). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Hallahan, K., Holtzhausen, D., Van Ruler, B., Verčič, D., & Sriramesh, K. (2007). Defining strategic communication. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 1(1), 3–35. Holtzhausen, D. (2002). Towards a postmodern research agenda for public relations. Public Relations Review, 28(3), 251–264. Laato, A. (1995). Assyrian propaganda and the falsification of history in the royal inscriptions of Sennacherib. Vetus Testamentum, 45. 198–226. Larsen, M. T. (Ed.) (1979). Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Lasswell, H. D. (1927). The theory of political propaganda. American Political Science Review, 21, 627–631. L’Etang J. (2008) Public relations, persuasion and propaganda: Truth, knowledge, spirituality and mystique. In Zerfass A., van Ruler B., Sriramesh K. (Eds.) Public Relations Research (pp. 251–269). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

L’Etang, J. (2004). Public Relations in Britain: A History of Professional Practice in the 20th Century. Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum. Le Bon, G. (1895). Psychologie des foules. Paris: Alcan. Macey, D. (2009). Rethinking biopolitics, race and power in the wake of Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 186–205. Matrat, L. (1971). Relations publiques et management. Brussels: CERP. Matrat, L. (1975). Doctrine européenne des relations publiques, condition du dialogue et de la participation. Estudios de Comunicación Social y Relaciones Públicas, 1, 29–33. Moloney, K. (2005). Trust and public relations: Center and edge. Public Relations Review, 31(4), 550–555. Moloney, K. (2006). Rethinking Public Relations (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Pieczka, M. (2006). Paradigms, systems theory, and public relations. In J. L’Etang & M. Pieczka (Eds.), Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice (pp. 333–358). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pineda, A. (2007). ¿Todo es propaganda? El panpropagandismo o monismo propagandístico como límite superior de la teoría de la propaganda. Comunicación, 5, 415–436. Place, K. R., & Vardeman-Winter, J. (2013). Hegemonic discourse and self-discipline: Exploring Foucault’s concept of bio-power among public relations professionals. Public Relations Inquiry, 2(3), 305–325. Roper, J. (2005). Symmetrical communication: Excellent public relations or a strategy for hegemony? Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(1), 69–86. Shrivastava, P. (1986). Is strategic management ideological? Journal of management, 12(3), 363–377. Sproule, J. M. (1989). Social responses to twentieth century propaganda. In T. Smith Ill, Propaganda (pp. 5–22). New York: Praegar. Siddall L. R. (2013). The Reign of Adad-n¯ır¯ar¯ı III. Leiden: Brill. St. John III, B. (2006). The case for ethical propaganda within a democracy: Ivy Lee’s successful 1913–1914 railroad rate campaign. Public Relations Review, 32, 221–228. Sumpter, R., & Tankard Jr., J. W. (1994). The spin doctor: An alternative model of public

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relations. Public Relations Review, 20(1), 19–27. Tchakhotine, S. (1939). Le viol des foules par la propagande politique. Paris: Gallimard. Ugeux, W. (1973). Les relations publiques. Verviers: Gerard & Cº. Watson, T. (2014). IPRA Code of Athens – The first international code of public relations ethics: Its development and implementation since 1965. Public Relations Review, 40(4), 707–714. Weaver, K., Motion, J., & Roper, J. (2006). From propaganda to discourse (and back again): truth, power, the public interest and public relations. In J. L’Etang & M. Pieczka (Eds.), Public Relations: Critical Debates and

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Contemporary Practice (pp. 7–22). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weber, M. (1968). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. Winter, I. J. (2010): On Art in the Ancient Near East. Volume 2: From the Third Millennium BCE. Leiden: Brill. Xifra, J. (2017). Manual de relaciones públicas e institucionales (3rd ed.). Madrid: Tecnos. Xifra, J., & Heath, R. L. (2015). Reputation, propaganda and hegemony in Assyriology studies: A Gramscian view of public relations historiography. Journal of Public Relations Research, 27(3), 196–211.

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PART II

Methodological Approaches in Propaganda Research

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10 Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda Chris Miles

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I will be exploring the phenomenon of viral propaganda through the lens of rhetorical criticism. I will argue that not only are the artefacts of viral propaganda profitably analysed from the perspective of rhetoric but the very idea of the viral nature of propaganda can be understood as a rhetorical construction that influences the way we think (and feel) about certain types of communication. I will be investigating the ways in which viral propaganda and memes have been defined – in other words, where have these concepts come from, who is using them, and to what purpose? How far, indeed, might it make sense to consider the idea of viral propaganda as a form of propaganda, or even a form of virus, itself? In order to pursue this exploration, I will first discuss what the terms rhetoric and rhetorical criticism can signify. Rhetoric and propaganda have a very close relationship and it is important for us to understand the

ways in which the former can serve the latter (O’Shaughnessy, 2004). Rhetorical criticism thus becomes a valuable method for analysing propaganda output and the ways in which that output might seek to win in the ‘struggle for perceptions’ (Taylor, 2003, p. 8). One of the major stylistic devices of rhetoric is the metaphor, and I will spend a short while discussing the fundamental importance of this figure of speech to the ways in which we view the world. I will then move on to a consideration of the contagion metaphor that is at the heart of the idea of viral communication and propaganda. Calling something viral is a rhetorical choice that is designed to influence the way an audience understands that thing. Again, we need to consider who is choosing this metaphor and to what persuasive purpose? I will examine the marketing roots of the concept of viral communication in order to discuss the strong links between marketing communication on the internet and modern propaganda, and the ways in which communication tools are ‘marketed’

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(by which I mean rhetorically packaged) to political actors. Internet memes, seemingly the most natively ‘web-based’ communication tactic in the modern propaganda arsenal, are intimately connected with the idea of viral communication. However, the origins of the meme concept in the final pages of Richard Dawkins’ popular genetics classic, The Selfish Gene (2016), originally published in 1976, are often overlooked as is the science of memetics that briefly flourished in its wake in the late 1980s and 1990s. A rhetorical approach to the full spectrum of the discourse around memes and memetics will allow us to more critically consider the nature of internet memes and their place in modern propaganda.

RHETORIC AND PROPAGANDA Our current attitudes towards rhetoric are inescapably influenced by the ways in which oratory and public persuasion have been framed in our past and there is a deep ambivalence towards persuasive speech in Western societies that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The accusations that Plato makes against the Sophists’ focus on persuasive technique are almost identical in sentiment to the way we now tend to talk about ‘spin doctors’ and political marketers. ‘Rhetoric’ is the word we use for words that are clearly trying too hard, that we can identify as manipulative, tricky, or mendacious. ‘Rhetoric’ is empty of real substance and is simply trying to get us to agree. It is the sign of an opportunistic ‘gun-for-hire’. It is not to be trusted. Much of this suspicion originates in Plato’s dirty propaganda war against the influence of the Sophists on Athenian youth. Indeed, the word ‘rhetoric’, from the Greek rhetorike has been convincingly demonstrated by Schiappa (1990) to have been coined by Plato with the express purpose of differentiating his philosophy from the sort

of relativistic language games that he accused Sophists such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, and Isocrates of pursuing. Very broadly speaking, the Sophistic tradition, particularly that carried on in Athens by Isocrates (a famous student of Gorgias), was a clear threat to Plato’s vision of a philosophy which was concerned with leading young citizens towards an appreciation of the unchanging, universal truths to be used as a basis for the creation and maintenance of a just and virtuous republic. Plato needed to devalue the power of the Sophists and so created a term, rhetorike, with which to label the Sophistic enterprise so that he was then able to define and gloss this across his dialogues in a manner which lead ‘inexorably to the devaluation and the fall of rhetoric’ (Cassin, 2014, p. 80). Plato ‘discards, devalues, annihilates, phantomizes’ (ibid., p. 79) the power that Sophistic practice and performance had given to logos, or speech, ultimately ‘taking possession’ of it through a cunning (and obviously rhetorical) strategy of ‘naming and shaming’. However, despite Plato’s immense influence on the development of Western intellectual life, his vision of rhetoric did not entirely carry the day. A facility in public speech was, after all, highly advantageous to any citizen who needed to pursue their own interests in the law courts and political assemblies of Athens and, later, Rome. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, adapted to the general demand for education in the art of persuasive speech in his writing of his study of rhetoric, but tried to make of it something more (Platonically) laudable (Reames, 2012). Plato’s rhetorike had de-fanged the enchanting power of logos and then, in Aristotle’s hands, we see it fully domesticated in its transformation into a techne ruled by a focus upon the internal logic of the matter in dispute, ‘leaving us with the proof as the core of rhetoric’ (de Romilly, 1975, p. 70). While Aristotle does not deny the capacity of words to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, his emphasis is upon rhetoric as a means to make

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a true case even stronger, and he starts from a position of ‘epistemological optimism’ (Wardy, 2005, p. 111), the assumption that truth itself is always naturally more persuasive. The rhetor’s job, therefore, is to help show that truth in the clearest, most effective light through the construction of persuasive argumentation. Still, though, an unease remains. It is particularly palpable in Aristotle’s dealing with the subject of rhetorical style, which covers the use of figures of speech, rhythm, patterning, word choice, and so on. Such devices were closely associated with Gorgias, one of the most famous Sophists, and underline the deep psychic effect that the form of words (rather than their substance or the rational arguments that they constitute) can have upon an audience (de Romilly, 1975). Aristotle does not really want to talk about style in persuasive speechmaking as it relies upon the ‘baseness of the audience’ (Aristotle 2004, p. 216). But he knows that he needs to because rhetoric ‘has to do with opinion’ (ibid.) and therefore should cover those techniques which are necessary and not just appropriate. He does his best, though, to continue Plato’s campaign against Sophistic persuasion by admonishing his reader not to fall into the trap of imitating the poetic excesses of Gorgias. Instead, the rhetor should be clear and appropriate, and never draw attention to the artfulness of their speech. This last stricture is one that echoes down through the history of rhetorica docens (or rhetorical instruction) – the orator must always avoid what Cicero calls lingua suspecta (Orator, 145). One should never use language or constructions which might raise the suspicions of the audience that they are the subject of rhetorical designs. So, although rhetoric became the sign of ‘a good man speaking well’ (Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, XII, 1) and formed one of the three pillars of the Medieval trivium, it has always contained within it the seeds of its own downfall. Rhetoric noticed is rhetoric failing. Logical argument, delivered in a

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plain, decorous style is the mark of acceptable public discourse, but when that logic becomes shrouded in Gorgian metaphor, patterns and stylings designed to enchant an audience’s emotions then we risk drawing attention to our efforts. We risk raising up that old Platonic spectre of manipulative, spell-binding logos. Propaganda is rhetoric, of course. If we use Taylor’s (2003) definition of the former as ‘a deliberate attempt to persuade people, by any available media, to think and then behave in a manner desired by the source’ (p. 7) then we are already in the same territory as Aristotle’s canonical statement that rhetoric ‘is the power to observe the persuasiveness of which any particular matter admits’ (Aristotle 2004, p. 74). While rhetoric was born in oratorical environments (ceremonial speeches, law court arguments, and political addresses) its principles and techniques were easily adapted to the religious sermon, the letter, the written philosophical argument, and countless other forms of persuasion. Indeed, given rhetoric’s importance in the educational programmes of Medieval and Renaissance schooling, it was only natural ‘that rhetoric provided the structure underlying all [the] propaganda media’ (Loach, 2006, p. 71) employed not only by the Jesuits and the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide but also the Protestant forces against which they competed. Indeed, let us not forget that both St. Augustine and Adam Smith at one point taught rhetoric for a living! Right up until the twentieth century, rhetoric provided the fundamental theory (rhetorica docens) and practice (rhetoric utens) for persuasion whether it be within the pulpit, the law court, the royal court, or the battlefield. As Machiavelli put it in no uncertain terms, an army’s generals must be trained orators ‘because without knowing how to speak to the whole army, [only] with difficulty can one do anything good’ (2005, p. 98). Western propaganda, therefore, ran on the engine of Classical rhetoric until the influence of psychological and sociological research provided alternative

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frameworks and vocabularies. Yet, even now, it is hard to pinpoint areas in which the social sciences have advanced our practical propaganda arsenal beyond the vast storehouse of techniques provided by the rhetorical tradition. If we simply cast our eyes down the long list of logical fallacies that the study of rhetorical argumentation has amassed over the centuries, we find that the root techniques of modern political marketing and propaganda revolve around such tried-and-tested appeals as those to authority, popularity, pity, false dilemmas, composition, and division. We still see such powerful rhetorical figures as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, alliteration, asyndeton, polysyndeton, and anaphora at the heart of persuasive political communication. Even an adoption of the ‘plain talking’ style of the grass roots electorate has a longstanding history as a deliberate rhetorical strategy. The scholarly method of rhetorical criticism has flourished in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While initially focused upon a rather conservative application of the Aristotelian rhetorical schema to the analysis of historically significant pieces of oratory (Black, 1965) it has over the past 60 years transformed itself into a highly variegated collection of foci and methodological approaches which broadly seek to analyse ‘any discourse, art form, performance, cultural object, or event that – by symbolic and/or material means – has the capacity to move someone’ (Ott and Dickinson, 2013, p. 2). So, we might think of rhetorical criticism of propaganda as a critical exploration of how the language, symbolism, and materials employed in propaganda attempts move the audiences that are exposed to them, with the obvious caveat that what is interpreted by the critic as propaganda is itself subject to rhetorical criticism. Ott and Dickinson (2013) gloss the word ‘move’ as meaning ‘in addition to persuading, inspire, entice, excite, and sway us’ (p. 2) and this is a useful reminder that propaganda, like all rhetorical discourse, does not just seek

to convince and persuade through what is logical or even likely but just as frequently seeks to move us physically (change our behaviour, get us out on the streets, encourage us to spread the message) by moving us first emotionally. A rhetorical criticism of a propaganda campaign, therefore, might seek to use elements of Classical rhetoric such as the Aristotelian division between proofs of ethos, logos, and pathos to look at the balance between appeals to authority, emotional trigger points, and more reasoned argumentation. It might look at the ways in which enthymemes (or arguments based upon premises accepted as probable by the audience) are constructed to carefully resonate with existing audience biases. The propaganda could also be investigated for its use of root metaphors, those wonderfully compressed and powerful figures of speech which have served as the engines for countless ‘moving’ speeches and communication artefacts. We might equally explore the range of fallacies that a campaign might adopt in its core reasoning, uncovering the logical flaws that nevertheless succeed in seeming logical to particular audiences at particular times. We might also look at the way in which the propaganda constructs its Other, and seeks to undermine alternative perspectives; as Potter (2005) argues, rhetoric can ‘be treated as a feature of the antagonistic relationship between versions; how a description counters an alternative description, and how it is organized, in turn, to resist being countered’ (p. 108). A researcher could also focus their investigation on the ways in which intertextuality and genre referencing serves to entice an audience or construct an appealing narrative. Or any combination of these and a myriad of other perspectives. Always central to the enterprise of rhetorical criticism, though, is the urge to trace how an artefact, or network of artefacts, might be designed (or serve) to move a particular audience or set of audiences. Let us now, then, perform a rhetorical criticism of ‘viral propaganda’.

Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda

THE METAPHOR OF COMMUNICATIVE CONTAGION One of the most powerful of rhetorical devices is the metaphor. Technically, a metaphor is the use of a word ‘from a lexical field other than that of the subject matter at hand’ (Fahnestock, 2011, p. 105). In other words, an ‘alien’ word is carried over to do descriptive work in a place it would not usually be found. Metaphors, precisely because they ‘need have no previous or easily categorized link’ to the words they are being carried over to, have the ability to create ‘new links, allowing the rhetor to illuminate one term (or concept) by features or senses borrowed from another’ (ibid.). A metaphor can allow us, therefore, to entirely change the way that an audience conceives of something. It is a remarkably efficient technique of communication in that it can bring a clear image and its set of associations to the mind, vivifying an idea in an attractive and memorable way. Aristotle noted that ‘all conduct their conversations in metaphors’ (Aristotle 2004, p. 219) for the metaphor is a ubiquitous aspect of language, not just something occasionally used for persuasive or poetic decoration. Lakoff and Johnson (2003) have famously argued that ‘most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature’ and that therefore metaphors ‘structure how we perceive, how we think and what we do’ (p. 4). As Richards (1964, p. 94) succinctly put it, ‘thought is metaphoric’. Accordingly, there is a long tradition of rhetorical criticism based upon the analysis of metaphors in persuasive communication, often called ‘metaphorical criticism’ to delineate its focus (Foss, 2003). One of the classic examples of this approach applied to propaganda, and one which has important ramifications for our consideration of the viral communication in propaganda, is Perry’s (1983) analysis of the infestation metaphor in Hitler’s rhetoric. Perry contends that ‘Hitler’s critique of the Jew’s status as a cultural being, for example,

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is not illustrated by the metaphor of parasitism; it is constituted by this metaphor and the figurative entailments it carries’ (p. 230). Hitler does not provide a structured, articulated, evidenced argument as to why his audience should see the Jews as parasites. Instead, his use of infestation metaphors to describe the Jews is his entire ‘argument’. A metaphor ‘can convey a whole body of incipient but shared attitudes and values’ and can provide a sort of ‘metaphoric logic’ which can ‘sustain and legitimate such a body of attitudes’ (pp. 230–231). Noting earlier work by Black (1970) and Sontag (1978) on the use of cancer as a metaphor, Perry states that ‘disease metaphors are the products of mysteries; they become in turn the producers of mystifications, insofar as they play upon our natural horror of the unknown in order to convey meanings which are left unsaid’ (p. 231). He then demonstrates the many ways in which Hitler’s discourse used metaphors which described the Jews and the Bolsheviks as ‘disease-causing agents’, parasites, or poisons which are attacking the ‘national body’ of Germany. Perry’s rhetorical analysis enables us to appreciate the careful ‘metaphorical logic’ of Hitler’s metaphors and how they work to provide a picture of a malignant internal force that has wilfully worked over time to threaten the health of Germany. Importantly, the use of the infestation metaphor also helps to ‘remove the moral ambiguities from the prospect of treating the Jews as enemies’ (p. 234) as disease-causing agents do not need to be treated with any moral consideration. Perry’s (1983) study is exemplary in its laying bare the workings of metaphor in the service of propaganda. However, it does force us to wonder what type of ‘metaphorical logic’ might be operating when propaganda is itself labelled viral? The phrase ‘viral propaganda’ brings a set of associations from the context of disease, bodily invasion, and parasitism (the part of the metaphor that Richards [1964] termed the vehicle) to illuminate our

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understanding of a particular type of propaganda (the other element of the metaphor, known as the tenor). Given the work of Perry (1983), Black (1970), and Sontag (1978), as rhetorical critics we would immediately suppose that those who use this metaphor intend to characterise this type of propaganda as nefarious, mysterious, out of control, insidious, threatening – that it to say, all the sorts of things that propaganda has itself used the tenors of virality and parasitism to imply about any particular target. So, ‘viral propaganda’, might be thought to be a pejorative construction, perhaps designed to demarcate certain propaganda outputs as particularly ‘virulent’ and therefore of more immediate cause for concern. And here, of course, we also walk straight into an old saw of propaganda studies – namely, that propaganda is any statement that comes from the Other, any ‘source that we do not like’ (Schumpeter, 2003, p. 254n). In this sense, the phrase ‘viral propaganda’ might be a doubly pejorative rhetorical construction. So, although I might engage in digital communications, my enemy indulges in despicable viral propaganda. Yet, interestingly, this is rarely the case. At the time of writing, a search of Google Scholar for academic works containing the phrase produces surprisingly few results (around 40 hits). Out of these only one (Ganor, 2015) uses the term ‘viral propaganda’ exclusively to describe communication tactics employed by a clearly marked Other, Islamic State (IS). Ganor (2015) notes that ‘the success of its viral propaganda campaign’ is one of the main elements that help to ‘guarantee that IS will continue to present a significant local and global security threat’ (p. 62). It is through the ‘skillful wielding’ (p. 62) (one notes the sword metaphor) of viral propaganda that IS is able to ‘publicize its terrorist acts’ (p. 56) and persuade Muslim youth that it is ‘the real deal’ (p. 62). Ganor’s use of the ‘viral propaganda’ metaphor is rhetorically part and parcel of the larger framing of what he calls the ‘war between civilization and barbarism’ (p. 63), which is ‘a war of values, a war for morality and ideology’ (ibid.).

More to the point, Ganor sees IS as a ‘problem within Islam’, a position which is echoed (and so rhetorically strengthened) by his use of the viral metaphor. However, Ganor’s (2015) piece is unusual in its, one might say, traditional use of the viral metaphor. Far more common is an apparently neutral, if not sometimes almost celebratory, use of viral framing when scholars talk about propaganda. This seems counter-intuitive when considered within the legacy of rhetorical criticism’s investigation of infestation and disease metaphors, though it does have a clear relationship to the ways in which contagion metaphors have been used in marketing communication discourse. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Miles, 2014), it was marketing that first popularised the idea of viral communication and that drove the rhetorical transformation of the metaphor into something desirable and useful. The first instance of viral marketing was Hotmail’s email service sign-up campaign (starting in 1996) where a short piece of text was automatically attached to the end of every email sent by a Hotmail subscriber informing the recipient that they could also get a free Hotmail account (Marsden, 2006). The text acted in a similar way as a virus inside the email, co-opting the trust that a message from a known source could generate to make the link to the Hotmail sign-up page seem secure and attractive. A very similar strategy was implemented by Apple in its marketing of the iPhone many years later. At almost the same time as Hotmail’s marketing campaign began to be rolled out, Jeffrey Rayport (1996) penned a gushing article for Fast Company magazine in which he suggested that marketers should look to imitating ‘both biological and computer viruses’ (p. 96). Interestingly, Rayport urged marketers to ‘stop shying away from the ominous sound of it and embrace the enemy: viral marketing or v-marketing if the term is too harsh’ (ibid.). At this early stage, then, the viral metaphor was still unnerving and uncomfortable, something that needed an act of will or some terminological occultation

Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda

to make palatable. Rayport need not have worried, though. As he indicated, ‘every marketer’ was ‘desperately searching for a new approach to marketing in the postmass-market economy’ (ibid.) and the prospect of a marketing technique that could in some sense take advantage of hard-to-reach and hard-to-understand postmodern consumers and infect them with a hidden message that they would unwittingly, or even gladly, spread across their communities was a hard proposition to ignore. Because that was exactly what viral marketing was – an attractive proposition that marketing gurus could sell to desperate, unnerved marketers who, in turn, could then sell it to their desperate, unnerved clients. A high-profile example of this was Seth Godin, one of the earliest marketing gurus to embrace the potential of the Internet, who published his Unleashing the Ideavirus in 2000, in which he described how an ideavirus can be designed by a marketer so that it ‘moves and grows and infects everything it touches’ (2000, p. 11). Godin’s book, like countless other articles, blog posts, and even scholarly papers in marketing journals after it, offered a series of rules for harnessing the idea of the marketing virus. What makes a marketing virus shareable? How do you design it for maximum effectiveness? How do you plant the virus in a community? How do you identify the best ‘patient zero’ to initially infect? The metaphor of biological infection was enthusiastically adopted in a florescence of marketing communication (of agencies and consultancies to prospective clients), marketing scholarship, and journalism (Miles, 2014). The metaphor of infection that is central to viral marketing very quickly lost any sense of being ‘ominous’ or ‘harsh’ (in Rayport’s words). This is because it offered marketers the comfort of control. The marketing virus was, ultimately, sold as something which was designed, targeted, and remotely guided by the savvy marketing team. Yes, it used the consumer as a host, but then they were getting entertained by unusual, free content – it was win-win!

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What does this mean for the consumer? While marketers might think the idea of infecting communities of customers and prospects is an exciting technique that puts them back in the driving seat, how might consumers feel about being targets of contagious messages? Of course, one of the great promises of the Internet was that it would make content producers of us all (Hoffman & Novak, 1996) and this was, indeed, one of the sources of marketer nervousness that viral marketing offered an antidote for. When consumers can potentially communicate across networks with the same speed and reach as a brand, then the balance of power shifts considerably away from institutionalised media and corporate voices. However, it was, perhaps, precisely the fact that consumers were empowered as content producers by the Internet that prevented any form of negative grassroots reaction to the metaphors and practice of viral marketing. Consumers could see that viral marketing was something that can work just as well for them as for any brand. Indeed, it was user-generated content that provided the Internet with its most powerful examples of viral power (Guadagno et  al., 2013; Shifman, 2012; Wiggins & Bowers, 2015). ‘Going viral’ soon became something that not just an ambitious brand manager could dream of, but anyone with a YouTube account. In this sense, the concept of viral marketing slipped its leash. It would be interesting, perhaps, to examine the relationship between the speed with which many publics forgot (or became inured to) the fear and panic related to early coverage of HIV/AIDS and the speed with which they embraced the metaphor of online virality. The semantic revision that the adoption of the term represents is something that powerfully demonstrates the alacrity with which metaphorical associations, and their consequent rhetorical uses, can change. As noted previously, most scholarly work on propaganda which uses the viral metaphor tends to use it without reference to its negative connotations of infection, infestation, and

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pestilence. So, for example, Rodley’s (2016) study of ‘viral propaganda in the 2014 GazaIsrael conflict’ looks at how ‘parties on both sides crafted multimodal digital content that sought to interpret, explain or recontextualise the conflict, with the ultimate goal of securing or bolstering support for their cause’ (para 6). Rodley (2016) notes that this type of shareable content is ‘widely used for marketing’ as well as for political communication, and while initially describing its use in the GazaIsrael conflict as ‘viral propaganda’ argues that it should more properly be ‘described as viral agitprop, in the sense of creative content intended to influence thoughts or behaviours that may or may not be produced by a government or formal institution’ (ibid.). Here, Rodley is working with scholarly understandings of propaganda which do not use the term to mark Othered communication. Yet, he is also using the term viral in what seems to be a neutral way, ostensibly shorn of its mysterious ‘metaphorical logic’ of disease. Instead, the specifically ‘viral’ content of this propaganda is referred to variously as ‘novel’, ‘stylish’, and ‘high arousal’ (para 13), demonstrating ‘a gap between media myth and reality’ (para 18), a source of ‘meta-mediation’ (para 19), as well as ‘winning support from foreign audiences, rearticulating national identity, boosting morale, and – through the practice of meta-mediation – neutralising enemy messaging’ (para 21). Interestingly, Rodley contrasts viral agitprop with the normal ‘practices of online creativity’ which produce ‘viral content’ that are ‘participatory and playful’ (para 25). So, viral communication is framed here as normally harmless, whimsical, and joyful – it is the context of war which makes it something more sinister. Even then, the serious, sinister side of viral agitprop is framed in a metaphor of mechanisation rather than organic infestation or parasitism – Rodley writes of how viral agitprop ‘systematises’ the culture of playful sharing. In a curious reversal of much journalistic discourse on the power of social media, Rodley actually describes how

the military strategic use of viral agitprop is an ‘abuse of Facebook’ (para. 28). The ramifications of virality as a metaphor for agitprop, then, are simply not examined. Rodley (2016) assumes that virality signifies a good thing because it is associated with playful, participatory online content creation. Evolving Rodley’s (2016) approach, Sparkes-Vian (2019) argues that virality in the sense of ‘propagation’ can, in fact, provide ‘a more logical overarching framework for a comprehensive theory of propaganda’ (p. 1), one that defines it as ‘an evolving set of techniques and mechanisms which facilitate the propagation of ideas and actions’ (ibid.) and that therefore can encompass both propaganda and counter-propaganda. So, propaganda does not have to be formally or even informally organised. Rather, an appreciation of the viral nature of modern political communication allows us to realise that propaganda, of whatever type, is always focused on propagation. Again, the metaphor of virality is not examined, just taken for granted. Now, it as this point that we must consider a term that so far has remained firmly ignored. And that is the word, ‘meme’. I would argue that Sparkes-Vian (2019), and many other scholarly investigators into the area of viral propaganda, manages to avoid much reflexive discussion of the nature of communication virality because of this word and what it can be made to signify. SparkesVian (2019) argues that memetics, or the science of memes, ‘has considerable analytical and methodological potential with respect to scholarly work on propaganda’ (p. 1) and goes on to adopt the ‘analytical “toolkit”’ of ‘qualitative memetics’ in order to analyse the success and failure of memes produced by the right-wing group Britain First and its opponents online. A similar memetic focus can be found in Wiggins’ (2016) investigation of online propaganda from both sides of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and in Wall and Mitew’s (2018) exploration of the #DraftOurDaughters 4chan Hilary Clinton attack campaign. In all of these studies, the

Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda

existence of memetics as a formal methodology is taken largely as read. Rhetorically, ‘memetics’ function as an ethos argument, or a proof by authority. By taking on the trappings of a science (explanatory diagrams, technical and mathematical terminology) the scholarly use of memetics to describe viral propaganda affords it associations of clinical inevitability and correctness. Wiggins (2016), for example, talks of ‘memetic structures’ (p. 472) and ‘memetic directionality’ (p. 480), while Sparkes-Vian (2019) talks of having to ‘disaggregate the memeplex into its constituent alleles’ and identifying the techniques ‘used to facilitate memetic replication’, as well as ‘institutional memeplexes’ creating ‘distinct memetic environments in which the selection pressure on specific memes is altered by the ready acceptance of the basic premises of the ideology’. Meanwhile, Wall and Mitew (2018) talk of the ‘topological nature of memetic warfare’ and its ‘processual aspects’ of ‘swarm networks’ such as ‘ideation, rapid prototyping, coordinating, producing and spreading of content by the users’. The metaphorical language here uses a mixture of vehicles drawn from start-up culture management-speak, computer networks, and what seems like evolutionary biology. And while a swarm might well have rather negative biological connotations, it is not the mysterious infecting horror that we can trace in the viral metaphor. Accordingly, in the next section, I consider in some depth the rhetorical/metaphorical nature of memetics and the relationship between ‘memes’ and propaganda.

MEMETICS AND PERSUASION The meme is an invention of evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. In one of the final chapters of his book The Selfish Gene (2016), originally published in 1976, Dawkins introduces the idea of the meme as a unit of cultural replication. Just as genes

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can be seen as using animals, plants, and humans as ‘survival machines’ (p. 245) to aid in their replication, so also memes use the human brain in order to replicate themselves. A meme is an idea, such as adding yeast to bread to make it rise, or a pattern such as a melody, or even a metaphor. It can be something as grandiose as a religion or something as quotidian as the idea of a belt to hold your trousers up. Memes, in Dawkins’ view, are the building blocks of human culture. All memes are in competition with another and ‘some memes are more successful in the meme pool than others’ (p. 251); they get imitated more frequently and spread more quickly from mind to mind. And that is all a meme is – a replicator. It has no other urge or function or ‘reason for being’ other than to replicate. Human cultures, then, become the collection of (currently) successful memes. Dawkins argues that as they are both simple competing replicators, memes will share the same qualities that genes need for success – ‘longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity’ (ibid.). Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene has been a tremendously popular book. Indeed, a public poll organised by the Royal Society in 2017 saw it voted the most influential science book of all time (Armitstead, 2017). The ‘meme’ meme, as it were, has demonstrated an impressive fecundity and longevity. However, its copying-fidelity has perhaps been less exemplary. Most users of the Internet today recognise the word almost immediately but do not associate it with Dawkins or even the briefly nascent science of memetics that formed around the idea and attempted to bootstrap itself in the pages of the online Journal of Memetics (the archives of which can be found at http://cfpm.org/jomemit/). Instead, the word meme has come to refer to a widely shared ‘image macro’, or an image with superimposed text expressing some comic sentiment, life advice, surreal insight, or, increasingly, politically partisan viewpoint. So, as Marwick and Lewis (2017) note, ‘while virtually anything can be a meme since it’s a unit of information, in

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modern Internet parlance, a meme is a visual trope that proliferates across Internet spaces as it is replicated and altered by anonymous users’ (p. 36). There has been a significant amount of scholarship that has attempted to explore the details and ramifications of the memetic concept (Aunger 2003; Blackmore, 2003; Bradie, 2003; Burman, 2012; Calvin, 1997; Distin 2006; Gabora, 1997; Gatherer, 1998; Jantke, 2004; Jeffreys, 2000; Kilpinen, 2008; Lissack, 2004; Marsden, 1998; Rose, 1998; Shifman, 2013; Shifman & Thelwall, 2009; Zipes, 2008). However, this scholarly literature has been largely divided on the question of whether memes actually exist, and if they do, how might they be most effectively analysed, measured, and described. The Journal of Memetics closed its doors in 2005. As the archive site puts it, ‘there was to be a relaunch but after several years nothing has happened’. The concept, in its original expression, proved just too problematic to get enough confident traction. As Shifman (2013) puts it, it was ‘the subject of constant academic debate, derision, and even outright dismissal’ (p. 362). In the meantime, though, the meme concept successfully mutated into a new form. As the Internet was transformed from a largely academic research network into the highly complex, variegated ocean of content creation, dissemination, and consumption that it is now, the dynamics of sharing became more and more central to its nature. Whole layers of the web became organised around encouraging and facilitating the rapid sharing of URLs, videos, images, and audio, as well as personal information, opinions, and ‘status’. Microblogging services such as Twitter, content sharing platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, Imgur, and The Pirate Bay, as well as social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all helped to shape an economy of attention (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Wu, 2016) which thrives upon the discovery, wide dispersal, and imitation of attractive content. This was fertile ground for the resuscitation of the

‘meme’ meme, an idea that had not proved to have the right traits to survive in the caustic environment of scholarship but which, once mutated into a far simpler form, began to flourish with incredible energy. Knobel and Lankshear (2007) talk of the ‘popular “appropriations” of “meme” as a word to describe particularly “infectious” phenomena’ (p. 199), in a decidedly unmemetic framing which seems to deny any agency to the meme itself while at the same time underlining just how far away this use of memes is from that understood by ‘serious students and theorists of memes’ (ibid.). Of course, if the central premise of memetics is true, then this change in the meaning and use of ‘meme’ is just an example of mutation and adaptation. Scholars were inefficient hosts, poor ‘survival machines’ (to use Dawkins’ phrase), whereas general netizens concerned with sharing cat pictures and poking each other on Facebook provided far more fertile ground. As a consequence, the ‘meme concept has enthusiastically been picked up by Internet users’ (Shifman, 2013, p. 364) and become ‘a popular term for describing “catchy” and widely propagated ideas or phenomenon’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 201). So, most people who use the term ‘meme’ and, indeed, most people who create online ‘memes’ have little to no knowledge of the term’s origins or its place in a scholarly field known as ‘memetics’. In common web parlance, then ‘meme’ has little connection with anything other than entertaining shareable content. From a rhetorical perspective, its metaphorical power has been distinctly curtailed – the associations with genetics, survivability, selfish units of replication that use humans as survival machines, the whole panoply of Dawkins’ own extremely rich metaphorical constructions, have all largely disappeared. Indicative of this is the way in which those who actually wish to produce negative rhetorical associations around the idea of online memes need to introduce other metaphors in order to do so. So, Rodley (2016) talks about ‘when memes go to war’

Rhetorical Methods and Metaphor in Viral Propaganda

(para. 25), and Wall and Mitew (2018) discuss ‘meme warfare’, as does Boyd (2002). Olsen’s (2018) piece in Salon.com describes memes as being ‘weaponized for political propaganda’ and Neuman’s (2012) article for NPR’s website speaks of political memes being ‘fast, cheap and out of control’ (personifying them with a Dawkinian agency that is chaotic in its inability to be managed). In a weighty report published by the Institute for the Future, on The Biology of Disinformation, Rushkoff et al. (2018) state that ‘memes are better understood as independent actors in a competitive battle of ideas’ (p. 9) which seems designed to make them sound like lone wolf terrorists. Indeed, they explain that this independence is why ‘teenagers in Russia can launch effective memetics assaults on Americans’ (ibid.). Rushkoff is himself a long-time populariser of the ‘meme’ meme, having published the influential Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (note the exclamation point and the implication of secret motivations) way back in 1996. We can see here that commentators (of both scholarly and more journalistic motivations) need to extend the idea of the meme with metaphors of battle and weapons in order to make it alarming or attention-grabbing within a discussion of propaganda or political communication. Their audiences do not associate the idea of the meme with anything threatening and so they need to rhetorically provide that threat through metaphors of war in order to persuade people that image macros and YouTube videos can indeed have serious or harmful effects on a country’s political existence. The metaphor of communication as virus has lost power in the same way that the original metaphor of the meme (as introduced by Dawkins) has. To describe something as being like a virus is no longer pejorative. The virus no longer shares the same associations of revulsion and fear that Hitler played on with his heavy use of infestation metaphors. Modern communication technologies have rehabilitated the virus. They have made

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infection a pleasant thing, an entertaining thing, something that friends do to friends. Perhaps indicative of this is the fact that when I search for the phrase ‘viral propaganda’ on Google in the United Kingdom, the first seven entries all relate to a music public relations company called, Viral Propaganda – a construction which hints at both an ironic rehabilitation of the term ‘propaganda’ but also clearly echoes the positive (if opportunistic) attitude towards infectious messaging that marketing communication has incubated since the 1990s. Perhaps the most important consequence of the metaphor of virality losing its negative associations is that it becomes something that we (scholars, journalists, commentators, and the general public) now find it difficult to be alarmed by. Linnemann et  al. (2014) have argued that the ‘zombie talk’ that has spread across modern media in the form of ‘zombie apocalypse’ content has acted not just as a fashionable entertainment genre but also as ‘part of a larger ideological frame that normalizes state violence and conceals the fundamental inequalities of late capitalism’ (p. 507). In a similar way, the viral metaphor that has been happily accepted by marketers, consumers, politicians, lobbyists, and extremists alike normalises the exploitation of influencers, audiences, and communities for the dissemination of their targeted messages. If it is a normal thing to do, it also becomes an easy thing to dismiss. This is why, as we have seen, those wishing to raise awareness of how memes are being used to influence political debates need to transform or re-frame the terms of the metaphor by talking of memetic warfare and the weaponisation of memes – such alterations serve rhetorically to help readers see viral communication in a different way. Others have tried to solve this problem by going back to the biological details of the viral metaphor and expanding them considerably. Rushkoff et  al. (2018), for example, resurrect some of the memetic science approaches of the 1990s and early 2000s, applying evolutionary biological terms and

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concepts to try to discover ways to defend against manipulative memes. They advance strategies of early detection, immunisation and containment that the left might use in order to combat infectious disinformation from the extreme right. Their approach, rhetorically, is an attempt to revivify the contagion metaphor for communication, injecting back some of the original unease, revulsion, and urgency that was naturally associated with infection in the public mind. It is also indicative that Rushkoff et al. (2018) are talking from a position on the US left. At this moment in time, it seems undeniable that the US alt-right have demonstrated a great facility with ‘weaponised’ memes. Communities around the boards 4chan/pol/ and 8chan/pol/, in particular, have a keen awareness of how to infect mainstream media with viral content that aids their cause and confounds their enemies while doing it with an eye to entertainment and ‘LULZ’ that comes directly from the positive re-framing of viral communication that has occurred as the Internet has made everyone a ‘marketer’.

METAPHORICAL MEMES While discourses around memes and viral communication are clearly grounded in metaphorical positionings, then, it is logical to ask whether there is something inherently metaphorical about the sorts of messages that are successful in contagious political communication? As we have seen, for some researchers, metaphor is ‘the very constitutive ground of language’ (Jaynes, 1976, p. 48). McVeigh (2016), indeed, memorably suggests that thinking should be ‘considered a collection of metaphors shaped by history’ (p. 22). Metaphors help us understand the world, and can be used to persuade us to see the world in a different way, they are ‘not simply descriptive, but transformative’ (p. 25) – ‘change the dominant metaphors, and the mental

paradigm changes’ (p. 26). So, in this chapter, we have been exploring the effect upon our understanding of political communication and persuasion that the use of the viral, or contagion, metaphor has. Yet, what of the sorts of messages that become memes, the types of content that are susceptible to the exponential growth of the viral distribution model? Do we find that political memes are particularly metaphorical? Certainly, researchers have found that modern mass-mediated political discourse makes much use of metaphorical constructions. Musolff (2004, 2016, 2017), for example, has consistently explored the power of analogical and metaphorical figures in European political communication. In a recent study (Musolff, 2017), he brings large-scale corpus analysis techniques to bear upon an examination of the ‘discourse career’ (p. 98) of one particular metaphor (that of the UK being at the heart of Europe) across the EUROMETA press text corpus running from 1989 to 2016. The analysis uncovered the ‘range of types of uses’ that the metaphor was put to and ‘shed light on the pragmatic factors underlying the resuscitation, ironical reversal and further sarcastic exploitation of the metaphor’ (p. 98). At the other end of the methodological spectrum, Kjeldsen’s (2000) detailed analysis of how a visual representation of a bicycle helmet functions metaphorically in a single print ad for the Danish SDP in the 1998 national election is a tour-de-force of qualitative exposition, plumbing the complexities of the shifting terms of the metaphor and their resonances for the Danish public. There has also been some significant research specifically targeting memetic or viral political communication which has underlined the importance of metaphor in successful contagious messaging. So, Huntington’s (2013, 2016) work has sought to trace the visual rhetorical devices common across political memes (particularly those arising from alternative, grassroots political protest) and has fixed in particular upon metaphor, synecdoche, and intertextuality

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as central figures. Her analysis of the visual rhetoric behind Pepper Spray Cop memes demonstrates just how much nuance a keen sensitivity to the working of metaphor can bring to an appreciation of apparently simple visual communication tropes. Piata (2016) has tracked the interplay between journey metaphors and humour in her study of political advertising and memes in the 2015 election in Greece. However, much of the extant research on political viral communication makes little reference to metaphorical content. So, for example, Lee and Campbell’s (2016, see also Campbell and Lee, 2016) study of what they dub OPPs (‘online political posters’, which are image macros employed in the service of party political communication on platforms such as Facebook) does investigate the thematic content of these messages but restricts itself to easily quantified codes such as general sentiment (negative/positive/other), visual presence of a party figure, policy focus or image focus, and so on. Certainly, some of the example OPPs that they provide do have clear metaphorical content (such as the image of then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, being in the pocket of the SNP’s Alex Salmond) but an exploration of figurative language is beyond the interests of their study. In this sense, Lee and Campbell reflect the more macrolevel perspective of the majority of political communication researchers towards viral/ memetic messaging. This, of course, leaves an important research gap that future scholarship must seek to fill.

CONCLUSION Virality is a metaphor for a form of content dissemination. It is not, directly, a metaphor for content. However, in order for a piece of content to lend itself to being spread across a population exponentially it must have certain characteristics. These characteristics can then be said to make it ‘go viral’. These are

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‘rhetorical techniques deployed to improve their replication’ (Sparkes-Vian, 2019). As with all rhetorical techniques, there is no easy recipe for their selection and combination. Rhetoric teaches the communicator an appreciation of kairos, or the right moment, and prepon, or ‘the non-rational, inexplicable intuition of adequacy and propriety’ (Cahn, 1989, p. 128). These are exactly the qualities that any creator of viral content needs in order to determine what rhetorical techniques (selection of metaphor, imagery, patterns, type of proof, etc.) are best suited for a particular audience at a particular time. These are also the qualities that are difficult to provide easy guides for. They require an intimate knowledge of the audience and their social and political environment and an acknowledgement of the fact that those audiences and environments are dynamic, constantly changing. ‘Computational propaganda’, the ‘use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks’ (Woolley & Howard, 2017, p. 1) can go some way in substituting for these human qualities but for the most effective messaging the human, rhetorical element remains essential. The changing connotations of the viral metaphor examined in this chapter demonstrate the ways in which rhetorical power is always contingent upon shifting audience understanding. However, even dead or heavily transformed metaphors still contain frames that influence the way we think about the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). There is some evidence, particularly in the wake of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election, that the environment is once again changing as various publics discover that they have been infected without their knowledge, victims of micro-targeted rhetorical payloads which take advantage of data scraped from their web habits to ensure effective kairos and prepon. Perhaps the idea that virality and the meme are simply empowering, entertaining features of the modern web is becoming a lot more nuanced as we

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rediscover the unbalancing force of contagious political rhetoric and once more realise the infectious power of words.

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11 Content Analysis and the Examination of Digital Propaganda on Social Media Darren Lilleker and Paweł Surowiec

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities of content analysis as a method for researching digitalised forms of propaganda, particularly in hybridised media environments. Digital propaganda is one of the manifestations of post-truth politics, and as such, it is a product of the culture of social interconnectivity as well as the hybridisation of political news media. It, therefore, represents the zeitgeist in communication studies and we problematise digital propaganda through the prism of social change. In doing so, we contextualise digital propaganda within political communication research, specifically studies employing content analysis-based methodologies, keeping in mind that this communicative practice adapts to, adopts features of, and co-evolves along with the media environment it occupies. First, the chapter describes the content analysis methodology and its application within

propaganda research. Second, we provide an overview of the research questions content analysis tends to be used to answer in digital propaganda research. Third, we focus our discussion on a critical examination of the content analysis methodology, leading into a discussion of new challenges surrounding the emergence of computational propaganda. Fourth, in the context of the shift towards computational propaganda, the delivery of personalised messages based on analysis of user interests and behaviours, we consider emerging trends in propaganda and what contribution content analysis research can make to understanding them. Fifth, we account for innovation in content analysis and the use of big data. Finally, we conclude with a discussion that develops an understanding of propaganda uses in a fast-moving and ever-evolving communication environment and the future potential of the content analysis methodology as an exploratory and explanatory tool.

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CONTENT ANALYSIS AS A METHODOLOGICAL TOOL Krippendorff (2004, p. 18) defined content analysis as ‘a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use’, emphasising the significance of the context for the application of this method. Content analysis has been applied in research of a variety of forms of political communication on social media: from electoral campaigning to digital diplomacy. Content analysis proves itself as a fairly flexible research method for studying documents and communication artefacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio, or video. Social scientists have and continue to use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyse social phenomena is its non-invasive nature. In contrast to attempting to understand social experiences through surveys or collecting survey answers, content analysis explains the style and strategic purpose of communication and so allows inferences regarding the intended effects of communication. The process of content analysis research involves the systematic reading or observation of artefacts which are assigned labels (sometimes called codes) to indicate the presence of characteristics germane to the research questions posed. Through the systematic labelling of the content of texts, researchers can analyse patterns of content quantitatively using statistical methods or use qualitative methods to analyse the meaning conveyed within texts. Computers are increasingly used in content analysis to automate the labelling (or coding) of documents. Simple computational techniques can provide descriptive data such as word frequencies and document lengths. Machine learning classifiers, such as nVivo, can greatly increase the number of texts that can be labelled, but the academic rigour and

validity of this exercise is a matter of debate. The simplest and most objective form of content analysis considers unambiguous characteristics of the text such as word frequencies; the page area taken up by, for example, a specific newspaper column; or the duration of a program, radio or television, or the amount of a webpage or website. All these measures can indicate what priority is given to a specific topic. Such reasonably simple processes of understanding communication by reducing it to quantitatively coded classifications forms the bedrock of much media research. However, once research moves towards more in-depth analysis of text, objectivity gives way to more subjective inferences of meaning being necessary. Analysis of simple word frequencies is limited because the meaning of a word depends on the surrounding text as well as the context for communication. While research employing quantitative content analysis transforms observations of found categories into quantitative statistical data, the qualitative content analysis focuses more on developing inferences about the intentionality of communication and its implications. Qualitative content analysis bears similarities with thematic analysis, where content is coded firstly by overall topic and then researchers seeks to understand the lexicon employed around that topic to infer the semantic meaning of words. This strand of research is specifically designed to analyse the strategic objectives of the communicator. Given that qualitative content analysis in particular requires hand coding by teams of researchers, internal validity checks are necessary to assess consistency between coders (Weber, 1990, p. 12). Hence the development of inter-coder reliability tests which quantitatively calculate the extent of agreement to provide confidence in the findings (Krippendorff, 2004). Since its development through studies of wartime propaganda and alongside the Hovland-Yale model (Hovland et al., 1953), which underpins much of the work in the field of political communication, content analysis

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Table 11.1  Uses of content analysis in political communication research Research question

Focus

Dimension

Research data

Communication sources and intentions

Source

Who?

Encoding

Why?

Communications processes

Channel

How?

Message

What?

Recipient

To whom?

Decoding

With what effect?

Cited sources by organisation or demographics Detail of authorship Rhetorical purpose (branding, persuasion, manipulation) Analyse traits of author Cultural aspects and temporal change Communicative objectives Analyse techniques of persuasion Analyse style of communication (word use) Describe trends in content creation Relate content to differing sources Compare communication to objective standards (public sphere theory) Identify intended audience by message style Describe patterns of communication and opportunities for interaction Measure readability Analyse the flow of argumentation Assess cognitive responses to communications

Communication effects

Adapted from Holsti (1969) who in turn developed the uses category from Berelson (1952).

has played a key role in advancing understanding of contemporaneous communication as well as temporal developments within and across nations. Table 11.1, developed from work by Holsti (1969), shows the three areas of research that have mainly employed content analysis. Table 11.1 thus explains the communication territory that content analysis tends to dominate from which one can see how quantitative and qualitative forms of the methodology have equal weighting if different application in the field.

CONTENT ANALYSIS IN THE STUDY OF PROPAGANDA Content analysis has a long genealogical relationship with the study of political communication and has roots specifically in the study of propaganda. The first studies employing the methodology were designed to understand the design, implementation, and potential effects of the use of propaganda during international military conflicts, specifically the First World War. The suggestion

that propaganda had played a pivotal role in shaping domestic and international public opinion triggered a wave of research on this practice by the US Federal Communications Commission. The reports developed out of this research not only offered insights into building propaganda campaigns and underpinned the development of a model for understanding political communication, they also advocated quantification, so placing the content analysis methodology as the foundation for epistemic objectivity (Lasswell, 1927, 1949). Over subsequent decades, different strategies utilising and adapting content analysis have been developed to accommodate the changing media landscapes, the evolving purposes for manipulating public opinion, as well as the political settings in which propaganda is utilised. To that end, content analysis remains relevant for the study of computational propaganda. Arguably, the bulk of the contemporary research using content analysis in the field of political communication has focused on election campaigning (Lilleker & Jackson, 2013; Štĕtka et  al., 2018). However, the methodology has been also used in other, more

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specialised areas and has contributed significantly towards improving understanding of the production and impact of political communication as well as the quality and validity of content analysis research. While there have been exponentially more studies that have utilised content analysis in the fields of media studies and political communication, propaganda studies as its subfield provides both sources of inspirations and reflection for researchers. In this section, we offer an overview of studies that explicitly focus on the study of propaganda within digital media environments to provide a sense of the application of the methodology in this specific area. All of the studies engage explicitly with terminologies used in the analysis of propaganda and focus on analyses of social media platforms as spaces for official state or other strategic propaganda practices. The studies we use as exemplars are summarised in Table 11.2, which provides an overview of their research questions and hypotheses which, alongside the below discussion, offers insights into the areas of scholarly enquiry in which content analysis is employed. Before the rise of social media platforms, the early studies of digital propaganda focused on the relationship between blogging and traditional print media. Esarey and Qiang (2011), for example, analysing the relationship between political blogging and political change in China. Their quantitative content analysis of the content of daily newspapers and blogs featuring ‘hard news’ commentary explored the levels of criticism, pluralism, and propaganda in both types of media, and found significant differences in the quality of political communication. The evidence suggests that new media empowered China’s ‘netizens’ and limited the state’s abilities to set the public agenda and control political debate. The data demonstrated a liberalisation of political communication due to the lowering of the cost of obtaining and exchanging political news, which, in consequence, triggered efforts by the state to maintain control of political expression. With a discussion

embedded in regime change theory, addressing questions focusing on the pressure that online sources – political blogs – exert on state authorities, content analysis is employed to offers insight into the way communication in digital media environments can lead to macro-level socio-political change. Propaganda has long been associated with military conflict, and hence studies also explore how social media platforms are used within these contexts. In a study of visual propaganda on Twitter, Seo (2014) explores the ways Israeli Defence Forces and Hamas used themes and frames for propaganda purposes. The research compares the prominence of specific themes and frames, of emotive phrasing across both actors’ Twitter accounts, and the differences between images posted by both actors. The study contributes to propaganda analysis by providing a conceptual and methodological framework for studying images shared via social media. It advances the scholarship on visual propaganda and captures the strategic evolution of military conflict communication by two unequally resourced political actors. The findings show how differing thematic frames can be utilised during conflicts offering relevance for understanding conflict communication as well as public diplomacy and strategic communication strategies. The study also offers a framework for the analysis of propaganda use for cyber-warfare, which, similarly to ‘non-combat’ political contexts, is becoming increasingly hybridised. A similar study was conducted by Hyunjin and Ebrahim (2016), who explored visual propaganda, this time focusing on Facebook. The research developed a comparative framework for exploring the strategies of the Syrian al-Assad regime and anti-government coalition’s Facebook pages, as well as the differences in their reception among Facebook users. Despite similarities in design, this study uses content analysis to identify different themes (e.g. victory, threats to the enemy, casualties), frames (overt versus covert) and the responses to different forms of visual

Research questions/hypothesis examples

Sample and platform

Seo, 2014

January 2006– December 2016.

Period

RQ1: What are the prominent themes N=72 images tweeted by 14 November of the images tweeted by the the Israeli Defense Forces, 2012–13 Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’s and 171 images posted January Alqassam Brigades? by Hamas’s Alqassam 2013. RQ2: Are there statistically significant Brigades during the differences between the images period. from the two parties with regard to prominent themes featured in those images? RQ3: What frames are prominent in the images tweeted by the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’s Alqassam Brigades? RQ4: Are there statistically significant differences between images from the two parties with regard to frames prominent in those images? RQ5: What are the main human characters featured in the images of each party? RQ6: Are there statistically significant differences between the images from the two parties with regard to human characters featured in those images?

Esarey and Qiang, As pressure on the regime from online N=555 blog postings 2011 dissent grows, is the regime listening? (alongside a sample of Are bloggers disgruntled citizens howling nine papers). in the wilderness? Is authoritarian rule more stable by virtue of allowing people to vent steam, as it were?

Study

Ways in which images were used for propaganda.

To test for evidence of information regime change.

Measure

Table 11.2  Overview of major content analysis research of propaganda on social media platforms

(Continued)

A comparison of blogs and newspapers confirms the hypothesis that compared with the content of mainstream media, blogs are much more likely to contain opposing perspectives and criticism of the state. The reach of propaganda, although considerable in newspapers, is much weaker in blogs. Resistance was the most popular theme in the images posted by the Israel Defense Forces, accounting for 29.2% of its 72 images during the analysis period. It was followed by unity (20.8%), threats from enemy (19.4%), destruction (15.3%), casualties of own civilians (9.7%), humanity (4.2%), and casualties of own soldiers (1.4%). Casualties of civilians was the most prominent theme in the images tweeted by Hamas’s Alqassam Brigades, accounting for 42.1% of the 171 images from them.

Main findings

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Research questions/hypothesis examples

Abrahms et al., 2017

Hyunjin and Ebrahim, 2016

RQ1: How do images posted to the Syrian President’s Facebook page differ from those posted to the Syrian Coalition’s Facebook page in terms of prominent themes? RQ2: How do images posted to the Syrian President’s Facebook page differ from those posted to the Syrian Coalition’s Facebook page in terms of propaganda frames? RQ3: How are different types of themes and frames of Facebook images associated with audience reactions to those images? Testing six hypotheses – example below: H1: Terrorist propaganda videos are less likely to feature attacks against civilians than the actual attack patterns of the terrorist groups.

Period

Measure

N= 473 videos derived from IntelCentre; social media used as independent variable; platforms unspecified.

2001–2011

Targeting preferences of terrorist leaders.

2011 and 2012 Effects of social – two weeks networking sites periods as use by exploring per location. protest related Twitter content during political campaigns in Spain, Greece, and the United States. N=333, Facebook images 1 April 2013–30 Role of visual posted – 214 images on September propaganda in the Syrian President’s 2014 the social media page and 119 images on age by analysing the Syrian Coalition page. themes, frames, and structural features.

Sample and platform

Theocharisa et al., To what extent did the researched N=2,000 tweets from 2015 movements use social media in a accounts of each way that contribute to the change of movement. political communication, mobilisation, and organisation of social movements?

Study

Terrorist propaganda videos do not highlight attacks that are representative of their group’s actual targeting behaviour. Propaganda videos are significantly more likely to showcase attacks that steer clear of civilians compared with the actual targeting choices of operatives.

The Syrian government used visual frames to support its narrative that President Assad is a fearless leader protecting its people and that life has continued normally throughout Syria; The Syrian opposition used various images to solidify its narrative of the Assad regime’s brutality and sufferings.

The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organisation and coordination issues.

Main findings

Table 11.2  Overview of major content analysis research of propaganda on social media platforms (Continued)

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Howard et al., 2017

Research aim: In this study, we analyse both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election. Statements supporting multi-sources exploratory design (no research questions per se): We measure how often sources were linked to by other online sources and how often they were shared on Facebook or Twitter. Through these sharing patterns and analysis of the content of the stories, we identify both what was highly salient according to these different measures and the relationships among different media, stories, and Twitter users. What were citizens sharing on Twitter? 22,117,221 tweets How was junk news/propaganda That contained hashtags distributed across the country? related to politics and the election in the United States.

Faris et al., 2017

N=595 posts were mainly gathered from online discussion forums and blogs (336), Facebook (159), and Twitter (100). N=4.5 m. tweets analysed in conjunction with open web sources. N=900,000 URLs that were shared in these tweets.

RQ1: How do journalists and regular users of social media perceive online fact-checking and verification services?

Brandtzaeg et al., 2018

1–11 November 2016.

May 2015– November 2016.

October 2014– March 2015.

Levels of polarisation in campaigning content.

(Continued)

32% of all the successfully catalogued political content was polarising, conspiracy driven, and of an untrustworthy provenance. Many of the swing states getting highly concentrated doses of polarising content were also among those with large numbers of votes in the Electoral College.

Journalists displayed a quite nuanced perception of verify cation and factchecking services. Social media users were more inclined to take extreme positions The research measured Our data supports lines of research on how often sources polarisation in American politics that were linked by focus on the asymmetric patterns other online between the left and the right, rather sources and how than studies that see polarisation as a often they were general historical phenomenon, driven by shared on social technology or other mechanisms. media.

Perceptions of online fact-checking by journalists and social media users.

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Chadwick et al., 2018

Whether 50c party members differentially We first analysed the 43,757 February 2013– reported cheerleading posts back to 50c social media posts November the propaganda department, even that we harvested from 2014. though they posted about topics at the leaked archive from the behest of the regime from other Zhanggong. These posts categories as well. were made by numerous authors on many different social media sites, including national-level platforms run by private sector firms such as Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba, as well as government forums at the national, provincial, prefectural, and county levels. RQ1: What motivations for sharing news on Social media data 15–22 May social media predict users’ democratically (N=1,525,748 tweets), 2017 dysfunctional news sharing? website data (N=17,989 RQ2: What motivations for sharing web domains), and news news on social media predict article data (N=641 being challenged by others for articles). having engaged in democratically dysfunctional news sharing? RQ3: What relationship is there between levels of agreement and disagreement in users’ online networks and their engagement in democratically dysfunctional news sharing? RQ4: What relationship is there between levels of agreement and disagreement in users’ online networks and their being challenged for having engaged in democratically dysfunctional news sharing?

Period

King et al., 2017

Sample and platform

Research questions/hypothesis examples

Study

Main findings

To reveal affinities between tabloid news and misinformation and disinformation behaviours on social media.

Sharing tabloid news on social media is a significant predictor of democratically dysfunctional misinformation and disinformation.

Use of propaganda for Finds that the government fabricates and strategic distraction posts about 448 million social media comments a year.

Measure

Table 11.2  Overview of major content analysis research of propaganda on social media platforms (Continued)

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propaganda (e.g. shares, likes, comments). The research further showcases the flexibility of content analysis and the study is claimed to represent ‘an important step toward developing solid methodological frameworks for analysing social media-based visual propaganda and persuasive messages’ (Hyunjin & Ebrahim, 2016, p. 228). Abrahms et al. (2017) apply content analysis to the dissemination of propaganda on social media during yet another politically violent context. Their study explores a sample of videos produced by the most active terrorist groups and provides an analysis of the targeting strategies of terrorist leaders. Unlike the previously discussed studies, their research is not based on an exploratory design. In this project, the researchers developed and tested six hypotheses, focusing on the targeting effects of propaganda videos derived from IntelCentre’s database of terrorist propaganda videos. In the methodological design, social media are treated as a dependant variable and used as a predictor for understanding the patterns of claims made about the execution of terrorist attacks. The analytical design focuses on the type of violence represented in the videos, the characteristics of the videos in terms of selectivity and other features, as well as message characteristics such as credit claiming patterns. The key findings show that social media is one of the important communication platforms for terrorist leaders, and it is consistent with other research on terrorist leaders showing that they are selective about which of their actions are publicised on social media and which are kept private. Theocharisa et  al. (2015) explore communication within a more domestic political conflict, examining the patterns of Twitter campaigning from a comparative perspective, exploring the effects of social media use on the changes to political communication for mobilisation and organisation by social movements. By focusing on how three social movements – Occupy, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi – the researchers examine

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Twitter content during political campaigns in Spain, Greece, and the United States. The study uses a comparative design to explore multi-dimensional changes to the ways in which micro-blogging can shift the dynamics of political campaigning by social movements. While it does not explicitly engage with propaganda terminologies, it showcases that, in some contexts such as Greece, microblogs are sites for sharing unofficial media sources due to ‘distrust and extreme hostility towards the media, which were suspected as serving solely the role of governmentsponsored propaganda’ (ibid., p. 216). The researchers found this was a crucial feature of the Greek protest movements, who called for boycotting mainstream media networks, which led to a reliance on content from political blogs and alternative news sites. The methodological contribution relates to the application of multiple analytical procedures applied to the content harvested from Twitter including visualisations and social network analysis (studying the degree of centrality of a political actor within the network), conversational affordances, including a measure of political attributes, and the construction of indicators for understanding the use of Twitter for political mobilisation, as well as the aims, characteristics, and tactics of social movements in their use of social media. The comprehensive focus highlights the versatility of content analysis for studying communication strategies. In contrast, and chiming with the emerging research agenda on post-truth, Brandtzaeg et al. (2018) explore the perceptions of factchecking as a preventative measure against the propagandistic threats associated with post-truth politics. Their study combines content analysis with interviews to explore ‘the ways that journalists and social media users perceive online fact-checking and verification services’. The researchers used qualitative content analysis (Ezzy, 2013) and used the data as a guide for interviews with journalists and social media users, specifically users of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter that

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pertain to three fact-checking online verification services: ‘FactCheck.org’, ‘Snopes’, and ‘StopFake’. The researchers conducted content analysis of 595 posts categorising these according to the criteria of usefulness and trustworthiness. Social media posts were also coded in accordance with their sentiment: positive or negative. While the study follows the established conventions of qualitative content analysis, and its methodological originality is limited, its application reveals that ‘a comparison of journalists’ perceptions with those of social media users reveals social media users are similarly ambivalent’ (Brandtzaeg et  al., 2018, p. 1), but journalists reveal a more nuanced perspective with regards to propaganda wars online. The controversies surrounding fake news, wide-scale usage of computational propaganda, and external intervention into democratic governance in US domestic politics have been discussed globally in relation to the 2016 presidential election and the election of Donald Trump. In a multi-source study of mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election, Faris et al. (2017) explore the frequencies of links to online sources and their sharing patterns on Facebook or Twitter. In this bookwide study, content analysis is used as part of the methodology to study the role of the networked public sphere in policy debates. What they define as an ‘ecosystem approach’ builds on a methodology that tracks the role of media sources in the public debate, in this case, manually coding the content of stories derived from open-web-sources and using qualitative content analysis to understand patterns in the text of the most frequently occurring stories on Twitter. Through these sharing patterns and analysis of the content of the stories, the research identifies issues that were highly salient according to these different measures and the relationships among traditional media, stories, and social media users. One of the key findings of this study is that disinformation and propagandist content is rooted in partisanship and, during the 2016

presidential election, was more prevalent on social media. Despite design limitations, particularly with regard to the procedural mapping, the study is part of an emerging theme in literature which explores new trends in political communication. Although not framed through the propaganda analytical lens, Chadwick et  al. (2018) conducted similar research to show how what they call ‘democratically dysfunctional news’ is produced, by whom, and how prevalently this material is shared. Hence, such studies show how content analysis can be utilised to explore the comparative visibility of certain ideas and arguments, and so helps researchers understand how these might inform public opinion and influence election outcomes. Howard et  al. (2017) is one of a number of studies that have come out of the ‘Computational Propaganda Project’. This study also focuses on the 2016 US elections and, by means of content analysis, focuses mainly on the levels of polarisation on social media by analysing the types of new items shared by the users of Twitter and the scale of sharing of computational propaganda content in swing states. The study analysed 7,083,691 of 22,117,221 tweets initially harvested by means of the public streaming API, all of which were associated with hashtags linked to the elections. The researchers worked with the content as well as the type of links that were shared by Twitter users, these were collected in order to answer two research questions: what forms of content (form and source) citizens shared on Twitter during the election, and how was fake news/computational propaganda distributed across the United States during the election campaign? Using a mixture of procedures, the research found that Twitter users received more misinformation, and polarising and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news audiences; users in some states shared more polarising political news and information than users in other states; levels of misinformation were higher in swing states than in uncontested states, even when the relative size of the user population

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was considered. Such research offers important insights into how misinformation and disinformation gains visibility and may impact public opinion during election contests. Finally, and chiming with the emergent fake news and computational propaganda agenda, the study by King et al. (2017) examined both public social media posts and private leaked online sources in order to explore the use of propaganda for ‘strategic distraction’ by the Chinese government. The study examines 50,000 party posts and explores the sources and patterns of computational propaganda to understand how they relate to the boarder censorship policy of the authoritarian Chinese regime. Methodologically, the authors characterise the patterns in multisource data via their network and time series structures. Through systematic analysis, the researchers extrapolate the themes and tonality to infer the goals and broader strategies behind Chinese government communication. Written up in a style resembling a detective investigation, the researchers show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid engaging with critiques of the party and government, and to avoid engaging on controversial issues. Rather, the authors posit, the data reveals the aim of this ‘massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime’ (King et  al., 2017, p. 484). Hence, we see here how content analysis can be utilised to infer motivations and objectives while also offering an analysis of patterns of communication. As a methodology aiding ways in which researchers explain and understand propaganda, contents analysis has evolved (Chomsky & Herman, 1988), in particular, it has been adapted to analyse data derived from digital media environments. Content analysis is also increasing complemented by other methods as it has been recognised that ‘the effects on perception of specific topics may be studied by comparing media

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representations (content analysis) with the representations expressed by different types of audiences in focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires’ (Pedro, 2011, p. 1908). Hence, in step with a research focus moving beyond the traditional ‘Who is propagating what, to whom, through which channel, with what intention, and with what effect?’ (Khamis et al., 2015, p. 418), more nuanced questions addressing the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions, particularly with regards to the frequencies of propagandistic messages, the patterns of their circulation, and the interplay between broadcast and social media have been developed (see Chadwick, 2011). In their updated version of a classical volume on propaganda and persuasion, Jowett and O’Donnell (2015, p. 395) state that ‘propaganda agents can more easily mobilise the public to amplify their messages if they can identify appropriate channels and content. Moreover, they can identify and work with social influencers to serve as “channels of communication to broader audiences” through social media platforms’. The content analysis research agenda that explores propaganda, and engages with the taxonomies of this communicative practice, has shifted focus towards those issues. This chapter continues the discussion to explore the extent that the methodology is fully equipped to adapt to this ever-changing media environment.

THE LIMITS OF CONTENT ANALYSIS Despite its widespread use and proven adaptability, since its inception, content analysis as a research method has faced significant criticism. The earliest and still seminal critiques of this method were articulated by Kracauer (1952) and George (1959). Kracauer’s work was widely viewed as a critical reaction to Berelson’s 1952 book, ‘Content analysis in communication research’. He argued that the quantitative orientation of this method neglected the quality of texts and that it was

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important to understand the context in which the texts analysed emerge. According to Kracauer (1952), it is not by quantifying and capturing ‘patterns’ in texts that content analysis can be epistemologically revealing, but by mapping out the possibilities of interpretation of ‘multiple connotations’. Here Kracauer argues for greater understanding of the way in which the same message can be interpreted differently by different audience members. As a critique of making inferences from any piece of communication, Kracauer’s argument stands. George (1959) also focused his criticism on the quantitative orientation of this method and argued that content analysis serves best as an impressionistic technique, of which flexibility and hypothesis forming is its forte, as opposed to hypothesis-testing. George’s critique emphasises the emergence of broad (dichotomous) coding schemes, rather than more granular, multi-faceted categorisations. By speaking about ‘specific discriminatory categories’, George flags up the importance of validity not reliability in content analytic studies of propaganda. While, to an extent, George’s critique is partiality answered by Krippendorf’s measurement strategy for inter-coder reliability, issues of objectivity remain when any form of graduating scales are added into a coding strategy; for example, the extent of a positive or negative slant as applied to studies of political advertising (see Kaid & Johnston, 1991). Critiques of content analysis have continued, frequently centring on whether the methodology can be used to make valid measurements and inferences about communication strategies and their effects. For example, Mayring (2000, p. 6) argues content analysis is ‘a superficial analysis without respecting latent contents and contexts, working with simplifying and distorting quantification’. Such critiques have led to the development of qualitative approaches to content analysis (see, for example, Brandtzaeg et al., 2018). While the critiques which build upon the work of Kracauer and George remain valid

generally, innovations in communication technology raise further questions as to the power of content analysis as a methodology. The tools which enable computational propaganda have an impact on politics, which develop alongside hybrid media systems, present new research challenges, as well as opportunities for studies applying content analysis to map trends in political communication. With the advancements of technologies which lead to the creation of hybrid media systems and the growing role of algorithms in the management of political communication on social media, Klinger and Svensson (2018, p. 4) question the changing media logics of social media networks. They argue that ‘it has been well established that information in mass media is selected based on news values, while the logics behind posting on social media platforms are instead guided by authors’ selection of information that is of personal interest to them’. This insight into the algorithmic logics underpinning social media poses challenges to content analysis of social media content. While researchers are able to view content in a linear manner, this may not be the experience of users as their news feed becomes populated by items their friends promote, or which fits to predictions based on their previous behaviour. Similarly to infer that effects are reliant on the number of times items are seen, while recent work responds to these points somewhat (see, for example, Chadwick et al, 2018), assumptions about popularity and viewership remain problematic and relate back to the arguments about the validity of research where multiple interpretations and communication contexts cannot reasonably be taken into consideration. However, notwithstanding the early critiques offered by Kracauer (1952) and George (1959), and subsequent studies that have questioned content analysis as a method, it remains one of the principal methods for the study of propagandist content. The flexibility of the method has led it to be employed to address a plethora of important questions in the field

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of political communication and it has been recognised as responding effectively to challenges associated with researching the digital media environment included sampling techniques, reliability, issues concerning gatekeepers, and hyperlinking. However, as one critical article concludes, content analysis is able to answer innovative research questions such as ‘How will the decentralized and open nature of the media influence the production of messages such as news reporting? How will message meanings and effects change in an interactive, hyperlinked, and multimedia environment?’ (Weare & Way-Ying, 2000, p. 289). In the decades since this was written, we have found content analysis techniques have been developed and adapted for the digital age, being used to review the content of websites, weblogs, micro-blogs, and social media, while recognising the limitations when analysing the complex content which populates these platforms.

NEW CHALLENGES FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS While at present content analysis remains highly relevant, emerging trends in the dissemination of propaganda present further challenges for the application of this method and the extent it remains a tool that can be utilised for understanding these developments. In particular, questions can be raised regarding the extent that the method can be used to aid understanding of new digital phenomena which are situated at the crossroads of hybrid media systems and hybrid media genres: fake news and digital propaganda. The content that is produced – discussed under the umbrella term of computational propaganda – which is targeted at individuals based on their preferences and demographics, are designed to conceal the sender and can often be impossible to view unless you are a member of the target population. These

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therefore impede identification of who is communicating, who is targeted, and with what intended effect. Equally it is problematic to assume motivations when claims are made that political messages are created purely to earn clickbait advertising revenue. While studies developed from the aforementioned ‘Computational Propaganda Project’ lead the way in terms of theoretical discussion and empirical insights, individual studies of computational propaganda on social media demonstrate some interesting challenges and lessons for researchers using this method. Studies seeking to analyse the manipulative features of digitalised persuasion in which social media, political bots, and the Internet of Things make up an incubating milieu for new forms of propaganda can find themselves limited when attempting to ascertain sources, motivations, and impacts. While Wooley and Howard (2016, p. 4886) set out a definition for ‘computational propaganda’ as ‘the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion’ studying such developments in political communication remains challenging. However, similar to past developments which have pushed the evolution of propaganda forward, military warfare became a playground for the advancement of technologies and, contiguously, the application of these forms of political communication as well as contingent research agendas (Howard, 2015). As the adaptation of computation propaganda to political campaigning, electoral as well as civic campaigning, is becoming more widespread, and involves ‘autonomous agents, equipped with big data about our behavior collected from the Internet of things, working across social media platforms to engage with citizens on political issues and advance ideological projects’ (Wooley & Howard, 2016, p. 4886), understanding their patterns and impacts is challenging particular as the environment is ever-changing. Such developments also present challenges to longstanding research agendas, for example,

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computational propaganda involves software programs that permit para-social interactive experiences. While being ideologically imbued, they are also interactive within the context of a platform and so give the impression of telepresence. Yet, while they are controlled by humans, these can be home state actors, foreign state actors, hackers, activists, or bots: such developments do not fit well with the roots of content analysis research in the Hovland-Yale (1953) research paradigm. Similarly, there are challenges with understanding the role of the citizen as content producer. With the rise of networked democracy ‘equipped with social media, the citizens no longer have to be passive consumers of political party propaganda, government spin or mass media news, but are instead actually enabled to challenge discourses, share alternative perspectives and publish their own opinions’ (Loader & Mercea, 2011, p. 759). Studies that explore how the ordinary user communicates about politics combine aspects of content analysis with discourse analysis (Lilleker & Bonacci, 2017; ZurutuzaMunoz & Lilleker, 2018). However, studies of this phenomenon are limited to citizen inputs connected by hashtags, if on Twitter or Instagram, or posted to specific pages on Facebook, it is impossible to curate all posts on a given topic. There are also limitations as platforms adjust the extent that content can be searched and archived by researchers. Apart from these technological challenges, there are further challenges with identifying true citizen voices, those of activists and the extent that political organisation employs bots in order to astroturf platforms with selfpromoting or attack messages. Aside from theorising and researching social media as spaces in which network affordances translate into democracy, social media also poses challenges to democratic governance and international relations, relating to their broader impact on politics. Bjola (2017, p. 189) links propaganda with geopolitics arguing that ‘the weaponization of information via digital propaganda has come to be

seen by some states as the optimal instrument for correcting power asymmetries in their global standing’. This argument shows the significance and importance of digital and computational propaganda, but also demonstrates the scale of the issues for researchers of propaganda on social media.

BIG DATA CONTENT ANALYSIS: A METHODOLOGY EVOLVES Big data, the use of large data sets, which may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions, is having an impact in all areas of human interaction with digital media environments. Big data provides the framework for computational propaganda in particular. While communication is ahead of the curve in utilising big data, as the Cambridge Analytica revelations indicate, research struggles to an extent to keep up. The reason being that methodologies for disseminating information do not need to be precise, they are about reaching as many people susceptible to manipulation as possible, whereas research must be reliable, valid, and replicable. However, as noted when discussing the work of Chadwick et al. (2018), innovation in content analysis has adapted to the potential offered by big data. The digital tools available have led to innovative ways of capturing data, in particular focusing on the interactive environment where political organisations and citizens routinely take part in the political communication process. A research strand has developed around mapping patterns of interactions between nodes, or user accounts, and around given topics (Lin et al., 2013; Bruns, 2018). Recording citizen exposure to an interaction with political communication is, in contrast, measured through having people download smartphone apps which monitor and track behaviour (Eagle et al., 2008). These projects

CONTENT ANALYSIS AND THE EXAMINATION OF DIGITAL PROPAGANDA

and many similar contribute to a broad research agenda defined as: How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived websites, social networking sites’ profiles, Wikipedia edits, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g. engines and recommendation systems) make use of the digital objects, and, crucially, how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? (Rogers, 2013, p. 19)

Such studies offer an important complement to studies that employ content analysis. While there are limited studies employing big data methodologies to questions relating specifically to propaganda, it is easy to see the relevance of these questions to any area of communication enquiry. However, big data research approaches, while offering the ability to tackle the scale of text which can be collected from the digital environment, cannot at present respond to the range of questions which are raised through propaganda studies. Big data approaches are by their very nature reductionist. Through the process of ‘applying math to huge quantities of data in order to infer probabilities’ (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier 2013, p. 11) there are dangers of loss of context when dealing with the message content questions at a minimum. More broadly, making inferences that sharing content from a source denotes support can prove unsafe (Zurutuza-Munoz & Lilleker, 2018). However, as Jungherr argues, the analysis of digital trace data allows not only broad patterns of communication to be identified but also interactions regarding events in realtime. So, he continues, ‘one can see the number of people who comment about an event over the period of its occurrence’ (Jungherr, 2015, p. 36). Building on this we can also identify patterns of language use contingent to an event, and, over time, map this data using sentiment analysis. This research can thus identify who is speaking, the keywords employed, the sentiment inferred through analysis of words used, and how different topics and sentiments emerged over time.

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Therefore, there is significant value in computation research techniques which take the basic rules of content analysis and develop them to handle the data that is available from digital media environments. Using such data to predict outcomes, for example, an election, remains problematic and may be attempting to do more than the data will allow (for debates see Jungherr et al., 2012). But big data research approaches are still in their infancy. Studies have demonstrated that such approaches can show to some extent who is communicating, although bots remain a problem for researchers (Ferrara et  al., 2016), the patterns in their lexicon, the levels of sharing or responses received, their embeddedness within online networks, and to some extent, can infer the strategy behind the communication. However, it is safer to infer the effects retrospectively which in turn leads to problems of causality. For example, Donald Trump may have gained exponential publicity from his use of Twitter during the US 2016 election contest, both through shares and media reporting, but was this a factor of his popularity or a factor which earned him support (Wells et  al., 2016). Thus, we find big data approaches offering the potential to be able to address key issues in propaganda studies within digital environments and yet some of the early critiques relating to reliable, valid, and context relevant findings remain pertinent.

CONCLUSION Content analysis as a research method is inextricably linked with the study of propaganda since its development in the first half of the twentieth century. Since those early studies by Hovland and colleagues, content analysis has been used widely to explore the key areas of political communication: ‘who says?’, ‘what?’, ‘to whom?’ via ‘what medium?’ and ‘with what effect?’ The approach remains relevant for many studies of propaganda

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production and dissemination via digital media environments, proving its adaptability and relevance. Critiques of the method, however, equally remain relevant. Ensuring the data is able to offer robust and reliable insights into the social phenomena being studied is an important question for any research project, content analysis has faced these challenges and procedures have been introduced to remedy some issues (Krippendorf, 2004). More major challenges will emerge when dealing with the fast-moving, multi-authored, heavily populated, and highly complex digital media environments of the twenty-first century. Computational propaganda, disseminated through automated bot accounts is challenging to categorise, archive, understand, and track. Big data approaches offer some potential for dealing with these issues and continue to evolve, but it is likely that research will always lag behind the practice of propagandists as researchers strive to develop techniques that deliver the insights required of the research community. Yet, as the scale and complexity of the propaganda industry grows, the analysis of message content remains of crucial importance; hence the basics of content analysis as a method are likely to remain dominant within the field of digital propaganda research.

REFERENCES Abrahms, M., Beauchamp, N., and Mroszczyk, J. 2017. What terrorism leaders want: a content analysis of propaganda videos. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40(11), 899–916. Berelson, B. 1952. Content Analysis in Communication Research. Glencoe, IL: Free Press Bjola, C. 2017. Propaganda in the digital age. Global Affairs, 3(3), 189–191. Brandtzaeg, P. B, Følstad, A., and Chaparro Domínguez, M. Á. 2018. How journalists and social media users perceive online factchecking and verification services. Journalism Practice, 12(9), 1109–1129.

Bruns, A. 2018. Big social data approaches in Internet studies: The case of Twitter. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, and M. Allen, (Eds.) The Second International Handbook of Internet Research (pp. 42–59). Cham: Springer. Chadwick, A. 2011. The political information cycle in a hybrid news system: The British prime minister and the ‘bullygate’ affair. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16(1), 3–29. Chadwick, A., Vaccari, C., and O’Loughlin, B. 2018. Do tabloids poison the well of social media? Explaining democratically dysfunctional news sharing. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4255–4274. Chomsky, N., and Herman, E. S. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Eagle, N., Pentland, A. S., and Lazer, D. 2008. Mobile phone data for inferring social network structure. In H. Liu, J. Salerno, and M. J. Young (Eds.) Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction (pp. 79–88). Boston, MA: Springer. Esarey, A. and Qiang, X. 2011. Digital communication and political change in China. International Journal of Communication, 5, 298–319. Ezzy, D. 2013. Qualitative Analysis. London: Routledge. Faris, R. M., Roberts, H., Etling, B., Bourassa, N., Zuckerman, E., and Benkler, Y. 2017. Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Cambridge, MA: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper. Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., and Flammini, A. 2016. The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), 96–104. George, A. L. (1959). Propaganda analysis. New York: Evanston Holsti, Ole R. 1969. Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hovland, C. I., Janis I. L., and Kelley, H. H. 1953. Communication and Persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Howard, P. N. (2015). Pax Technica: How the Internet of things may set us free or lock us up. New Haven: CN, Yale University Press.

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Howard, P. N., Kollanyi, B., Bradshaw, S., and Neudert, L. M. 2017. Social media, news and political information during the US elections: was polarizing contents concentrated in swing states? [online]. Oxford: Oxford University. Available from: http://comprop.oii. ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/ 93/2017/09/Polarizing-Content-and-SwingStates.pdf [Accessed 11 June 2018]. Hyunjin, S. and Ebrahim, H. 2016. Visual propaganda on Facebook: A comparative analysis of Syrian conflicts. Media, War & Conflict, 9(3) 227–251. Jowett, G. S., & O’Donnell, V. (2015). Propaganda & Persuasion. New York: Sage Jungherr, A. 2015. Analyzing political communication with digital trace data. Cham: Springer. Jungherr, A., Jürgens, P., and Schoen, H. 2012. Why the pirate party won the German election of 2009 or the trouble with predictions: A response to Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T. O, Sander, P.G. & Welpe, I.M. ‘Predicting elections with twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment’. Social Science Computer Review, 30(2), 229–234. Kaid, L. L., and Johnston, A. 1991. Negative versus positive television advertising in US presidential campaigns, 1960–1988. Journal of Communication, 41(3), 53–64. Khamis, S., Gold, P. B., and Vaughn, K. 2015. Propaganda in Egypt and Syria’s ‘cyberwars’: contexts, actors, tools and tactics. In J. Auerbach and R. Castronovo (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (pp. 418– 438). Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, G., Pan, J., and Roberts, M. 2017. How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engagement argument. The American Political Science Review, 111(3), 484–501. Klinger, U., & Svensson, J. (2018). The end of media logics? On algorithms and agency. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4653-4670. Kracauer, S. (1952). The challenge of qualitative content analysis. Public opinion quarterly, 16(4), 631-642. Krippendorff, K. 2004. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Lasswell, H. 1927. Propaganda Techniques in the World War. New York: Knopf.

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Lasswell, H. D. (1949). Why be quantitative. In H. Lasswell and N. Leites and Associates (eds), Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics, Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 40-52. Lilleker, D. G., and Jackson, N. 2013. Political Campaigning, Elections and the Internet: Comparing the US, UK, France and Germany. London: Routledge. Lilleker, D. G., and Bonacci, D. 2017. The structure of political e-expression: What the Brexit campaign can teach us about political talk on Facebook. International Journal of Digital Television, 8(3), 335–350. Lin, Y. R., Margolin, D., Keegan, B., Baronchelli, A., and Lazer, D. 2013. #bigbirds never die: Understanding social dynamics of emergent hashtag. arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.7144. Loader, B. D., and Mercea, D. 2011. Network democracy? Information, Communication & Society, 14(6), 757–769. Mayer-Schönberger, V., and Cukier, K. 2013. Big Data: The Essential Guide to Work, Life and Learning in the Age of Insight. London: Hachette. Mayring P (2000, June) Qualitative content analysis. ForumQualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal] 1(2). Available at: http://www.utsc. utoronto.ca/~kmacd/IDSC10/Readings/ text%20analysis/CA.pdf. Last accessed 1 June 2018 Pedro, J., 2011 The propaganda model in the early 21st century, Part II International Journal of Communication, 5(41), 1906-1926. Rogers, R. 2013. Digital Methods. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Seo, H. 2014. Visual propaganda in the age of social media: an empirical analysis of Twitter images during the 2012 Israeli-Hamas conflict. Visual Communication Quarterly, 21(3), 150–161. Štětka, V., Surowiec, P., & Mazák, J. (2018). Facebook as an instrument of election campaigning and voters’ engagement: comparing Czechia and Poland. European Journal of Communication, 34(2) 121-141. Theocharisa, Y., Loweb, W., van Dethc, J. W., and García-Albaceted, G. 2015. Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: Online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi

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movements. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 202–220. Weare, Ch., and Way-Ying, L. 2000. Contents analysis of the World Wide Web: challenges and opportunities. Social Science Computer Review, 18(3), 272–292. Weber, R. (1990). Basic Content Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wells, C., Shah, D. V., Pevehouse, J. C., Yang, J., Pelled, A., Boehm, F., and Schmidt, J. L. (2016). How Trump drove coverage to the

nomination: Hybrid media campaigning. Political Communication, 33(4), 669–676. Wooley, S. C., and Howard. P. N. 2016. Political communication, computation propaganda and autonomous agents. International Journal of Communication, 10(9), 4882–4890. Zurutuza-Munoz, C., and Lilleker, D. 2018. Writing graffiti on the Facebook wall: Understanding the online discourse of citizens to politicians during the 2016 Spanish election. Communication & Society, 31(3), 27–42.

12 Character Assassination as Modus Operandi of Soviet Propaganda Sergei A. Samoilenko and Margarita Karnysheva

INTRODUCTION This chapter argues that character assassination (CA) was not simply a sanctioning mechanism of the Soviet regime, but a structural property of Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of the USSR. The relationship between Soviet propaganda and CA was symbiotic as a result of that state doctrine, which interpreted world events as continuous class struggles. Hence, the role of propaganda was not only to promote the official ideology, but also to cultivate reflexive hostile attitudes toward ideological rivals. In the world of politics, all ideological contestants strive to achieve power and status by imposing their definitions of reality on others and delegitimizing the views of their opponents (Bourdieu, 1990, 1991; Thompson, 2000). Soviet propaganda succeeded in legitimizing the political beliefs of Marx and Lenin as the superior ideology. It created an iconoclastic Soviet culture that had a profound impact on other societies, as recent

studies of nostalgia for the Soviet past attest.1 Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist Party remains the second largest party in the Russian Federation; it also maintains its omnipotent rule in the People’s Republic of China. This chapter argues for a detailed inquiry into the interplay between Soviet propaganda and character assassination by providing insight into the factors influencing state-run media campaigns in contemporary Russia. A review of Russian Marxism, particularly of Lenin’s approach to propaganda, is essential for elucidating this symbiotic relationship.

THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The Role of Character Assassination in Propaganda Campaigns Political power is achieved ‘through the mastery of other people’ (Mann, 1986, p. 6) via

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ideology: a set of ideas, normative beliefs, and ethical ideals that represent a particular view about reality and become ‘a persuasive force from the power of collective participation’ (Ellul, 1973, p. 117). Since ideology is based not on facts but on strong beliefs, it often produces a ‘false consciousness’ (Engels, 1893/1968) that shapes or determines an individual’s perception of reality. Hence, Lasswell and Kaplan (1950) refer to ideology as ‘the political myth’ created in order to ‘preserve the social structure’ (p. 117). Some scholars argue that an ideology can be known only in contrast to a competing set of beliefs and values (Žižek, 1995). Hence, one cannot become conscious of another ideology unless there is a conflict between ideological frameworks. The promotion of ideology is achieved through propaganda, which is the means of communication by which competing groups attempt to lead the public to accept a given political or economic structure or to participate in a certain action. Ideology serves ‘as a peg, a pretext’ (Ellul, 1973, p. 117) for propaganda by providing it with themes and content. Importantly, a critical condition for the development of propaganda is the prevalence of powerful myths in society. These myths are then reinforced or exaggerated to provide citizens with a clear opinion on multiple issues that are outside their own experience. Typically, state propaganda promotes learned values and attitudes, instills proper reflexes, and reinforces mass commitment to action. Character assassination refers to a set of strategies intended to discredit an individual or group target in the eyes of various audiences. Throughout history, it has been applied as a tool of political competition, a method of personal retaliation, or a means of normative sanctions (Davis, 1950; Icks & Shiraev, 2014). A character assassination event is a public contest between an attacker and a target over credibility and legitimacy. The attacker applies a range of persuasive strategies to convince public opinion that the target lacks the required moral framework – and thus the

legitimacy – for an honorable distinction or social status. Character assassination frequently results from differing perceptions of social reality or clashing worldviews that often lead to ideological competition and protracted social conflict (Pearce & Littlejohn, 1997). According to Rokeach (1973), the major ideologies of the 20th century are best understood from a two-dimensional perspective, which creates the perception of a binary opposition. Each ideological camp attempts to influence public opinion of its legitimacy while calling into question the reputation and good name of its rivals, thereby undermining the rival’s symbolic power to influence hearts and minds. Importantly, character assassination is closely related to the concepts of coercion and violence, since it is a demonstrative means of exercising power and enforcing compliance in social structures. Many character assassination events defy easy explanation as individual manifestations of aggression and can only be understood in relation to group or systemic conventions. Every state is a coercive institution based on the use of legitimate violence, which allows some people to rule over others (Weber, 2004). Thus, character assassination is legitimized by cultural practices that are built into the societal and cultural values of a dominant nation, religion, or ideology and manifested in its propaganda. In this sense, character assassination is a type of cultural violence, which Galtung (1990, p. 291) describes as ‘any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form’. The use of character assassination in propaganda campaigns targeting ideological outgroups can result in physical violence toward their members and even lead to their extermination.

Character Assassination in Soviet Propaganda Soviet propaganda was based on the solid foundation of Marxism-Leninism, which

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divided humanity into two antagonistic social classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The conflict between the two classes was inevitable due to fundamental ontological differences in their ideologies, as manifested in social dualisms. According to Pearce and Littlejohn (1997), social conflicts inevitably arise when parties see other parties’ interests and values as potentially interfering with the realization of their own goals and ideas. Bell (1965) notes that Vladimir Lenin, the political leader of the Bolshevik party, used the term ideology in the sense of ‘conflicting belief systems’, or combat of ideas. Clearly, such presupposition precludes alternative ideologies to appear in the same political environment. As suggested by Lenin (1902/1961), ‘there is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology)’. The use of character assassination in Soviet propaganda stems from the traditions of the European Reformation and the 18th-century Enlightenment (Burrows, 2019; Dykema, 2014). Soviet propaganda originated from the ideological activities of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In many ways, the Bolsheviks followed in the footsteps of the nihilists and the narodniki (middle-class revolutionaries in 19th-century Russia who believed in revolution through peasant uprisings). Early Russian revolutionaries, such as the members of Narodnaya Volya, employed radical measures from street agitation to terrorist acts in order to attract the attention of the masses (Ely, 2016; Plekhanov, 1883/1974). Lenin openly deployed character attacks against his ideological opponents – especially the Mensheviks – in his writings, calling for an ‘extermination struggle’ to which there can be no limits (1907/1972, p. 300). He also incited the proletariat and the peasantry to ruthlessly do away with the monarchy and the aristocracy. For example, in one pamphlet he referred to the Bolsheviks as ‘the Jacobins of contemporary Social-Democracy’, who ‘shall settle accounts with tsarism in the Jacobin, or, if you like, in the plebeian way’

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if the revolution gains a decisive victory (Lenin, 1905/1977, p. 58). In the late 1890s, the pamphlet On Agitation by Kremer and Martov (1893/2008) exerted a great influence on Russian SocialDemocrats. It called for mass agitation among the workers on issues of their everyday needs and demands. The twin strategies of agitation and propaganda were introduced by Gregory Plekhanov, a prominent Russian theorist of Marxism. Plekhanov defined propaganda as ‘the revolutionary explanation of the present social system … to individuals or to broad masses’. He described agitation as ‘the call upon the masses to undertake definite, concrete actions, and the promotion of the direct revolutionary intervention of the proletariat in social life’ (as cited in Lenin, 1902, p. 409). A critical function of Soviet propaganda was to combat ideological dissent and counter subversion. Thus, state propaganda became not only an ideological mouthpiece, but also ‘in the long run a means for the eradication of the last traces of bourgeois propaganda dating from the old regime’ (Bucharin & Preobraschensky, 1921). The Bolsheviks labeled all ideological and political opponents ‘exploiters of the toilers’ and ‘enemies of the people’. By contrast, the members of the Bolshevik Party, which would become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), were presented as the vanguard of the proletariat, selfless warriors who would sacrifice their lives for the interests of the working class. Without propaganda, Marxism-Leninism would have ‘lost its reality and became an abstraction’ (Ellul, 1973, p. 201). The role of Soviet propaganda was officially defined as the expression of the essential worldview of the working class and its natural aims and interests. Its historical position was determined as the social force leading to the epoch of communism (Pravatorov, 1975). The presence of a strong myth created favorable conditions for mass persuasion. To legitimize their seizure of power in 1917, the

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Bolsheviks proclaimed their goal to be liberating the Russian workers and peasants and leading them into the Communist Eden. To achieve this goal, the country was supposed to pass through various stages of building a democratic socialist state, which were to culminate in World Revolution and the creation of a prosperous and classless communist society. These fundamental beliefs became a blueprint for social order in Soviet society.

SOVIET PROPAGANDA STRATEGIES Propaganda strategies distinguish between the purposes of agitation and integration. Support for an official ideology is demonstrated through the binary principle of inclusion through a pledge of allegiance and exclusion through an open rejection of competing ideologies. The role of character assassination is to provide clarification about who counts as a good member of society and who is a flawed person.

Character Assassination in Agitation Campaigns Agitation campaigns are typically used to mobilize the masses for social change or revolutionary purposes that seek to achieve instant results or obtain short-term political gains. According to Ellul (1973), they are based on simple slogans, such as the call to liberty among the oppressed, the promise of bread to the hungry, or the promise of land to peasants. A popular function of agitation is to unleash mass hatred by attributing misfortunes to another party. Character attacks on ideological opponents prove effective when they are able to persuade uneducated or uninformed audiences. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was ensured through heightened agitation and pacifist propaganda in the context of World War I. Bolshevik propagandists endorsed mass

desertion in the army and fostered soldiers’ antagonism toward their commanding officers. Most Soviet agitation campaigns between 1917 and 1937 promoted the idea of class struggle and attacked the foes of the Soviet state. After the October Revolution, agitprop became a distinguished method of spreading the political ideology of the newly constituted proletarian government (Pipes, 1995). In order to win the support of Russian peasants, the Bolsheviks recruited and dispatched tens of thousands of emissaries, including city workers and demobilized soldiers, to remote rural areas (Kenez, 1985). Agitprop trains and riverboats carried activists and promotional materials to isolated areas. These volunteer agitators informed peasants about land reform policies and provided assistance with their implementation. Agitprop street theater was noted for its use of archetypal characters of perfect virtue and evil, as well as for its ridicule of the Church and capitalists. Under Joseph Stalin, from the 1929 ‘Great Turn’ to his death in 1953, propaganda was intentionally consolidated to produce consistent and unified messages. During the first Pyatiletka campaign – the five-year plan, which was implemented between 1928 and 1932 – agitation campaigns aimed to inspire solidarity among city workers and peasants, thereby promoting in-group cohesion and altruism. In addition, agitation campaigns were intended to inspire the absolute maximum enthusiasm possible among the masses in order to increase productivity. By the late 1920s, Soviet propagandists were actively using a ‘compare and contrast’ strategy, contrasting the advantages of the socialist system with the disadvantages of living in capitalist countries. This approach reinforced a bipolar view of the world as being split into two camps: imperialistic aggressors versus righteous communists and socialists. In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin’s cult of personality dominated every aspect of public life. His statements were disseminated in national, regional, and factory newspapers

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and immediately adopted as direct guidelines. Thus, if Stalin and All-Union Communist Party or VKP(b) denounced someone as ‘an enemy of the people’, this label was quickly accepted as irrefutable truth. Character assassination under Stalinism was realized by means of well-planned smear campaigns in the Soviet press that often led to public show trials and the physical annihilation of the target. In order to unite numerous foreign sympathizers of Soviet Russia and promote communism worldwide, the Communist International (Comintern) was founded in Moscow in 1919. Comintern ran effective public relations campaigns abroad, using all available channels to reach out to international sympathizers, including left-wing parties and intelligentsia. Through this network, the Soviet leadership conducted defamation campaigns targeting the White (anti-Bolshevik) movement and the governments of the Entente countries. ProSoviet communist and trade union organizations abroad spread Soviet ideology, blaming capitalist countries for Russia’s misfortunes: ‘The White Terror unleashed by the bourgeois cannibals is indescribable’ (The Communist International, 1919/1980). In the 1930s, the Comintern network helped spread propaganda aimed at discrediting Leon Trotsky and other political opponents. In the late 1930s, Trotsky’s attacks on his victorious rival Joseph Stalin constituted a dangerous threat to the international standing of the USSR precisely because he attacked Stalin’s policies as contradictory to MarxismLeninism (Trotsky, 1935). Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the dissidents’ activities to publicize awareness of human rights violations in the Soviet Union were perceived as a serious threat because they tarnished the state’s image as a socialist democracy.

Character Assassination in Integration Campaigns The Soviet state exerted control and leadership not only through authoritarian

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dominance, but also through hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) – that is, by integrating subordinate classes into the dominant culture. The mission of propaganda is to support soft power by reinforcing the myths within a culture and providing citizens with a clear and well-articulated opinion about national and foreign issues. As suggested by Ellul (1973), effective propaganda of integration requires that the majority of citizens share a similar culture and ideology, as well as having the basic education necessary to be able to read and discuss political information. Therefore, ‘propaganda forms culture and in a certain sense is culture’ (p. 110), as a cultured person is more susceptible to propaganda. The cultural revolution declared by Lenin in 1923 aimed to eliminate illiteracy so as to more effectively propagate MarxismLeninism and atheism. Importantly, Lenin’s vision of cultural revolution did not distinguish between the tasks of information and propaganda. Lenin believed that political propaganda was to serve two critical functions: organize and educate the masses. For example, he considered a newspaper ‘not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator’, but also ‘a collective organizer’ (Lenin, 1902). The growing literacy rate among Soviet citizens made it possible to expose previously uneducated masses to printed propaganda and thereby increase their political engagement. The Department for Agitation and Propaganda was founded in the early 1920s under the control of the CPSU’s Central Committee. Its aim was to support Party initiatives through mass communication, political education, and public outreach. In order to maintain control over education, science, and culture, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, led by Anatoly Lunacharsky, was established in 1917 as a national center of political education. In December 1918, a system of free school education was introduced. The humanities became subordinated to propaganda tasks, and school syllabi were designed on the basis of Marxism-Leninism.

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Anti-religious propaganda entered academia in the late 1950s, when the course Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism was added to higher education curricula. Religion was perceived as an ideological competitor of Marxism-Leninism, one that interfered with the latter’s goal of building a proletarian society. Youth organizations, such as the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol, played an important role in the promotion of dominant norms and values. These organizations helped to build so-called ‘class-consciousness’, which Mao later described as a way to ‘destroy the individualist and petit-bourgeois spirit while assimilating the individual in a collective of thought’ (cited in Ellul, 1973). In addition, organizational membership was supposed to strengthen individuals’ group identity and facilitate total belief in ideological doctrine. Naturally, this would justify any decisions or actions in the name of a cause, including the harassment of class enemies. From childhood, an individual was integrated into the Marxist-Leninist network of organizations, such as Pioneer or Komsomol groups, which were free of adverse ideological influences. The state policy of cultural revolution provided propaganda with new ideas, including some that were applied to character assassination campaigns. Russian Marxist philosopher Alexander Bogdanov (1924) argued that culture and art always reflect the interests of a certain class. Therefore, it was necessary to destroy ‘old bourgeois culture’ and replace it with the ‘pure proletarian culture’ of the future. Hence, the Soviet propagandists immediately labeled alternative cultures ‘archaic’ (feudal-bai,2 feudal-lamaistic3), ‘bourgeois’, or ‘decadent’ and persecuted their key representatives and followers. Practically, Bogdanov’s ideas of the termination of non-proletarian culture were embodied in the formation of Proletkult, a federation of local cultural societies and avant-garde artists (Gorbunov, 1972; Mally, 1990). The role of Proletkult was to carry to the masses an ideological and progressive

culture that would raise the authority of the new Bolshevik government among the leftist intelligentsia abroad. The Soviet government funded the publication of Marxist-Leninist classics and ideologically sound literature in large quantities. These books promoted the avant-garde role of the working class and mythologized the biographies of party and state leaders. Art was considered just another propaganda tool. State subsidiaries primarily supported artists and sculptors who worked in the genre of socialist realism. Another critical function of Proletkult was the obstruction of non-proletarian art and artists who did not share the views of the Soviet ideology. For example, a smear campaign against Boris Pasternak, a Nobel Prize winner,4 was organized by the main CPSU ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, through the Union of Soviet Writers.5 This Proletkult organization was also instrumental during a harassment campaign against Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago. The goals of agitation and integration frequently overlap. Specifically, hatred of a common enemy is the most accessible and comprehensive means of unifying followers of a particular ideology (Hoffer, 1951). The rally round the flag effect is frequently exploited by political leaders in times of uncertainty and turmoil to distract from economic or policy issues and increase support for the government. Political crises can be conveniently promoted by state propaganda to increase the approval ratings of political leaders (Mueller, 1970; Tir, 2010). Specifically, the symbolic sphere can be organized through censorship policies and by replacing inconvenient narratives with spiritual bonding and group-think. During the purges of the late 1930s, character assassination of Stalin’s political opponents was vigorously supported by a great number of enthusiasts. Collective letters written by groups of intellectuals, workers, and collective farmers demanded that ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’ be punished (Pravda, 1937). The denunciation and anonymous

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reports became a sign of loyalty to the state under Stalin. According to Kimerling (2017), anonymous complaints and accusations fulfilled several functions. First, they simulated the democratic right of the Soviet people to influence political life according to the socialist vision of democracy by the people. Second, the complaints of the working people provided the perfect pretext for repressions, a justification that was often used in political campaigns. In the same vein, in 1973, a newspaper smear campaign against physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov was supported by well-known scientists, members of the cultural elite, and labor collectives across the country (Pravda, 1973).

CHARACTER ASSASSINATION TARGETS The motives for character assassination (CA) vary. Many attacks are launched ‘to win political battles, discredit unwelcome news, or settle personal scores’ (Icks & Shiraev, 2014, p. 3). However, a character attack on an individual may be an intermediate phase of a strategic plan targeting an opposition movement and a competing ideology. From the remnants of the czarist regime, the Bolsheviks inherited an economically devastated country in the throes of war. World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War spread famine and public discontent with the new government. During the Civil War (1918–1921), Soviet propaganda became an extremely important tool for mass persuasion. Rooted in socialist ideology and mixed with various character assassination methods, political propaganda contributed significantly to the Bolsheviks’ victory. The key targets at that time included the White Movement, anarchists, socialist-revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and foreign nations participating in the Allied intervention. At a time when both the Whites (monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks) and the Reds

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(the Bolsheviks) were plundering the civilian population, organizing pogroms, and using mass terror tactics, the task of Soviet propaganda was to shift the blame for any wrongdoing to the Reds’ opponents while playing down their own crimes. For example, Leon Trotsky, then People’s Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs and commander of the Red Army, often blamed the regime of petty-bourgeois compromisers for all troubles that had occurred since the Revolution.6 After the Civil War, the Bolsheviks continued to position themselves as the sole defenders of proletarian interests, declaring all ideological rivals to be enemies of the people. Collective character assassination against social groups began with the decree of January 1918 that separated Church from state and school from Church, which was accompanied by anti-religious propaganda and atheistic education. State-run CA campaigns targeted many social groups, including the nobility, landowners, priests, the intelligentsia, rich peasants, and any other group categorized as a ‘class enemy’ of the Soviet state. After Lenin’s death in 1924, character assassination continued to be a popular tool of political competition and was frequently used in power struggles among the members of the Soviet elite and of the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, Leon Trotsky was defeated by Joseph Stalin and his supporters and expelled from the party and the Soviet Union. Using Trotsky’s authority in international proletarian and socialist circles, the Trotskyites launched their own anti-Stalinist propaganda campaign to undermine the credibility of the Soviet Union as the world’s first socialist state. In exile, Trotsky created the anti-Soviet Fourth International and began an aggressive propaganda campaign against Stalin. In return, Soviet counter-propaganda accused Trotsky and his supporters of collaborating with fascist Germany and Japan. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Communist Party and the state apparatus were shaped by an endless intra-party

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struggle for internal purity and concerns about commitment to the party line. Stalin’s Great Purge was an attempt to rid the party of any oppositionists who might even potentially become Communist leaders or popular figures in a context of growing public discontent with state policies (Blackstock, 1969). Following Stalin’s death, there was a brief period known as The Khrushchev Thaw from 1953 to the 1960s. During this time, the government ceased mass repressions and rolled back censorship. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 denounced the cult of Stalin, liberalized some domestic policies, and granted amnesty to many victims of the previous purges. Consequently, the techniques of state domination changed and the scale of physical violence shrank significantly. Despite democratization reforms, the state’s official rhetoric remained the same. The Soviet government continued to suppress ideological dissent and run smear campaigns against its opponents. The goal of propaganda was to ensure unity between the state and citizens through socalled self-criticism. This practice expanded under Khrushchev in the 1960s as an effective means of controlling the bureaucracy and channeling society’s indignation and aggressive tendencies (Pravda, 1962). The newspapers published hundreds of letters from readers denouncing the shortcomings and faults of functionaries and their institutions. During this campaign, many civil servants, clerks, and small managers became scapegoats, while the Communist Party always remained above reproach. In the 1960s, Soviet propagandists used character assassination to ensure ideological conformity. Since any resistance to dominant positions would disrupt the reproduction of the social system, the state applied repressive measures and disciplinary sanctions against any dissent. Hence, the selective repressions of the 1960s and 1970s used character assassination to prevent the spread of oppositional activism by sending a signal to the general public that disloyalty was reprehensible and

punishable (Egorova & Egorova, 2019). The Stalinist mass purges were replaced by elaborate smear campaigns against famous dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. After World War II, the world was split by the ideological, economic, and geopolitical rivalry between NATO and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The NATO countries continued to support many anti-communist and subversive organizations abroad. Character assassination also served the function of counter-propaganda by responding to adversarial persuasion or disinformation. Soviet counterintelligence used smear campaigns against the members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), who were involved in covert operations against the Soviet Union (Bannov, 1977). This organization sponsored Radio Free Russia and the publishing house Posev, which specialized in anti-Soviet and other samizdat literature smuggled outside the USSR. Soviet propaganda defined the Cold War as an economic and ideological confrontation between capitalist and socialist modes of production. The competition between the USSR and the United States continued in new ideological markets all over the world. For example, in Latin America, the Soviet Union targeted local intellectuals to replace the dogma of the Church with Marxism (Miller, 1989). Soviet Cold War propaganda also sought to alter the positive image of the United States, an erstwhile ally during World War II.7 The strategy and targets for anti-American propaganda were outlined in the same Marxist-Leninist language the Bolshevik leaders used to castigate their class enemies, including ‘the stranglers of freedom and independence of peoples’ and ‘a country of national and racial discrimination’. Soviet propagandists frequently applied their favorite ‘compare and contrast’ technique, juxtaposing the advantages of developed socialism with unemployment, racism, and neocolonialism in capitalist countries. Disinformation was a crucial tactic in the Soviet political warfare of active measures,

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which included overt and covert techniques for influencing events in foreign countries. Notorious examples included a fake embassy report about US plans to overthrow the government in Ghana and rumors that the United States was responsible for the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca (Cull et  al., 2017; U.S. Department of State, 1981). Soviet black propaganda also spread rumors that the AIDS virus was manufactured by the US government and first tested on gay prison inmates (Boghardt, 2009). In addition, character assassination served the purpose of counter-propaganda, or responding to adversarial persuasion.

The Role of the Media Character assassination became an integral tool of mass persuasion in Soviet propaganda campaigns conducted via state-controlled media. In the Soviet Union, the mass media served as channels of state propaganda and deployed all possible resources to obliterate the target. In pre-revolutionary Russia, propaganda was disseminated through verbal agitation and the distribution of printed materials. Russian socialists held good orators who could win the attention of the audience in high regard. Lenin (1902/1961) distinguished between the tasks of the propagandist and of the agitator. He noted that the propagandist, whose primary medium is print, must explain the causes of social inequities and present too many ideas: ‘so many, indeed, that they will be understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons’. Meanwhile, the agitator, who operates by means of the spoken word, emphasizes the emotional aspect of the matter: he takes ‘as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience’ and strives ‘to rouse discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, leaving a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist’ (p. 409). Agitators organized rallies,

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meetings, and task groups, which became training grounds for future propaganda and character assassination campaigns. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks created a highly effective censorship mechanism that stifled voices in the alternative press. In 1919, Lenin drafted a resolution on closing the Menshevik newspaper Vsegda Vpered on the grounds that it was a ‘counter-revolutionary’ outlet of the Mensheviks, ‘who have lined up with the propertied classes, i.e., the landowners and capitalists’ or display ‘spineless vacillation, bringing them to serve [the White admiral] Kolchak’.8 Pravda emerged as the leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official media outlet of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. As early as 1918, the Bolshevik press initiated a defamation campaign against socialist-revolutionaries (SRs). After an assassination attempt against two Bolshevik leaders, the Bolshevik newspapers called for physical violence against their ideological adversaries (Pavlov, 1999). The newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya cooperated with the secret services so closely that their publications often served as the main source of incriminating evidence. The publication of statements and public addresses made by top Soviet officials often preceded and shaped official charges. This was the case in December 1919, when a large group of SR Maximalists was arrested after several publications in the press.9 Despite the importance of printed propaganda, its impact on the masses was limited due to widespread illiteracy among the general population. During the years of the October Revolution and the Civil War, posters and leaflets designed by avant-garde artists therefore played a critical role. As suggested by Ellul (1973, p. 111), the proliferation of shared stereotypes in a culture makes it easier for individuals ‘to form public opinion and become susceptible to the manipulation of stereotyped symbols’. Soviet propaganda actively borrowed plots

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and images from the Bible and Orthodox Christian iconography that were familiar to the general public (Volkov, 2008). Biblical passages like ‘He who shall not work, neither shall he eat’ were commonly used to promote a new way of life and the ideas of collectivism. Thus, in demonizing the SRs, in 1918, Pravda published an article titled ‘To the Cains of Revolution’ (as cited in Pavlov, 1999). The images of enemies emulated the lubok-style painting embedded religious themes and traditional folklore. For example, one poster depicted Trotsky as a mounted archangel piercing the hydra of world imperialism with his pike.10 Soviet posters painted Soviet enemies in grotesque and repulsive images, frequently having animalistic but still identifiable characteristics. Enemies of the people were depicted as ravens and dogs; capitalists were presented either as hydras or fat men wearing top hats and tuxedos and smoking big cigars (Bonnell, 1997). In the late 1920s and 1930s, many posters contrasted deviant White émigrés with young and healthy Soviet citizens. At the same time, visual propaganda promoted the numerous achievements of Soviet Russia, including new machinery, mass education, and cultural entertainment of the proletariat, as an attractive alternative to the religion and capitalism of Imperial Russia. Soviet propaganda was seamlessly embedded in symbolic acts of everyday interaction among people, often reflecting established cultural conventions. Through art and agitprop, ridicule and character attacks on class enemies were incorporated into popular culture. Soviet propagandists applied aesthetics of Russian traditional folk art to denigrate political adversaries. For example, Soviet writers mocked White Army generals and other enemies of the Soviet state by writing new lyrics to humorous folk songs (chastushkas). Many chastushkas were laden with vulgarities to ridicule commonly perceived enemies. The ideologemes created during wartime by Lenin and Trotsky, such as ‘class enemy’

and ‘mercenary of foreign imperialism’, seeped into everyday language along with other popular metaphors and propaganda clichés (Volkova, 2013). Thus, mockery’s appropriation of the word ‘bourgeois’ in public discourse translated it into ‘class enemy’ in the minds of the general public. People commonly applied this term to propertied families or anyone who wore a starched collar, tie, or decent suit instead of a worker’s blouse (Kolonitskii, 1994). Specifically,  it became a term of abuse, used for namecalling, identification of class difference, or the justification of illegal violence. In 1919, the Council of People’s Commissars nationalized theaters and the cinema industry, which was supposed to become ‘the most important of all the arts’, according to Lenin (as cited in Boltyansky, 1925, p. 19). In the early 1920s, Soviet cinema actively promoted the theme of class struggle and the image of enemies in propaganda movies, including The Strike (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein; History of the Civil War (1922) by Dziga Vetrov; and Mother (1926) by Vsevolod Pudovkin. These stories portrayed the martyrdom of the Red heroes killed by White and imperialist villains. Many Soviet propaganda films became world classics. For example, Battleship Potemkin, released in 1925, has often been cited as one of the finest propaganda films ever made and is considered among the greatest films of all time. A long list of postwar anti-religious films, such as Leaded Sky over Borsk, directed by Vasili Ordynsky in 1961, discredited religious organizations and holders of religious beliefs.

SOVIET PROPAGANDA AND VIOLENCE The scale and intensity of a character assassination event is determined by the amount of resources the attacker and the target have at their respective disposals. Clearly, dominant

Character Assassination as Modus Operandi of Soviet Propaganda

power structures, such as totalitarian states, have absolute control over resources, as well as symbolic power to destroy their targets psychologically and erase their names from public memory. The symbolic means of character assassination are frequently coupled with various forms of psychological violence or ‘violence that works on the soul’ (Galtung, 1969), including intimidation, brainwashing, indoctrination, degrading, and so on. As early as 1920, Leon Trotsky, the founding father of Soviet propaganda, affirmed that the survival of socialism in Russia was inextricably linked to the proletarian dictatorship’s capacity to use strategies of repression and intimidation.11 The Bolshevik monopoly on political power and moral positioning was also clearly expressed by Lenin during the 11th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1922. In his speech, he articulated that the New Economic Policy had to be accompanied by a political offensive against political opponents and harsh measures against Bolshevik dissidents (Pirani, 2008). As noted previously, many social groups were subject to indirect and direct violence, repressions, and executions for nothing more than class differences. For example, the intelligentsia came under attack because it negatively influenced workers with its bourgeois ideology. According to Gelman (2018), intimidation strategies became institutionalized in the later Soviet Union as the politics of fear, a particular vision of informal governance and sanctions used by the state to ensure political control and social order. An important feature of Soviet propaganda was its interplay with physical and psychological violence, which became possible due to the state monopoly on power and means of coercion. From the 1920s onward, public show trials were a distinctive feature of character assassination in Soviet propaganda campaigns; they were also a trademark of Stalin’s politics during the Great Terror. Klicperová-Baker (2019) defines show trials as staged spectacles that conveniently combine both pre-propaganda and prosecution.

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During a public trial, victims are forced to discredit their own characters through widely publicized public confessions before an official verdict. In other words, the actual trial is preceded by a defamation campaign in the media. The trial of the members of Kolchak’s Omsk government in May 1920 became the first in a long series of defamation campaigns in the form of judicial pseudo-investigations and court hearings (‘Verkhovnyy Pravitel’ Rossii’, 2005). In 1922, a fierce smear campaign in the newspapers preceded the Moscow show trial of the SRs (Morozov, 2005). Other well-known show trials of the 1920s included the lawsuits against participants in the peasant rebellion in Tambov region and the Kronstadt rebellion of sailors and soldiers (Avrich, 1970; Singleton, 1966). During the Great Purges, prearranged acts of self-incrimination became a critical element of public show trials. The show trials of the 1930s were held nationwide and included voluntary confession and unanimous approval of the final judgment. In addition to the sentence, the defendants were also forced to testify against their friends, colleagues, and relatives. The testimonies and false accusations were used as inculpatory evidence. Among defendants in these show trials were former Bolshevik party leaders, top military commanders, statesmen, and top secret police officials charged with treason and espionage (Pravda, 1938; Vestnik, 1936). The Tukhachevsky case was a famous military tribunal of Red Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky and a group of Red Army generals (Blackstock, 1969). These show trials allowed the Soviet leadership to eliminate popular public figures and potential political rivals. Frequently, character assassination was continued post-mortem through memory erasing techniques, which were intended to obliterate ‘traitors’ from public memory (King, 1997). The names of the victims and any references to their accomplishments were deleted from books; their images were removed from group photographs.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, the state continued to suppress any ideological dissent and conduct defamation campaigns against its opponents. It applied a range of oppressive instruments of informal coercion, which did not necessarily entail direct violence, but rather informal power, such as selective use of the law, manipulative use of state institutions (courts, hospitals), and invasion of personal privacy (Ledeneva, 2018). For example, those involved in the production and dissemination of samizdat – that is, the production and circulation of printed materials outside official publishing houses – faced severe repression ranging from incarceration to exile to confinement in psychiatric wards (Forsyth, 2018; Makarov, 2018). The Soviet state mixed character assassination tactics with various means of psychological pressure on dissenters and nonconformists to ensure compliance and to prevent the spread of oppositional activism. The role of smear campaigns, similar to the above-mentioned attacks on Boris Pasternak, was to send a signal to the general public that disloyalty was reprehensible and punishable. The political abuse of psychiatry became a systemic feature of the Soviet regime under Yuri Andropov, KGB (Committee for State Security) Chairman from 1967 to 1982, who considered the dissident movement a perfidious creation of Western intelligence agencies designed to undermine the Soviet state (van Voren, 2018). Dissidents were often stigmatized as unstable and mentally ill and forced to accept compulsory treatment in psychiatric clinics (Bloch & Reddaway, 1977). Notably, Soviet psychiatry considered religious adults with higher education to be suffering from psychotic disorders that caused abnormal thinking and perceptions (Derwinski & Schifter, 1986). Needless to say, dissidents were dismissed from their jobs and were denied the opportunity to find new ones.12 In the 1970s, the pressure on dissidents only escalated and continued until Mikhail Gorbachev’s early glasnost policy reforms in 1986–1987.

CONCLUSION Propaganda and character assassination are two mechanisms of state domination that demonstrate enhanced compatibility and seamless convergence in societies with asymmetric power distribution. This chapter views this symbiotic interdependence as a structural property of a dominant ideology with unlimited access to authoritative resources. In the context of the Soviet Union, character assassination was highly compatible with Marxism-Leninism’s interpretation of the world as a forum for clashes between contrasting views of ideological and moral order. Lenin’s idea of ‘extermination struggle’ defined the state’s course for action for several decades. In this respect, the role of propaganda was not only to create the necessary cultural base, but also to cultivate conditioned reflexes and hostile imagination toward anyone who was portrayed as a fundamental threat to cherished values and beliefs. Propaganda allowed the effects of character assassination to reach large audiences through state-controlled mass media. However, character assassination was not only instrumental in top-down persuasion, but also in grassroots propaganda dissemination. Propaganda primed the general public by prompting sticky frames and labels that spread horizontally between ordinary people through individual networks. Labels that mocked the notion of ‘bourgeois’ identity promoted the rise of sociocultural conflict and negative identification of class differences. Soviet propaganda incorporated character assassination into agitation and integration campaigns. This was intended to remind Soviet citizens about the accepted value system and establish standards for evaluating themselves and the actions of others. Character assassination helped the Soviet state ensure conformity and gain compliance by discrediting voices and muting dissent. It also served as a form of counter-propaganda by responding

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to adversarial persuasion or disinformation. Further research should specifically address anti-Soviet character assassination campaigns in the Western and immigrant press and their impact on the choice of Soviet counter-­ propaganda strategies. Today’s Russia is not a typical authoritarian regime, as there are still some spaces where civic actors can exercise their autonomy. The regime demonstrates low levels of repression compared to the Soviet era, yet politics of fear are still present as an instrument of domination and informal governance (Ledeneva, 2013, 2018). During Putin’s third presidential term (2012–2018), for instance, the state used an increasingly broad legal framework to preserve state control and social order. State measures were applied primarily in the form of individual sanctions on participants in protest or independent activism. Character assassination, too, remains a powerful institutional mechanism of informal governance. For example, spreading rumors about opposition leaders is not necessarily a violation of formal rules but an informal strategy intended to prevent individual actors from acting in a manner that may affect the interests of a political system. In fact, the entire state media system can be used for either random character attacks or long-term smear campaigns. Various forms of kompromat, or strategically used compromising materials, are commonly employed against the non-systemic opinion leaders in Russia today (Mesquita, 2018). The hybrid approach to propaganda and character assassination in the Soviet Union provides useful insights into contemporary Russian propaganda. Further comprehensive inquiry is needed to assess the degree to which the traditions of Soviet propaganda determine strategic and tactical governance decisions in contemporary Russia. In addition, future studies should specifically address the relationship between the rise of a new political propaganda and the declining quality of the public sphere.

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Notes 1  Pew Research Center (2017, June 29). In Russia, nostalgia for Soviet Union and positive feelings about Stalin. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/ wdBE5g. 2  Rich landowner in Central Asia. 3  Buddhist priest in Inner Asia. 4  See Sem’ krugov travli Borisa Pasternaka [Boris Pasternak: Seven circles of harassment]. Retrieved from https://arzamas.academy/materials/389. 5  It was founded in 1921 as VAPP (All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and belonged to Proletkult. 6  See Trotsky (1923, p. 26) for examples. 7  Plan meropriyatiya po usileniyu antiamerikanskoy propagandy na blizhaysheye vremya [Activity plan to increase anti-American propaganda]. (1949). Retrieved from www.alexanderyakovlev. org/fond/issues-doc/69577. 8  See Lenin (1919/1972). 9  See Morozov (2005). 10  Poster of Leon Trotsky slaying the counter-revolutionary dragon. Retrieved from www.marxists. org/archive/trotsky/photo/t1918a.htm. 11  See Trotsky (1920). 12  For details see Dissidentskoe dvizhenie v rasskazakh uchastnikov [The dissident movement in the stories of its participants]. Retrieved from https:// arzamas.academy/materials/1209.

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rezolyutsiya rabochikh zheleznodorozhnogo depo stantsii Irkutsk-2. [Destroy the Nazi hirelings! From the resolution of workers of the workers of the railway depot, station Irkutsk-2]. Pravda. Retrieved from https:// goo.gl/HFHJcM Pravda (May 11, 1962). N. S. Khrushchev. Rech’ na vsesoyuznom soveshchanii rabotnikov zheleznodorozhnogo transporta 10 maya 1962 g. [N. S. Khrushchev. Speech at the AllUnion Conference of Railway Transport Workers on May 10, 1962]. Pravda. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/17BLfe Pravda (1973, August 29). Letter from the members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Pravda. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/ fZDit6 Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: Free Press. Singleton, S. (1966). The Tambov Revolt (1920– 1921). Slavic Review, 25(3), 497–512. Thompson, J. B. (2000). Political scandal: Power and visibility and in the media age. Cambridge: Polity. Tir, J. (2010). Territorial diversion: Diversionary theory of war and territorial conflict. The Journal of Politics, 72(2), 413–425. Trotsky, L. D. (1920). Terrorism and communism. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/Q3kDfe Trotsky, L. D. (1923). Kak vooruzhalas’ revolyutsiya (na voyennoy rabote). Tom 1: 1918 [How the revolution armed (at military work) Vol. 1: 1918]. Moscow: Supreme Military Editorial Board. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/V2GjFf Trotsky, L. (1935). Open letter for the Fourth International. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/ archive/trotsky/1935/xx/fi.htm

U.S. Department of State. (1981, October). Soviet “active measures.” Forgery, disinformation, political operations. (Report No. 88). Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2jfoS5a Verkhovnyy pravitel’ Rossii. Dokumenty i materialy sledstvennogo dela admirala A. V. Kolchaka [The supreme ruler of Russia: Records from the investigative case of Admiral A.V. Kolchak]. (2003). Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from http://istmat. info/node/30343 Vestnik. (1936). Usilit revolyutsionnuyu bditelnost [Strengthen revolutionary vigilance]. Vestnik AN SSSR [Bulletin of the USSR Academy of Sciences], 8–9. Volkov, E.V. (2008). Gidra kontrevolyutsii: Beloe dvizhenie v kulturnoi pyamyati sovetskogo cheloveka [Hydra of counterrevolution: White movement in the cultural memory of Soviet society]. Chelyabinsk: Chelyabinsky Dom Pechati. Retrieved from https://bit. ly/2xbbM1w Volkova, E. (2013). Osobennosti podachi obraza ‘vraga naroda’ v sovetskoi pechati kontsa 1920 – pervoi poloviny 1930 [Presenting the image of ‘the enemy of the people’ in the Soviet press from the late 1920s to the first half of the 1930s]. Mediascope, 4. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/NADN5H van Voren, R. (2018). Psikhushka. In A. Ledeneva (ed.), The global encyclopaedia of informality (Vol. 2, pp. 446–449). London: UCL Press. Weber, M. (2004). The vocation lectures. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Books. Žižek, S. (1995). Introduction. In S. Žižek (ed.), Mapping ideology (pp. 1–33). New York: Verso.

13 Assessing Propaganda Effectiveness in North Korea: A Limited Access Case Study E f e S e v i n , K a d i r J u n A y h a n , W o n Yo n g J a n g , and Hyelim Lee

INTRODUCTION The Korean Peninsula has been an area of interest for propaganda scholars. Given the almost mystified portrayal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and its relatively closed-off status, scholars have produced a significant volume of studies analyzing the country’s propaganda toward its citizens (Byman & Lind, 2010) and its portrayal of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) (Gabroussenko, 2011), as well as of the Western world (Oh & Hassig, 2010). In this chapter, our objective is to use the experience in the Peninsula from a methodological perspective to advance our understanding of propaganda assessment. More specifically, we present a case study of how South Korean practitioners assess their campaigns. The South Korean experience is noteworthy and has the potential to contribute to propaganda studies based on the context in which it is taking place. Primarily, the fact

that North Korea is inaccessible through mass media or digital communication platforms encourages the propagandists to take more creative solutions. From leaflets carried by balloons across the borders and loudspeakers targeting the North, we observe projects that present non-mainstream approaches to reach an audience. This figurative communication distance between the audiences and practitioners requires a similarly creative approach to assessment. Practitioners cannot rely on tried-and-true methods, such as public opinion polls, to assess the effectiveness of their campaigns. Our study is, thus, led by an overarching question: How do practitioners assess their impact in environments with limited access? We present a case study of the South Korean propaganda experience toward the North. We build the case narrative on document analysis, interviews with key practitioners, and an impressionistic survey carried out among the defectors from North Korea. We limit our study to non-state actors in South

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Korea that actively engage in propaganda attempts in, or rather, toward North Korea. While the government had been the main propagandist toward North Korea until the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, state-led propaganda activities came to a halt, except for a brief and lighter continuation in 2010s. Viewing these activities effective and necessary, North Korean defector entrepreneurs entered the propaganda scene to fill the vacuum created by the government’s exit. Our study selected these non-state activists who have engaged in propaganda activities toward North Korea for more than a decade. The rest of the chapter is structured in six parts. First, we present a summary of existing studies in propaganda assessment with a specific focus on cases including relatively closed regimes such as Cuba and Iran. Second, we introduce the historical context in which North-South relations as well as propaganda projects have been executed. Third, we discuss our case study methodology. Fourth, we share the reconstructed case narrative in the following section. Fifth, we discuss our findings from a theoretical perspective. Sixth, we conclude the chapter by sharing the implications of our study.

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW Effectiveness of Propaganda A broad definition of propaganda, as provided by Harold D. Lasswell (1927, p. 627) in his seminal work The Theory of Political Propaganda, equates the term to all techniques that manage the ‘collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols’. More nuanced definitions add methods and objectives, positioning propaganda as deliberate and systematic attempts that have the objective to ‘achieve a response that further the desired intent of the propagandist’ (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2006, p. 181). As both

definitions highlight, there has always been an interest in capturing the impacts and outcomes of propaganda effects. The earlier days of propaganda studies, shortly after World War I, were dominated by rhetorical approaches (Sproule, 1987). Scholars focused on analyzing the use of language and persuasive elements in messages (Billig, 1988). Contemporary studies have evolved toward communication research, including statistical and experimental research (Sproule, 1987). This particular move brought together a more quantitative approach to the assessment component (Watson, 2012) where studies incorporated assessment of outcomes. There is an expectation, both in the practice and study of propaganda, that the projects will yield observable and measurable changes (ParryGiles, 1994). The dissemination of propaganda messages has the potential to change the way issues are framed in mass media. Framing theory argues that communicators strive to make certain aspects of issues more salient in public discussions to achieve their intended consequences (Entman, 1993). For instance, during the Iraq War of 2003, the Bush administration framed the operation as self-defense (Hiebert, 2003), with the expectation that a self-defense use of armed forces would have been more acceptable than a war of aggression for the international community. More often than not, the issues at hand can be presented through multiple frames. While explaining the recent developments in China, two American newspapers – The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – use different frames. Both newspapers acknowledge China’s economic power and political problems, yet the former frames China as a potential, albeit problematic, economic partner with the latter seeing China as a political threat (Golan & Lukito, 2015, p. 13). It is expected that propagandists push frames that are more conducive to their policy goals. In the case of North Korea’s own news coverage of nuclear program, the issue is framed as one of relations with South Korea and the

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US (Rich, 2014), highlighting its national security aspect. The effectiveness of propaganda can be seen in its capacity to influence frames, in this case the success of North Korean propaganda in affecting the news coverage in the country (Jang, 2013). Another related and relevant impact of propaganda is observed in agenda-setting studies. In addition to the way issues are framed, propagandists can aim to influence which issues are covered, thus setting the agenda for media coverage and public discussions (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). A recent study observed such an outcome of election propaganda in which the coverage of Indian general elections in 2014 predominantly highlighted one candidate, therefore, increased his popularity among the electorate (Baumann et al., 2018). When photographer David Guttenfelder was allowed to take photos inside North Korea, he posted 490 images from the country to his personal account out of which only 26% framed the country as a totalitarian regime (Holiday et al., 2017). Yet, when additional news outlets relayed his photos, some chose to increase this frequency up to over 50%, encouraging their readers to discuss the regime’s characteristics and not its culture, history, or daily life (Holiday et al., 2017). A successful propaganda attempt can also influence what issues are discussed in media and in public. The increasing adoption of social media usage, such was the case in Guttenfelder’s photos, became an important variable in agendasetting and framing studies. Individuals no longer needed to rely on media or opinion leaders in order to get their news. Rather, their social networks took over this particular function (Benkler, 2006; Castells, 2009). Studies on social media enable practitioners and scholars not only examine the content but also map out the relationships among people (Boynton & Richardson, 2016). A Twitter hashtag, #SaveDonbassPeople, brought the human rights violations in Eastern Ukraine to the public agenda (Makhortykh & Lyebyedyev, 2015). The hashtag was also instrumental in

creating a community of users who were interested in the issue (Makhortykh & Lyebyedyev, 2015). A successful propaganda attempt, thus, can have a dual purpose as it can synchronously create a community and influence the views of the masses. Eventually, the manipulation of people’s minds is the benchmark for success in propaganda activity (Gabroussenko, 2011, p. 52). The ultimate objective of a propagandist is to incite desirable behavior through communication. It is, therefore, possible to assess a propaganda campaign either through its influence on the outcomes or the processes. The existing studies outline how aspects can be described and assessed. For the processes, studies need to demonstrate the changes in framing, agenda-setting, or networks. For the outcomes, the link between communication and change among target audiences needs to be unpacked. The next section assesses the feasibility of these methods in limited access cases.

Limited Access and Propaganda In the case of North Korea, however, there is virtually no access to any of such data points. Media platforms, including social media, cannot be used to monitor changes in public discourse. Observing behavior or attitude change among North Koreans is similarly challenging. We use these characteristics to construct a subset of propaganda cases. Labeling as limited access cases, we introduce instances in which there is little to no opportunity to gather data on the aforementioned propaganda change processes and outcomes. Our understanding of limited access is a relatively pragmatic one (cf. Koch, 2013, and the accompanying special issue). We accept the conditions of the situation, and investigate their impacts rather than their causes. In other words, we solely focus on how limited access to North Korea changes the propaganda practice. Albeit the focus of this study, North Korea is not the

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first case to present such a challenge to practitioners and scholars. In this section, we present the insights drawn from studies covering two of such cases: Cuba and Iran. Cuba has been an important topic in American foreign policy and a frequent target of American propaganda attempts especially within the Cold War context. Yet, as a report commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) summarizes, gathering data from the country was challenging (Roberts et al., 1999, p. 10): Traditional methodologies for gauging public opinion are unavailable to researchers who wish to study the attitudes and behavior of the people of Cuba. First of all, there is limited access to Cuba. Any polling organization would have to have government approval and would be closely monitored. A second problem is that, for all practical purposes, there are no Cuban tourists who travel abroad […] And while phone service to Cuba has vastly improved in the past few years, normal telephone sampling would be highly suspect inasmuch as Cubans would likely be distrustful of strangers calling and asking questions about life on the island.

The practitioners had limited access to Cuban society which barred them from carrying out random sampling methods. In 1998, the United States Information Agency implemented non-random sampling methods. They carried out a field research in Havana and asked individuals applying for American visas whether they have seen the TV Marti’s – a station operated by the United States to disseminate messages in Cuba – broadcast (Elliston, 1999, p. 11). This non-random ­sampling procedure yielded biased results as the respondents did not represent the Cuban population. Even though the practitioners acknowledged the shortcomings of their methodology in their reports, they also argued that it was virtually impossible to conduct any random sampling in closed societies such as Cuba (Elliston, 1999, pp. 266–267). Consequently, non-random sampling studies were used to assess the changes in Cuban public opinion. One popular data gathering

method was to rely on Cuban travelers for focus groups and interviews (Elliston, 1999, p. 296). Another frequently consulted population was Cuban emigres. USAID (Roberts et  al., 1999) conducted interviews at ports of entries and reached out to recent emigres to assess the effectiveness of American messages. In addition to reaching parts of the populations, practitioners devised additional auxiliary methods to argue for the effectiveness of their communication attempts. Radio Swan – a station ran by American intelligence officers to broadcast anti-Castro propaganda – presents an intriguing attempt. The station was publicly denounced by Fidel Castro during his United Nations General Assembly address that took place only months after the station started its operations (Elliston, 1999, p. 9). The broadcast was deemed to be effective as it attracted the attention of high-level politicians. Similarly, digital propaganda attempts present internet blocking (Kalathil & Boas, 2001) as a measure of success, arguing that a censorship would be deemed necessary only if the message was conceived to be potentially effective. Last but not least, technical characteristics of transmissions were also used in assessing broadcasting-based propaganda (Elliston, 1999, p. 236). Iran stands out as another contemporary case that has received American propaganda messages and limited the practitioners’ access across decades. Throughout their practice, Americans relied a variety of tools to assess their effectiveness. Not unlike the Cuban case for instance, censorship was seen as a plausible assessment method. Voice of America’s programing toward the country was regularly jammed by the Soviets during the Cold War (Hixson, 1998). It is argued that the jamming practice was used to suggest ‘Russian fears that the broadcasts were working’ (Kisatsky, 1999, p. 177). Although it was not possible to poll any segments of the Iranian population, there were alternative areas to gauge audience reaction. Tabulation of radio receivers was used

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to assess audience outreach (Hixson, 1998). Listener mails were also seen as feedback mechanisms about the effectiveness of US propaganda (Hixson, 1998; Kisatsky, 1999). Even though these mechanisms were useful to evaluate whether messages reached their target audiences, they did not provide any insights on whether the audiences accepted the messages or not (Kisatsky, 1999). In the case of propaganda attempts surrounding the 1953 coup d’état in the country, practitioners followed a more ambitious approach and assessed the effectiveness of their messages in terms of behavioral changes (Roberts, 2012). Voting records in August 1953 elections, changes in local radio coverage to more closely align with American foreign policy choices, and overall support to the coup by Iranians were introduced as partial evidences for propaganda success (Roberts, 2012). Across both cases, we observe our initial conjecture that limited access requires unique and creative assessment tools at play. From auxiliary variables to non-random sampling, practitioners craft new devices that best fit the characteristics of the limited access context. The next section describes the context in the Korean peninsula by providing an account of post-war development and propaganda attempts of South Korea and North Korea.

INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS AND PROPAGANDA It is virtually impossible to give an account of modern Korean history without an appeal to propaganda as it has been a constant fact of life in both sides of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Following the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was freed from Japanese occupation. However, Koreans were not able to create one new independent state, which was divided into two zones at the 38th parallel, splitting the peninsula roughly in half. The United States and the Soviet Union occupied

respectively the southern and northern parts and finally established different types of governments, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), in 1948. Both Koreas claimed the entire peninsula as their land in their respective constitutions, not recognizing the other as a legitimate actor. North Korea started the Korean War in 1950 in an attempt to unify the two Koreas under communist leadership. Particularly during the Korean War (1950–1953), propaganda was an important component of the warfare (Kim & Haley, 2017). Traditionally, it is argued that psychological warfare plays a more important role in wars between same ethnicities compared with inter-ethnic wars (Hwang, 1995; Kim, 2008). Considering that there was almost no difference in terms of ethnicity, religion, culture, and language between the two Koreas, the competition for support of the Koreans meant earning legitimacy through ideas. Both the American-led UN forces on behalf of South Korea and North Korea utilized propaganda materials to get the upper hand in the psychological warfare. The United States was already experienced with psychological warfare because of its war against the Nazis in the World War II. The United States and UN focused more on short-term goals to win the mind and hearts of the Korean public on both sides of the border mainly via leaflets, while North Korea’s focus was on long-term goals to win support for the communist ideology mainly via newspapers and radio (Hwang, 1995; Kim 2008). During the Korean War, the number of leaflets by the US army is estimated to be around 2.5 billion (Chung, 2004, p. 95–96). Starting with the end of the Korean War in 1953, the North and South found themselves in need to not only to create a sense of community among its citizens through political communication but also to depict the other party in a less favorable light – either to each other or to the foreign audiences. Moreover, the Armistice Agreement of the Korean War was signed in 1953 without the

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participation of the South Korean government. A truce in the Korean War without a peace treaty had made the Korean Peninsula a potential war zone and had intensified tensions between the two sides through competition for security and propaganda. From the foundation of both countries until the end of Cold War, the two Koreas have shown existential antagonism (Armstrong, 2005) being threatened by the existence of one another. Propaganda vis-a-vis the public across the 38th parallel played an important role since the first day of division. In the following sections, we present a succinct historical overview of the region, focusing on the impacts of social, political, economic, and cultural developments on propaganda.

North Korea Since 1953 Since 1953, North Korea has pursued limited interaction with international society and primarily occupies the world agenda through its nuclear program. The country sought political stability and economic development through communist one-party dictatorship with the help of Russia and China shortly after the end of the war. It has been reflected as a country with a ‘ruinous brand of centrally controlled socialism’ (Oh & Hassig, 2010, p. 90). The North Korean political agenda, including its dominant ideology, is determined by the individual leader, rather than a discussion among the governing party (Jang et al., 2015, p. 43). Juche, self-reliance, was an idea brought by Kim Il-Sung (Park, 2002). With the introduction of this ideology into the constitution, the country pushed a new type of desirable citizen (Byman & Lind, 2010, p. 52). Espousing self-reliance, the ideology is observable across all segments and functions of society to the extent that it is likened to a religious belief rather than a political idea (Park, 2002). Songun – or military first – was similarly introduced by Kim Jong-Il (Suh, 2002). The North Korean administration has

been keen on disseminating this particular idea so that the country can ‘protect itself from its capitalist enemies’ (Byman & Lind, 2010, p. 52). Even during the Six-Party talks regarding its nuclear arsenal, North Korea always appealed to the idea of being independent ‘from any kind of western power or ideas’ (Jang, 2013, p. 199). The dominant ideologies are promoted through state-controlled media outlets to the citizens, establishing a stronger image of its leader and government (Jang et  al., 2015, p. 48). These media outlets would, more often than not, portray the United States, and other foreign powers including Japan as the aggressive actors causing disturbance in the region (Jang et al., 2015, p. 49). South Korea occupies an important theme in North Korean propaganda toward its citizens. Up until 1980s, the South was depicted as an economically backward country (Gabroussenko, 2011). Since then, the depictions have changed, probably based on the economic development of the South, into a conservatism theme which shows South Korea ‘through the images of ugly devastation and misery, which dehumanizing colonial modernization had allegedly brought to land’ (Gabroussenko, 2011, p. 41). South Korean governments are depicted as puppets of the American imperialists. Moreover, as North Korea’s economy was in better shape than South Korea until the mid-1970s (Ku, 2018), it started and had been more active in its cross-border propaganda after the war, aiming at a North-led Korean unification (Joo, 2016). With the end of Cold War and being surpassed by South Korea in terms of the economy, North Korean propaganda has taken a more defensive posture by trying to dominate and block South Korean loudspeaker broadcasts and targeting its own public rather than South Koreans (Joo, 2016). North Korean propaganda leaflets are seen in South Korean cities from time to time criticizing South Korean governments (particularly conservative ones) as puppets of the United States and showing North Korea as a benign supporter of unification (Byun, 2018;

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News1, 2017; Park, 2016). However, given South Korea’s ease of access to information freely and the South’s apparent superiority to the North in terms of economy, freedoms, and social life, North Korea’s propaganda leaflets appearing in South Korea are not effective (Park, 2016).

South Korea Since 1953 To the south of the DMZ, there was also a need to build a nation and disseminate a new national idea among citizens (Hong, 2011, p. 986). As part of the American anticommunism strategy during the Cold War, the South Korean government under President Syngman Rhee enacted the National Security Act to prevent anti-national activities and the spread of communism. Through American aid, South Korea began to integrate into the capitalist system (Bizhan, 2018). Prior to the Korean War in 1950, there was a wide range of guerrilla activities on the 38th parallel (Halliday, 1973). After the end of the war, the construction of a modern nation in South Korea must be understood in its own history and traditions and in its special relationship with the neighboring powers. Under the Cold War regime, South Korea has moved quickly from an underdeveloped authoritarian country to the current developed democratic state and achieved this in a compact manner. South Korea was placed at the forefront of the anticommunism expansion, in which South Korea has promoted a national identity and rapidly achieved national development and economic growth through American military and economic aid and state-led economic policies. After South Korea developed more rapidly and surpassed North Korea in almost every aspect, including GDP per capita, exports, technology, conventional military strength, diplomatic ties, and exchanges with foreign countries since the mid-1970s, South Korea became more confident in its position vis-àvis North Korea (Ayhan & Jang, 2019). The

end of the Cold War, on top of this newly emerged confidence, brought change to interKorean relations. The Roh Tae-Woo government normalized its relations with socialist regimes which have traditionally been allies of North Korea – an era known in South Korean foreign affairs as ‘Northern Policy’. The Roh Tae-Woo government legalized governmentsanctioned or approved exchanges between South and North Korea following its 7-7 Declaration. Particularly, since the progressive Kim Dae-Jung’s Sunshine Policy, South Korea welcomed and encouraged other countries’ diplomatic recognition of North Korea. While South Korean government propaganda toward North Korea was seen as an essential part of its warfare strategy when the two countries were very close in terms of development, with the widening gap as the South Korean economy took off, South Korea needed less propaganda to show its excellence to the people of North. The two Koreas agreed to halt propaganda against each other following engagement policies of progressive South Korean governments. In 2004, all loudspeaker broadcasting at the border was halted, only to be briefly restarted in 2015. The Panmunjom Declaration which was signed during the third inter-Korean summit, under newly elected progressive Moon Jae-In in South Korea, called for ending propaganda activities across the border once again. In summary, Korean relations have always had a strong propaganda component which was partially influenced by the relative social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of the countries. It can be argued that South Korea performed relatively better in the system battle against North Korea in the 1970s and ended the long-sustained military dictatorship through political participation by citizens in the late 1980s. The next section provides details on how we gathered data to describe the propaganda projects of non-state actors in South Korea and reconstructed the case narratives within the particular background discussed here.

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METHODOLOGY In order to present an inclusive picture of the South Korean practice, we structured our research as a case study. Based on the theoretical and historical context shared in the preceding sections, we introduce a narrative of how practitioners assess their work. We employ an ‘interpretive case study’ approach to explore alternative ways of linking an established theory and evidence based on specific historical cases (Lijphart, 1971, p. 692). Our aim is, ultimately, to uncover ‘patterns of invariance and constant association’ that are common to relatively small sets of cases (Ragin, 1987, p. 51). Thus, we simply explain why a specific historical event occurred rather than pursuing empirical generalization in any way through our research. The politically charged nature of our study and limited access issues require a relatively flexible access to the practitioners. In line with our case study methodology, we followed a convenience sampling approach (Gerring & Christenson, 2017). The propaganda projects, practitioners, and survey participants are selected due to their availability, interest in the project, and their reputation as practitioners (Koerber & McMichael, 2008). These data sources are used to construct a case narrative that shows the relationship between assumed causes and observed effects. In our case, our focus is on how limited access pushes the practitioners to devise novel methods to assess their propaganda projects. For our interviews, we planned to conduct five interviews with prominent activists who engage in propaganda activities vis-a-vis North Korea. The concept of ‘prominent activist’ does not have a set definition. For the purposes of our study, we sought information rich cases. Therefore, we selected the interviewees on the scale and frequency of their activities and the media exposure that they received. The interviews took place from May 25 to June 15, 2018 in Korean. Two interviews, with Lee Min-Bok, the head of Campaign for North

Korean In Direct Way, and Jung Gwang-Il,1 the head of No Chain, were conducted faceto-face and recorded following their consent. We conducted the interviews in public settings near the workplaces of the interviewees. The interviews took around 90 minutes. The third interviewee agreed only to an unrecorded phone interview which lasted 40 minutes. The latter also did not give his consent to his name being used. Therefore, he is referred to as Interviewee X here. All three interviews were semi-structured. All three activists that we have interviewed are defectors from North Korea who have settled in South Korea. The fourth and fifth interviews were dropped due to repeated scheduling conflicts. The research team saw these conflicts as an expression of hesitation to join the project given the sensitive nature of their practices. Therefore, we did not aggressively pursue these particular contacts. Instead, we sought opportunities to increase the number of interviewees through snowballing sampling. Yet, all three interviewees agreed that there were not others that were as active as the five individuals we contacted because of the high costs and risks associated with these propaganda activities. Therefore, we posit that despite the relatively small number of interviews, the accounts of these three practitioners portray a near-complete picture of the practice. In addition to the interviews, we analyzed the propaganda materials of these three activists for emerging themes. Through an inductive approach, we looked for main ideas and repeating messages across the documents (Bowen, 2009). Lee Min-Bok gave us his missionary and non-missionary leaflets. He further provided two texts suggesting why he began sending the balloons and best practices for making North Koreans believe the contents of the leaflets. Interviewee X provided us with 31 photos of his leaflet samples, contents of USBs, and technical details of his balloon-sending operations. Jung Gwang-Il on the other hand showed us the contents of SD cards during the interview rather than

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giving them to us suggesting that the contents change frequently. Finally, in order to triangulate the data with an alter-perception in addition to the ego-perception of the activists (Arts, 2001), we surveyed North Korean defectors in South Korea asking them about their perception of the effectiveness of the propaganda activities. Since a public opinion poll in North Korea is not feasible, the North Korean defectors in South Korea are the next best sample to provide us with this alter-perception. North Korean defectors, although a biased sample, are often used as the most, and sometimes only, available sample to study public opinion in North Korea (Jeong, 2005; Kim, 2012; Kwon, 2007, 2009; O’Carroll, 2014). We contacted 20 defector-related organizations or gatekeeper individuals to fill out and/or share our survey with other defectors. Due to the sensitivity of the topic and relative difficulty of finding defector respondents, we were able to get only 13 responses. All questions, except for demographic ones, used five-point Likert scale responses and inquired about the factors that motivated them to leave North Korea and their insights regarding the effectiveness of South Korean propaganda activities. Although far from being complete, our data gathering procedures are consistent with studies and practices in limited cases as discussed earlier in the chapter. The objective of our analysis is to present a coherent narrative of how South Korean propagandists assess the effectiveness of their campaigns. Our analysis primarily relied on the accounts gathered through interviews. The first two recorded interviews were transcribed. Together with the interview notes from Interviewee X, two of the authors carried an inductive analysis of the text and identified recurring themes and prominent arguments. The propaganda materials were used to assess the accuracy of the arguments made by the practitioners and to further detail the themes identified by the authors. Last, information gathered through

the defector survey was used to triangulate the sources used to reconstruct the case narratives.

FINDINGS: THE STORIES OF SOUTH KOREAN PRACTITIONERS Who are the South Korean practitioners? Before moving forward with what they do, we inquired about the ‘who’ aspect of their narrative, asking our interviewees to discuss their understanding of activism and activist. The main goal of the activists in South Korea engaging in propaganda activities in North Korea was to expose people to lives outside North Korea and to provide them with alternative facts. Even though interviewees presented this particular intermediate goal first, they also mentioned their ultimate goals as to make individuals defect from the country in the short-run and to destabilize the Kim regime in North Korea in the long-run. Jung Gwang-Il asserted that there were 700,000 North Korean soldiers near the border with South Korea and if they were to be exposed to leaflets, USBs and broadcasting coming from the South, it could mean the toppling of the regime in the North. Furthermore, he suggested that after being exposed to the information coming from outside, the North Korean youth could ask for change in their country. Interviewee X also sent pamphlets to North Korea encouraging North Koreans to protest against their government. On the other hand, Lee Min-Bok’s goals were more moderate asking North Koreans to change their lives by leaving the country like he did more than two decades ago. This particular claim was supported by the propaganda materials. Looking at the messages conveyed in these propaganda materials, we observed four main themes: daily life, politics, popular culture, and religion. Interviewee X argued for the importance of portraying the daily life and opportunities in South Korea. In a

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similar vein, Jung Gwang-Il produced videos of foreigners, third-party neutrals who have been to both South and North Korea, comparing the two Koreas’ streets, lifestyles, and farms. They also sent videos of ordinary lives of Europeans and Americans to North Korea, which showcased their reality rather than staged contents. In a two-page document where he explains ‘the ways to make North Koreans believe the contents of leaflets’, Lee Min-Bok argues that propaganda activities must begin with the familiar to eliminate the mistrust; then, one must seize the opportunity to make them ask questions about what they already know (Lee, n.d.). He encourages North Koreans to talk to the Chinese about South Korea. ‘You call China (Jungguk) heaven (cheonguk), right’ asks the leaflet, adding ‘then why do the Chinese go to South Korea to work or to get married’ (Lee, n.d.b)? It continues to ask if the South is living poorly and the North is living more prosperously, how did these ‘beggars’ open a tourist resort in Kumgang Mountain and an industrial complex in Kaesong where more than 50,000 North Koreans work (Lee, n.d)? The leaflets suggest the reader that one should go to China to check these facts through radio, the internet, and television, asking by the way, why you cannot use radio, the internet, and television in the so-called ‘strong and prosperous country’ (Lee, n.d). All interviewees discuss political events and politics to challenge the North Korean narratives of events in order to make North Korean citizens question their government. Lee Min-Bok’s leaflets raise questions about the Korean War regarding whether it was really started by the South as the North Korea’s official narrative suggests. Interviewee X challenges the Kim Il-Sung’s family tree through his news-article-like alternative facts. Jung Gwang-Il’s content includes ‘facts’ about why Kim Jung-Nam, the late half-brother of Kim Jong-Un, was killed. The latter also sends news related to inter-Korean relations, including a North Korean concert in Seoul,

which is not shown to the ordinary North Koreans. The most important reason for providing North Koreans with these ‘facts’ is defector-activists’ rightful conviction that information in North Korea is very much controlled by the government and ordinary North Koreans do not have access to these alternative facts. Lee Min-Bok suggests that the reason why North Korean leaflet propaganda toward South Korea cannot be as effective as vice versa is that South Korea is an open society where people can access any kind of information they want while this is not the case for North Koreans (Park, 2016). The third theme that emerged from the interviews and the propaganda contents is popular culture. Popular culture products, particularly South Korean and American films, TV shows, and music, are one way to expose and attract them to the outside world. Jung Gwang-Il and Interviewee X send SD cards and USBs to the North with such popular culture contents. Jung Gwang-Il prefers American films and dramas rather than Korean ones, since the latter might also give North Koreans a negative image of the life in the South. The video contents also include entertainment shows in South Korea and rather less Westernized pop music videos from the South. Interviewee X prefers South Korean shows and music. What is common to both is the belief that the good quality production of these pop culture products and the lifestyles that they showcase would be attractive to ordinary North Koreans, indeed more attractive than the political contents which might even backfire simply because of being labeled as propaganda as implied by both interviewees. In other words, apparent political neutrality of the pop culture contents is seen as effective for the expected outcome, which is making North Koreans question their lives in North Korea and potentially oppose the government or defect from the country. Another interesting finding in our interviews is that both Jung and Interviewee X also send South Korean goods, including snacks,

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rice, ramen, and even socks along with the SD cards and USBs to allure relatively poorer North Koreans to the contents of the propaganda materials. In the media interviews, practitioners talk about how one-dollar bills and small amounts of rice can supplement a North Korean individual’s life (Ham, 2018a, 2018b). These material incentives are seen by practitioners as a way to allure North Koreans to magnify the influence of their propaganda. According to Jung, the underlying assumption is that for North Koreans to stand up against their regime, first, their stomachs must be full which the rice and dollar bills are for; and second, they must know what is going on in the world which the USBs and leaflets are for (Ham, 2018a). The last theme that emerged from the interviews was the role of Christianity through these propaganda activities targeting the North. Lee Min-Bok sends two kinds of leaflets, one is more political and personal in its contents, and the other purely missionary. Jung Gwang-Il sends the Bible in e-book and audio-book formats. Interviewee X, on the other hand, claimed that his activities did not have connection with any religious groups. However, it should be noted that the packages he sends carry stickers that say ‘God loves you’. The media coverage of defectoractivists’ propaganda toward North Korea also clearly show the active presence and support of conservative churches in sending balloons and pets toward North Korea (Ham, 2018a). The defectors shared similar views about the content of materials. One question asked the respondents what had an influence in their decision to defect. The answer with highest weight was ‘I expected to live in a country with better economic life’, followed by ‘economic difficulties in North Korea’. When asked a hypothetical question of what would increase the likelihood of North Koreans’ defection, ‘experiencing extreme hunger and poverty’ was the most heavily weighted answer, followed by ‘exposure to South Korean popular culture’. In other words, defectors also argued that

South Korean popular culture products coming through the North Korean border were influential while leaflets coming from South Korea were not. Defectors and practitioners agree that a more neutral exposure to popular culture is an effective way to convince North Koreans to turn against the regime, while smuggling through the border is an effective way to do it. Smuggling the USBs – or other material – into North Korea required the creativity of practitioners who devised unique methods to disseminate their content as well as to argue for the effectiveness of their delivery. Lee Min-Bok and Interviewee X rely on hot air balloons whereas Jung Gwang-Il employs plastic bottles released to the sea to cross the border. While the former two rely on calculations of the wind, the latter used calculations of the tide to find the best launch times. The practitioners argued that around 30% of bottles reach North Korea based on their study of tides and water flows (Kwon, 2018). Parts of the bottles that did not reach their targets were found in the open sea, and endangering lives of animals such as sea turtles (Kim, 2018). In a separate media interview, Jung Gwang-Il also revealed that he uses GPS tracking devices to observe where his material reach (Mok, 2017). This particular point proved to be a substantial point of contention among the practitioners. Given the high costs associated with propaganda activities, these non-governmental groups rely on donations to continue their works. For donors, the channel – or how the messages and materials were sent to North Korea – seemed to be the ultimate deciding factor in the effectiveness of propaganda. Therefore, the group that managed to provide a coherent and compelling account of how their material reached the audiences in the North became more likely to receive donations. It should be noted that our interview protocol did not probe about the technical details of the delivery methods. However, the practitioners voluntarily provided detailed information across the board. Their willingness can be used to argue for the

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relative importance of their technical acumen in their work. The propaganda materials are not directed at a specific audience. When South Korean activists let their balloons fly – or their bottles swim –, their only expectation is to reach a North Korean. Although Jung Gwang-Il, as stated earlier in this paper, positioned the soldiers near the border as a plausible audience, his statements were more about the distance limitations of his methods, rather than a strategic audience choice. Yet, mistrust between the two societies is a constant obstacle. In an attempt to build trust with the readers of the propaganda leaflets, Lee Min-Bok gives all his contact information and his background, particularly the fact that he too is a North Korean. Interviewee X, on the other hand, discussed a cascading activation model. He argued that talking to neutrals – such as ethnic Koreans living in China or Central Asia – was his objective. He personally was not convinced by a propaganda material he saw. For him, the turning point was his exposure to a Koryoin – a name given to Koreans who have been in Soviet Union and CIS countries for almost a century – while serving in the military. Jung Gwang-Il also said in the interview that smuggling of South Korean and American popular culture products into the black market in which individuals voluntarily acquire them were more effective to expose North Koreans to the outside world in an exponential way. Yet, how do the practitioners know the effectiveness of their methods? How can they make sure, for instance, the material on a USB drive is read let alone changes someone opinion? The snippets we shared in the paragraphs above are predominantly based on the experiences of practitioners – either what they have gone through personally or what they heard from the defectors. The arguments are not necessarily based on a systematic assessment. None of the practitioners included in our study has carried out such a project. Yet, it is not due to the lack of knowledge. As argued above, the practitioners often

find themselves in need of arguing for the effectiveness of their methods. However, not unlike the experiences in Cuba and Iran, their access to data is limited. The vast majority of activists involved in propaganda vis-à-vis North Korea are North Korean defectors. Therefore, these practitioners’ confidence in their propaganda methods comes from being insiders, knowing the North Korean society, its regime, political climate, and the needs of its people. They want to create ‘second public opinion’ (Chang & Jeong, 2015, p. 135), a private discourse as opposed to the government’s official discourse. Various studies suggest that due to the changes in North Korean society, such alternative discourse is more prevalent as the majority of North Koreans have access to banned foreign goods and information which has a great impact on their lives (CSIS, 2017; Chang & Jeong, 2015; Jeong et  al., 2015). However, some studies show that North Koreans prefer interpersonal communication via their personal networks than mediated communication in their access to information coming from outside North Korea (Kwon, 2007, 2009). Natural word-ofmouth within the country is found to be more preferable than forced exposure to materials (Kwon, 2007, 2009). These findings are in line with Jung Gwang-Il’s idea of introducing popular culture and other videos into the black market, which then can find its way into the private discourses of North Koreans, helping form a second public opinion. Both Lee Min-Bok and Jung Gwang-Il suggested that they utilize censorship and reactions as a success criterion. The fact that the North Korean administration is irritated by the propaganda activities coming from the South was the best indicator of these activities’ effectiveness. They believe that the administration is aware of – and disturbed by – their activities as during inter-Korean meetings and agreements, including the most recent Panmunjom Declaration of 2018, one of the first issues being raised was stopping propaganda activities. Practitioners posit

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that if the North Korean regime is assertively asking them to stop, their methods must be influential enough to attract the officials’ attention. Lee Min-Bok says he received many death threats from the North, and is currently being protected by six rotating South Korean police officers, a fact that we also witnessed during our interview. Jung Gwang-Il drew a similar conclusion about his impact. As smuggling materials through the Chinese border became more expensive, he turned to using drones which would fly to the North where a contact was waiting for them. Chinese authorities raided their hideout and confiscated their material in 2016, following a tip from the North Koreans whose interest shows that the drone propaganda campaign was successful. An additional arena was defectors. Both Lee and Jung also suggested that the North Korean defector interviews show that many defectors chose to leave their country after being exposed to either propaganda leaflets or foreign pop culture products. This was another measure for their activities’ effectiveness. Interviewee X, on the other hand, suggested that he could not know the effectiveness of his activities and did not comment further on the assessment aspect.

LESSONS FROM THE KOREAN PENINSULA Our study of South Korean propaganda has confirmed our assumption that the established frameworks to study propaganda fall short of providing guidance given the limited access. Unsurprisingly, there are overlaps between previous limited access cases. Yet, two aspects of the case make the Korean experience unique. First, a complexity stems from the relationship between the two nations. In both the Cuba and Iran cases, the US stood as an outsider. Yet, with South Korea and North Korea, there is a shared history and culture among other traits. Second,

the contemporary nature of the case changes certain tools and platforms. The experience of the practitioners was illustrative in identifying what can and cannot be used for assessment. In this section, we re-evaluate the case narratives. The South Korean experience includes assessment on three levels. Although the literature discussed the impacts of propaganda on outcomes and processes, the limited access requires tweaks. We argue that the practitioners cannot look directly at the processes but rather consider two aspects of their messages to argue for their effectiveness: the content of their messages and the technical characteristics of the platform they are using. The outcomes, on the other hand, can only be indirect. The first level focuses on the practitioners’ capacity to produce messages and their credibility. The data within this perspective is gathered by engaging with the practitioners. Yet, two issues our study faced demonstrate important points to consider. First, funding sources have the potential to influence the capacity to produce messages as well as their content. In our case, the role of religion raised an important concern about message formation. We have observed that the religious overtones attracted the attention of religious organizations and increased the donations made to the activists. Given the fact that the practitioner suggested that there were not many activists who do propaganda activities vis-a-vis the North chiefly because of the high costs associated with these activities, a funding source might change the content. Besides religious donations, Lee Min-Bok suggested there were activists launching balloons to get more media attention and more donations in turn. Jung Gwang-Il claimed that some activists would come to his activities to have their pictures taken to suggest that they were also prominent activists, in turn to get donations themselves. Second, the credibility of the propagandists cannot be seen as devoid of context. The mistrust between the South and the North presented a challenge to establish

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credibility for the practitioners. Interviewee X argued that all of these propaganda activities could be ineffective due to the difficult of establishing credibility. Therefore, the first level of assessment needs to be supported by data source triangulation through contextual/background information and propaganda material in addition to engaging with practitioners. The second level looks at the technical capabilities of the platform. A precursor to successful behavioral change is message dissemination. A propaganda attempt cannot be successful if the target audiences are not exposed to the messages. Therefore, a propagandist can use their reach as a measure. In balloon propaganda, Lee Min-Bok takes pride in his engineering capacity arguing that his balloons, for which he holds a couple of patents, are the only ones that can reach regions beyond the border. Jeong Gwang-Il sends out bottles based on his calculations of tides – which come only twice a month. Interviewee X integrated timers to his balloons to assess delivery. Assessment at this level should include data compatible with the channels used, such as wind patterns for balloons and tide patterns for floating bottles. The third and last level includes indirect outcomes. As it is virtually impossible to assess the direct outcomes or changes in the audience behavior in limited access cases, the practitioners found auxiliary success variables. However, the lack of random sampling requires the practitioners to corroborate data from different resources. The mismatch we witnessed between the findings of our interviews and impressionistic survey better explains the need for corroboration. Jung Gwang-Il decided to use American popular culture items instead of Korean dramas based on an assumption that the former would be more effective. The respondents to our surveys argued that South Korean dramas were seen as more effective by defectors. Yet, it is not possible to generalize the results of our survey or Jung’s assumptions. A more accurate way to assess

the effectiveness of content is to include both types of data, as well as additional accounts of defectors and practitioners, and proxy variables for success. In our study, we found that practitioners use the viewpoint of the other to argue for such effects. As a successful propaganda attempt should make it impossible or at least difficult for the receiving part to achieve its own objectives, any reaction coming from the North Korean government is seen as success – ranging from death threats to raids.

CONCLUSION This chapter presented how South Korean practitioners assess the effectiveness of their campaigns to North Korea – an environment to which they have limited access. Our modest objective was to devise a framework that could encompass the creativity of practitioners. We used the practices of non-governmental actors originating in South Korea and directed at North Korea given the prominent role of propaganda in the history of the Peninsula and the relatively isolated situation of North Korea. Our study, despite its contributions, is not without its limitations. First and foremost, we realized that a study of contemporary propaganda practices is a sensitive endeavor. With its political nature and imaginative delivery methods, it is a challenging task to solicit uncut responses from any of the participants. Second, not all our invited participants – practitioners and defectors in our survey alike – was excited about our study. Therefore, our findings are clouded by a self-selection bias. However, we believe such volunteer behavior – or lack thereof – is an obstacle likely to be faced by other researchers and practitioners. Yet, it still should be acknowledged as a limitation. Third, our data tri­ angulation lacked an important source – information coming from the audience. We could not use any data points from North

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Korea to corroborate our findings. The very reason that started the research project, limited access, remains as a limitation. Consequently, we present our findings as one way to study propaganda, rather than the only or even the most effective way. Our model simply presents an unprecedented way of thinking. We shared our findings as a three-level assessment framework: content, platform, indirect outcomes. The framework has implications both for the study of propaganda and practitioners. From the perspective of propaganda studies, the relative importance of this chapter is based on its articulation that encourages matching the creativity of practitioners. In other words, our framework lays out a way to study propaganda campaigns in which traditional theories and models cannot be used due to access issues. For practitioners, the case presented might provide novel approaches to message delivery and assessment. Similarly, the model can be used to design, execute, and assess campaigns. The model is likely to benefit from future studies that integrate additional cases with limited control of media platforms. In North Korea, government control over media comes close to a complete blackout. In limited control cases where a government does not necessarily block all media platforms but controls the content, it might be easier to gather audience perception data and improve the model. Moreover, the history of North–South relations creates an intriguing dynamic between the two societies based on a tale of shared history and mutual mistrust. Therefore, the model can be improved by studies focusing on cases in which practitioner and target countries have different prior relations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was partially supported by the 2018 Korea Foundation Support for PolicyOriented Research Programme.

Note 1  Despite the sensitive nature of their work, most North Korean defector-activists appear on South Korean and foreign media using their real names. In our interviews with three activists, two suggested that we use their real names. Since these are elite interviews which are also supplemented with their other interviews in the media, we use Lee Min-Bok and Jung Kwang-Il’s real names. On the other hand, the third interviewee asked to be anonymous, hence referred to as Interviewee X here.

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14 Towards the Measurement of Islamist Propaganda Effectiveness: A Marketing Perspective Paul Baines and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

INTRODUCTION UK Security Services are conducting around 500 active investigations with around 3,000 people under direct surveillance and the terrorist threat is increasing (Farmer, 2017). By the year ending September 2016, a total of 401 people had been convicted since 9/11 of terrorism related offences in Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) (Home Office, 2017). In the US in 2017, in evidence provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Brian Jenkins of RAND Corporation outlined how, by his calculation, there had been 80 plots since 9/11 in the US ‘motivated by Jihadist ideology’ (Jenkins, 2017). More recently, Sayfullo Saipov, who killed eight New Yorkers in a spree killing incident using a pickup truck on October 31, 2017, was apparently inspired to commit mass murder after watching hours of Daesh snuff videos on his smartphone, according to a federal prosecutor (Whitehouse, 2017). We may hypothesize that Internet-delivered

propaganda plays some role in the terrorist’s radicalization, and if not in their radicalization, in their call for others to follow what they have, or would have, done. Nevertheless, internet-based propaganda is not ipso facto sufficiently persuasive to generate terrorist recruits (Neumann, 2008). This paper explores what effect propaganda might have, and how Western security services might move towards a system of measuring the effectiveness of Islamist terrorist propaganda,1 based on insights from marketing. With Sunni Islamist terrorist groups (especially Daesh, Al-Qaeda, and its regional variants), one is dealing with a cult whose chief form of proselytization is via cyberspace propaganda (including social media), proliferated by what Daesh call the ‘media mujahidin’. Here, we define propaganda – using Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell’s interpretation – as ‘the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of

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the propagandist’ (Jowett and O’Donnell, 2012). But, cyberspace propaganda is not merely another instrument of influence, it is the essence of these organizations (Dearden, 2017a), particularly as they lose territory as Al-Qaeda did in Afghanistan and Daesh has in Iraq and Syria. The role of propaganda is multifaceted: to recruit new fighters to serve in theaters of war, to inspire homegrown attacks, to provide terrorist attack know-how (i.e. by acting as ‘virtual training camps’), to recruit funders, to recruit fighters’ wives (a Daesh variant), to terrorize local populations, and to sap the will of, and goad, Western governments. Every time a new terrorist attack occurs in a Western country, Daesh claim responsibility; although frequently these attacks are more inspired by jihadist ideology than being centrally directed and claims of responsibility may be dubious (Ochab, 2017). A key question arises: How influential is propaganda in encouraging terrorist activity? A recent UN study suggests propaganda acts to reinforce, rather than create, a sense of grievance (Dearden, 2017b).2 Nevertheless, Daesh – the deadliest terrorist group of 2016 according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (Tracy, 2017) – managed to attract a total of over 40,000 foreign fighters and there is no formal explanation as to why some countries supplied so many, and others so few. Indonesia, for example, is 90% Muslim with a population of around 261 million, and yet it supplied only around 400 foreign fighters compared with the UK, which supplied around 850.3 We postulate that propaganda played an important role here, although we also acknowledge that much propaganda was developed in English as opposed to Bahasa Indonesia. An important reason why Daesh’s propaganda was initially so successful is because it had gained command of a huge swathe of Syria and Iraq with millions of people under its yoke. To cement its advantage, Daesh resurrected the ‘caliphate’ and an ‘Islamic State’. The fantasy of a new beginning was simply

irresistible to many, and was made more so by propaganda depicting an ideal state for wives and fighters alike.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM SPACE Several factors impinge on the problem of measuring terrorist propaganda effectiveness. These include barriers to measuring effectiveness, deciding on measures of effectiveness, determining which methodologies to use to research the measurement of effectiveness of terrorist propaganda, understanding how fear appeals work (the dominant persuasive mechanism in terrorist messaging), understanding the effect of terrorist leaders, understanding the terrorist group’s center of gravity,4 and determining how all of these factors impact on the stages of terrorist recruitment (which we call the recruitment funnel). We consider each of these areas in brief below (see Figure 14.1 for a rich picture representation of the problem space).

Barriers Four key elements create difficulties in the measurement of propaganda effectiveness. The first of these is the difficulty that rests in defining propaganda. Part of the problem of measuring terrorist propaganda effectiveness relates to what we mean by ‘effectiveness’. Whilst military practitioners distinguish between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness, commercial practitioners tend to evaluate their advertising campaigns more holistically on the basis of (in decreasing importance): sales uplift, impressions (i.e. how many times an ad is viewed), reach and frequency (the number of people exposed to the message and the number of times each person receives the message), social media engagement (e.g. Twitter retweets),5

Figure 14.1  A rich picture of the terrorist propaganda effectiveness measurement space

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click-through rates on websites, conversions (undertakes a desired action), responses in customer surveys, viewability (i.e. only ads that are seen by viewers), brand awareness measures, bounce rates (i.e. the proportion of viewers who leave a website after entering without viewing other pages on the site), cost per click (CPC, i.e. the cost per online ad viewed), increased footfall (either to a website or to a retail outlet), brand uplift (e.g. measuring initial awareness to final conversion: on YouTube this might be via views, watch time, shares, and comments), net promoter score measurement (i.e. how likely people are to refer others to a company), and attribution modeling (i.e. measuring the impact of communication activity on turnover, profit, customer retention, and volume sales) (Econsultancy/ResearchNow, 2017). Another barrier to measuring propaganda effectiveness lies in the cognitive clutter – a fog – that exists in the propaganda battlespace. Ellul, the great French propaganda theorist, is ambivalent about propaganda’s actual effectiveness (Ellul, 1965). He explains the conflictual process problem, where there are many propagandas struggling against each other for supremacy. The task therefore becomes one of how to disaggregate the effect of one from the other. The question arises as to how we determine whether or not it was the Jihadi clip seen on YouTube, a contact from a foreign fighter via Telegram, or the copies of Dabiq or Inspire read on the dark web, or some combination of all of these that exerted the most persuasive effect. Propaganda can be both formal (i.e. centrally directed) and informal (disseminated through word-of-mouth online or offline by adherents). Ellul disparages the notion that propaganda manifests its impact in ‘clear, conscious opinions’, directly contradicting the idea that the propagandee responds according to the will of the propagandist’s slogans – the now discredited and so-called ‘hypodermic needle model’6 favored by Harold Lasswell (Lasswell, 1927). One concern is visibility. All propaganda today,

not just social marketing/advertising, has to ­penetrate a barrier of cognitive clutter, the sheer amount of messages with which people are bombarded on a daily basis. Moreover, an essential problem in assessing the effectiveness of all social messaging, and propaganda particularly, is the distinction between tone and message: a text gives a message, but it also connotes tone, and the control of tone is often elusive. This can give messages an unintended reading. Tone is created by the paralanguage, the non-linguistic forms of meaning such as color, print style, and spacing. Hence, symbolization in messaging has a controlled but also a non-controlled element. Meaning is negotiated in the semiotic process and what is encoded is not necessarily what is decoded7. We turn to the process of measuring propaganda effectiveness next.

Methodologies for Measuring Propaganda Effectiveness There have been a number of approaches designed for use in evaluating the effectiveness of propaganda. One common process used in US and NATO military doctrine is the SCAME method (Department of the Army, 2008), which requires analysis of the following: • Source – Who is the communicator and what credibility and influence, if any, do they have? • Content – What is the nature of this and what are its key lines of persuasion? Are messages overt or covert? • Audience – Are different messages aimed at different audience segments? If so, which ones and with which messages? • Media – What channels are the communicators using, what are their special features, and to what types of audience do these media generally appeal? • Effects – Are these message of performance (e.g. number of people reached, frequency of communication?) or are these messages of effect (e.g. foreign fighters generated). Are these effects advertent or inadvertent?

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This method is useful in evaluating specific propaganda materials or campaigns and in providing a holistic qualitative overview of that messaging. To probe a potential causal link between propaganda and radicalization, one approach would be to conduct systematic content analysis of terrorism offenders’ media usage online, together with the same systematic content analysis of non-offender’s message usage online (the control) in a casecontrol study. Such an approach is frequently used in epidemiology to identify risk factors which cause a disease. Social media content analysis (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) can also be used to evaluate terrorist group effectiveness. It is particularly helpful in identifying: • How messages, including rumors, disseminate through social networks. For example, analysis of Twitter during the 2011 London riots helped the (London) Metropolitan Police Service to understand public reaction to the riots (Procter, 2017). • Which social media users influence the most followers. • The sentiment displayed in the messages. • Where users are located (if location tags are turned on) and collecting users’ posts via geofencing techniques. • With tweet analysis, we can discover message origins, scale of distribution, targets for distribution, and crucially, message content, looking at what kinds of messages succeed and what kinds fail, including the language of the message, how vivid is it, how violent is it, as well as the nature of the content itself – is it purely abusive, does it exhort to action, what message appeals does it contain (e.g. humor, fear, guilt, religious)? • Non-public social media data for specific respondents by ‘catfishing’ (i.e. setting up fake accounts to lure adversaries to connect).8

Depth interviews can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of terrorist communications by undertaking interviews with the following groups: • Offenders – Liebling and Straub talk about how in interviews with terrorism offenders, examples of prisoner radicalization tended to be indirect

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(i.e. something that happened to somebody else) (Liebling and Straub, 2012). Interviews conducted with former jihadists might help to determine the role that propaganda played in energizing latent sympathy into violent action. There could also be a specialist study of incarcerated jihadists and their personal narratives, specifically with the intent of surfacing the role of online propaganda in their radicalization or a study of jihadists returned from Syria and Iraq who have not faced imprisonment or who have been rehabilitated. • General population – when a topic is particularly sensitive, or when focus groups are not effective (perhaps because one person such as a village elder dominates conversation), depth interviews are preferred. Respondents could be asked about a range of issues individually to gauge, for example, their use of media, their sympathies for terrorism causes, and so on. • Mullahs – interviews with Mullahs or other community leaders could provide insight into the theological arguments that terrorist groups are using and their effectiveness.

Focus groups can be used to: • Test the wording, imagery, sound to be used in the messaging in counter-terrorism communication campaigns. • Evaluate the effectiveness of adversary propaganda campaigns by showing adversary messaging to selected target audience segments.9

Netnographic methods can also be used to evaluate terrorist propaganda. The method was originally developed by marketing academic, Robert Kozinets,10 to monitor and research online communities. In relation to evaluating terrorist propaganda, netnography might be used to survey terrorist chatrooms and other online spaces, particularly in the dark web. Weimann argues that the dark web is being used to spread propaganda as well as raise funds, organize attacks, purchase explosive and firearms, and other activities (Weimann, 2016). Content analysis of member discussions could highlight particular themes of discussion, particularly influential sources, as well as intended attack plans and the modus operandi that terrorist groups

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intend to inspire in their adherents, including ‘lone wolf’ attackers. Finally, another useful method for evaluating propaganda is semiotic analysis. This approach adopts an outside-in perspective by evaluating how the communication fits within the cultural milieu in which it is operating.11 This method has previously been used to analyze al-Qaeda propaganda by evaluating the aural, linguistic, and visual signs contained within the communication (Baines and O’Shaughnessy, 2014). Another methodological possibility is to track how Islamist propaganda videos are disseminated through the various channels in which they travel over time. Of particular relevance would be to analyze how they are posted and shared (retweeted on Twitter, uploaded and shared on YouTube, on their own channel on Telegram, etc.), including in what countries, and by quantifying the responses to them and categorizing them based on any expressions of interest in being recruited. Some thought would need to be given to the ethical implications of such a study.

Measures of Effectiveness In the measurement of effectiveness, it is necessary to identify specific measures. These could be many and various but principal amongst these measures might be the following: • The number of foreign fighters (and members of the organization more generally): added measures include the speed of recruitment, the absolute number, and the number recruited as a percentage of the population or a relevant sub-population. • Proxy measures might include the quality of the recruits (e.g. the nature of their skills) and the number of Islamist-inspired attacks and where those attacks have taken place (e.g. US, Europe, elsewhere). • Propaganda of the deed measures might include whether an attack and its replay through propaganda is generating polarization in society (as measured in opinion polls), the public response

to the attack and any security deployment (measures might include social media content analysis, press commentary, opinion polls), and the symbolism of the target (i.e. the extent to which it indicates a ‘virtuoso’ performance, which projects the terrorist group’s ubiquity or ability to hit anywhere, measured on a subjective basis). • Sympathy for the cause: measured in terms of whether or not this is active, latent, or noncommittal (which we regard as a form of sympathy in itself) and determined via opinion polls (see Vignette 1). One aim of terrorist propaganda aimed at the West is not merely to solidify the basis of Muslim support or gain recruits, it is also to undermine the Western assertion of military power by attacking the West’s soft underbelly, liberal and leftist opinion, persuading them that military aggression is futile, and thereby strengthening opposition to Western government actions (military or otherwise). For some idea of how to evaluate sympathy for the cause, see Vignette 14.1.

Vignette 14.1: Sympathy for the Cause In a YouTube video on Aaj Tak Live – a mainstream Indian Hindi TV news channel – entitled ‘Vishesh: Hafiz Saeed, mastermind of 26/11 terror attack’, the news report effectively functions as propaganda. It was uploaded on July 6, 2014, but by November 3, 2017, it had received over 114,000 views, receiving 172 likes, 72 dislikes, and had attracted 126 comments, many of which expressed support for the terrorist and to which names and photographs were attached, making these supporters readily identifiable. Supportive comments included: ‘fuck indain (sic) men dogs’, ‘hafiz saeed is a freedom fighter of azad kashmir from bloody indians’, ‘Good job saeed’, ‘Hafiz saeed is the hero of Pakistan & shame on Indian army’, and many more. TV news reports like these, though not in themselves propaganda, do the work of the propagandist. The comments section of this news report demonstrates a significant number of people supported the

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terrorist and were prepared to make this support public. The high viewing figures tell us something about the attention-getting capability of news reports. Mainstream media serves a purpose in terrorist arousal. Thus, the press itself becomes a channel of propaganda, albeit unwittingly. Radicalization can thereby happen without the intervention of orthodox propaganda processes (e.g. via closed internet chatrooms as per al-Qaeda of yesteryear or on the dark web or in peer-topeer channels in the modern environment). Mass media is an important propaganda channel which reaches everybody. Thus, we propose that the analysis of readers’ comments in response to reports of terrorist activity in media would be a useful activity in detecting sympathy for a cause. Such media analysis should be in countries with a significant level of pre-existing radicalization (e.g. Pakistan, Yemen). Furthermore, this approach allows the identification of people who are either already radicalized or in danger of being radicalized. External Stimuli

Message Components Self-efficacy Response efficacy Susceptibility Severity

Fear Appeal Use Fear-elicitation is the principal motivation for much propaganda activity; that is, terrorists seek to strike terror into their enemies. Daesh took a step beyond al-Qaeda’s approach in their pursuit of the doctrine of the management of savagery, namely the extreme use of violence to subjugate the enemy and the filming of that violence for propaganda purposes. This considered strategy was designed to ensure the region selected for its use, namely Iraq and later Syria, would fall into chaos and in the power vacuum ruins, a Caliphate could rise phoenix-like from the ashes.12 Key questions include does it really work and do target audience segments resist the fear appeal? To illustrate how the fear appeal operates, we apply the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) – see Figure 14.2. This model was used because previous fear appeal models over-emphasised rational versus emotional thinking in fear appeal scenarios

Message Processing (1st and 2nd Appraisals)

Outcomes

Protection Motivation

Perceived Efficacy

(Self-efficacy Response efficacy)

Danger Control

Feedback loop

Fear

PERCEIVED THREAT (Susceptibility Severity)

Defensive Motivation

No threat perceived (No response)

Individual Differences

Figure 14.2  The Extended Parallel Response Model Source: Witte (1992).

Message Acceptance

Process

Message Rejection

Fear Control

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(Witte, 1992). The model suggests that when we receive a fear appeal message, it contains four properties: i) the severity of the threat, ii) a statement about the susceptibility of the subject to the threat, and a proposed course of action to respond to the threat which implies a degree of iii) response efficacy and iv) subject (self-) efficacy. The source’s fear appeal message assumes that subjects receiving the message can avoid the threat outlined by following what the communicator suggests (response efficacy) and that the communicator believes the subject is able to affect that course of action (self-efficacy). However, just because someone says something does not mean we believe it. So, once the subject receives the source’s message, they evaluate for themselves what the severity of the message is, how susceptible they are to the threat, how efficient the response suggested is, and whether they are able to undertake the suggested course of action. If they perceive a threat to be low, they act no further on the message as it is not perceived to be persuasive. If the perceived threat and the perceived efficacy of the message are rated highly, subjects seek to control the danger by adopting the message instructions. Here, whilst fear is important and feeds back into evaluations of perceived threat and perceived efficacy, it does not moderate the rational responses to either protection motivation (i.e. acceptance of the message instructions) or defensive motivation (i.e. fear control, by denial, avoidance or mastery of the message). Where subjects have low self-efficacy, therefore consider themselves incapable of following the advocated course of action, or feel that the threat is unavoidable, they reduce their fear via a defensive motivation to reject the message. This process might also occur via psychological reactance.13 Where there are high levels of perceived threat but subjects have low levels of perceived efficacy, this can lead to subjects adopting the opposite course of action to that advocated in the message (Witte, 2017). The EPPM distinguishes between adaptive (message acceptance) and

maladaptive (message rejection) responses. This model is useful because it can be used to measure the effectiveness of terrorist fear appeals by evaluating how target audiences respond to the messages based on perceived efficacy and perceived threat levels (see also Chapter 21). Recent research on the topic of fear appeal use suggests that there is a positive linear relationship between fear intensity (how fearful the message makes the subject) and persuasiveness (LaTour and Rotfeld, 1997). A metaanalytic study of fear appeal research (Witte and Allen, 2000) confirms that the greater the intensity of the fear appeal, the more attitude, intention, and behavior is directed towards that advocated in the message. However, compliance with the message does depend on the importance of the issue advocated, whether or not the message indicates a route to reduce fear, and whether or not subjects believe themselves able to behaviorally comply with the messages. Other individual differences also impact on the efficacy of the message. For example, teenagers are less susceptible to fear appeal messages (LaTour and Rotfeld, 2000), women more susceptible (Samu and Bhatnagar, 2008), and those with less self-esteem more persuadable (Higbee, 1969), amongst other traits. To see how the model can be applied, see Vignette 14.2.

Vignette 14.2: Terrorist Group Use of the Fear Appeal In 2016, Boko Haram, based in north-east Nigeria, returned to using ‘cash loans’ to recruit members to spy on security forces for them. The cash loan tactic follows previous Boko Haram approaches such as attacks on schools and the kidnapping of girls. How do ‘cash loans’ work as a recruiting tactic? In psychology, reciprocity is a powerful mechanism (Cialdini, 2007). Most of us can relate to the idea that if we receive something from someone, we feel a need to ‘return the favor’ and are likely to do so. But, in this case,

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there is also an added dimension. Refusing a cash loan from Boko Haram is likely to result in death. So, the group is using the ‘fear appeal’. Fear appeal is the practice where an offer is made and the only alternative to accepting it is serious danger, akin to the Italian mafia making ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The way to avoid the threat of death and potentially even long-term abuse against the victim’s family, is to accept the loan. This is adaptive behavior to mitigate the threat, or, danger control. Rejection of the offer requires fear control. By offering ‘cash loans’, Boko Haram can also play on being an alternative to government and ‘looking after’ their members, something they particularly focus on in their messaging. In another example of fear appeal use, Daesh used an atrocity video, the ‘Clanging of the Swords IV’ (a feature length film produced by alFurqan media), depicting the mass murder of Daesh enemies using the production values of video games such as Grand Theft Auto and the Police Camera Action! series. They also encouraged thousands of their followers to install an app ‘The Dawn of Glad Tidings’ allowing Daesh to disseminate messages to others in their network (including ‘Swords IV’, other gory images, and news of Daesh’s military successes to swamp social media). All this messaging went viral and damaged Iraq army morale before Daesh assaulted Mosul with only 800 soldiers, ranged against two divisions of Iraqi army personnel (about 30,000 soldiers). Despite their overwhelming numbers, the demoralized Iraqi army turned and fled. Saturation levels of tweeting do give the impression of a massive movement: that is to say with tens of thousands of tweets being created and passed along, Daesh project an image of a vast organization with an army of followers. Propaganda thus helped Daesh overturn overwhelming odds (Kingsley, 2017). They went on to take a further three cities (including Deir el Zour and Tikrit) in fairly short order immediately afterwards (Chulov, Hawramy and Ackerman, 2014).

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The Leadership Effect The credibility of the message source also impacts on message effectiveness, in particular whether a propaganda spokesperson is seen as credible, expert, and trustworthy (Hovland, Janis and Kelley, 1953). Al-Qaeda videos were notable for proclamations from the likes of influential and sometimes charismatic spokespersons, who acted as chief ideologues (and ultimately as brand custodians), such as Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Americanborn, Adam Gadahn. Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American, for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and, more recently, Ahmad Abousamra, a Syrian-American, who played a leading role in Daesh’s propaganda operation and edited its magazines, Dabiq and later Rumiyah (Cruickshank, 2017). After 2014, Daesh represented a real threat to al-Qaeda, in the sense of attracting its would-be recruits and famously the two organizations split as al-Zawahiri castigated Daesh over its propaganda strategy as recently as January 2017 over ‘exceeding the limits of extremism’ (Dearden, 2017c). But, not all Daesh output is about violence and its glorification. Much of it attempts to project its credibility as a territorial government. This has distinguished Daesh from al-Qaeda which was only ever a guerilla group. Daesh has innovated the process of message dissemination by stressing multichannel platform use including Twitter, Facebook, peer-to-peer applications like Telegram and Surespot, content-sharing sites like JustPaste.it, and by decentralizing its media operations (Koerner, 2017). A demonstration of the importance of leadership on recruitment was displayed by al-Nusra Front’s (an al-Qaeda-affiliate), Abdallah al-Muhaysini, who launched a campaign to recruit 3,000 child soldiers to fight in Syria (Anon., 2017). The campaign, dubbed ‘Go Forth!’ was supported by highway billboards and posters, social media, and cash payments of between US$100 and US$150. An antirecruitment campaign ‘Children not soldiers’ documented at least 500 child soldiers had

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been recruited by ‘Go Forth!’ within the first month (Ali and Schuster, 2016). Leadership can therefore serve as a persuasive recruiting tool, serving to increase the number of followers (see Vignette 14.3).

Vignette 14.3: The Allure of Sally Jones One exemplar of leadership was the British jihadist, Sally-Anne Jones (also known as Umm Hussein al-Britaniyah and Sakinah Hussein), who served to increase the recruitment of Western women to Daesh. Dubbed a ‘white widow’, she was the wife of jihadist hacker, Junaid Hussain (killed in a drone strike in 2015) and leader of the ‘Anwar Al-Awlaki’ battalion, an all-female wing training European female recruits (‘muhajirat’) in weapons-handling and suicide mission attack planning. She is thought to have recruited dozens of women to Daesh before her social media accounts were shut down. Jones had used her Twitter account to release incendiary statements defending the group’s beheadings and threatening to undertake these herself (Hughes, 2016). At one point, she tweeted the address of US Navy Seal, Robert O’Neill (the man who fired the fatal shot at Bin Laden), exhorting Daesh and al-Qaeda supporters to kill him (Lawler, 2015). Jones was purportedly killed in a US drone strike in June 2017.

The Center of Gravity An important concept in military strategy is the Clausewitzian notion of center of gravity, a critical capability which underpins a military organization’s modus operandi and operational effectiveness. Islamist terrorist groups operate on the basis that the West’s center of gravity is mainstream media. Consequently, Al-Qaeda has made crude efforts to influence elections in the past. In a propaganda video, Bin Laden threatened ‘prompt and severe actions’ against

Spain for participating in the War in Iraq in 2003 and the Madrid bombings occurred in March three days before the Spanish general election. The incumbent government’s rush to erroneously blame ETA, a Spanish terrorist group, the poor state of the economy, and perhaps the failure to stop the terrorist attack all led to the surprise election of the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party promptly pulled its 1,300 Spanish troops out of Iraq. Other examples of al-Qaeda attempts to influence elections include threats made in propaganda videos prior to elections in the US in 2004, Pakistan in 2007, and Germany in 2008. Al-Qaeda’s standard line of argument within these videos was to argue that Western troops were aggressors illegally operating in Muslim lands and that if they did not leave, then Muslims had a duty, outlined in warped theological versions of the Hadith and using passages from the Qur’an, to kill Western citizens. It is highly unlikely that al-Qaeda ever thought they could influence Western elections; rather, it is more likely that they sought to spoil elections (a symbolic target) and maximize the publicity generated at a time of heightened media fervor. More recently, it is not inconceivable that the Daesh attack on Paris in April 2017 was an attempt to influence the French Presidential in favor of Le Pen, to create an uprising amongst France’s substantial Muslim population by encouraging ‘lone wolf’ attacks, and to gain media attention. Such media attention enables self-radicalization amongst adherents who do not have links to Islamist terrorist groups directly. One consequence of Islamist targeting of main­ stream media is that Western television channels and newspapers (and their online versions) have inadvertently become channels of terrorist propaganda even if they are not recognized as such. The specific contribution of mainstream media has been to showcase and hyperventilate terrorist events, whether these be attacks in the West or atrocities in the Middle East. To bring together marketing, propaganda, and the measurement of effectiveness, we consider how Islamist propaganda might be

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used at different stages of terrorist recruitment (using an adapted version of the ‘marketing funnel’ (Singh, 2017)). We consider this topic next.

DISCUSSION: MEASURING PROPAGANDA EFFECTIVENESS VIA THE RECRUITMENT FUNNEL Propaganda plays a different role at different points in the terrorist recruitment process. We can see the process of recruitment moving from paying attention to the message after being exposed to it, it persuading or influencing someone, that leading to engagement with the new (Islamist) cause, and this leading onto action for/conversion to the Islamist cause. Propaganda plays an important role in leading the would-be recruit towards a more restricted set of ideological views, by appealing to

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people’s existing prejudices (hence they display motivated reasoning to believe the messages they see/hear), which engenders an evernarrowing Weltanschauung towards ever more extreme views/attitudes. This in turn leads to alienation and a sense of victimhood, and onto extreme action. This process is represented by the funnel element in Figure 14.3. In our model, which we focus around online propaganda – because that is the dominant form of Islamist propaganda – we also identify how the effectiveness of terrorist propaganda might be measured for each recruitment stage, using appropriate social media metrics. The model is discussed in more detail below.

Attention/Exposure Measuring attention-getting is the easiest metric to acquire. This is often really all the advertising industry understands about making

Figure 14.3  Stages of terrorist recruitment with associated social media metrics

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an impact, particularly when measuring the effectiveness of offline marketing. Viewings of jihadist media such as Dabiq, the Daesh magazine and analysis of the extent of Twitter dissemination of Daesh and al-Qaeda messaging would be examples here. Exposure can also be measured by the number of followers/ fan/subscribers to different platforms hosting jihadi content and ‘brand mentions’ (such as when an adherent discusses Daesh in a tweet or in a blog post for example). Videos that go viral particularly demonstrate effectiveness in gaining exposure. Consider the Joseph Kony film (Warman, 2012) which had generated around 102 million views by November 2017 and made the Ugandan warlord notorious but had no impact on the campaign to bring him to justice.

Persuasion/Influence Daesh engage in a very personal approach to persuasion, a kind of bespoke tailoring, where they approach potential recruits online on a one-to-one basis in an attempt to seduce them to join, giving them instructions about what to do, how to reach Daesh held areas or alternatively how to plan attacks on their own in their home country. A huge amount of resource is devoted to this task. Metrics associated with this stage of recruitment might include ‘share of voice’ – a quantitative measure which would be particularly useful in determining how attractive different terrorist groups are to different adherents, in a similar way as a consumer might decide amongst which supermarket brands to shop at. Sentiment analysis (positive/negative/ neutral) of the content of terrorist group adherent’s social media feeds also indicates the extent to which they have been persuaded or influenced by a particular brand. Influencer’s reports, such as Radian 6 or Klout, analyze what is being said by who. These platforms are useful in helping to identify influentials. This second stage is likely

the most important of all, representing the stage at which countermeasures should be most focused.

Engagement This stage of recruitment is the stage in which the would-be jihadist starts to actively seek out terrorist group content and to share that content with others. Sharing is nevertheless a crude measure because one might share an item because you want others to see it rather than because you find it persuasive or agree with it. In the case of Daesh, some people might share jihadi content because they find it so appalling. Useful metrics include clicksthrough on suggested social media links, retweets and shares of jihadi content, @replies on Twitter, wall posts on jihadi blog forums, and both positive and negative comments ascertained through sentiment analysis. Importantly, tracking the sentiment of a particular user’s postings can give an insight into any one individual’s radicalization process, and deradicalization (depending on the sentiment of the content).

Action/Conversion The final stage is recruitment, where people actively join the organization, to fight for it either in the homeland or by going abroad, or at least to work for it in some kind of service capacity such as fundraising. At this stage, the process of socialization is likely to be direct personal solicitation from a terrorist organization itself. One cannot overestimate the importance of secret channels of communication with individual targets (e.g. via Telegram or via ‘meets’ in the dark web). Indeed, one could compare it with the importance of personal selling in modern and classical marketing. The initiative to ‘hook up’ may come from either the would-be recruit or the recruiter, but the signs that someone is

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ripe for recruiting may be evident from the content of their social media postings. However, law enforcement authorities do need to move quickly because the exchange may disappear in a cloak of invisibility, as the transaction transfers to specialist peerto-peer media like Telegram. A definitive understanding of how terrorists progress through this stage should come from examining the computer systems of convicted, killed, or repenting terrorists. Our suspicion is that in general such devices would contain evidence of extensive exposure to terrorist propaganda, which if mapped over time, might yield interesting patterns of radicalization. Other metrics which indicate a wouldbe terrorist is moving towards the action/ conversion stage include content downloads, online donations, know-how video views, and webinar or online jihadi training events. For example, anonymous has reportedly launched an online camp in the dark web to train hacktivists in the battle against Daesh (Halkon, 2016).

POLICY IMPLICATIONS: REDUCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TERRORIST PROPAGANDA Whilst much counter-terrorism effort should aim to focus on shutting down centrally directed efforts, new approaches must also be found to identify and isolate adherents who disseminate such hateful propaganda messages. Software developed by Crisp, based in the UK, currently exists to automatically detect terrorist material within minutes of it being posted including material posted on the dark web (Gibbons, 2017). Some thought should be given as to how such software might also be fine-tuned not just to identify jihadist content but to track users who engage with it through their recruitment journeys. Another approach to countering the

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effectiveness of Islamist propaganda might be to deliberately subvert it. Such an approach was revealed by Chechnyan Police’s E-Unit when a group of young Chechen girls contacted Daesh asking for money to travel to Syria but cut off all ties when they received the funds (Sanghani, 2015). The center of gravity of the Daesh propaganda model is its crowd-sourced model of consumeristproducer acting as ‘media mujahedin’. This element is both a strength and a weakness. Law enforcement authorities should target their resources to targeting and prosecuting the worst offenders (i.e. the ‘influentials’) disseminating hateful messages. The power of the crowd should also be harnessed in flagging terrorist propaganda content for take-down. This might involve developing an online version of the ‘if you see something, say something’ (suspicious activity reporting) campaign in a partnership between the social media service providers and law enforcement authorities. Propaganda aimed at would-be recruits purports to be a ‘special truth’. It makes the subject feel special, either because they are receiving the message, or because of the nature of what they are being incited to do. Countering its effectiveness can be achieved by reducing the credibility of the message. Such an approach might involve discrediting both the message itself and/ or the messengers. This very approach was used effectively by the Information Operations Task Force in Iraq against alQaeda in Iraq and al-Zirqawi by using a disgust appeal to create an emotional wedge between al-Zirqawi and the general population (Segell, 2009). Reducing the effectiveness of propaganda aimed at the general public in particularly affected countries would likely require countering adversary use of fear appeal. This requires a robust system, including a public reassurance campaign, to be put in place both to counter public fear and the associated danger that stokes that fear.

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CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF FUNDING

This chapter has deliberately focused only on the application of mainstream marketing effectiveness measurement, as opposed to political and/or social marketing effectiveness methodologies given time and space restrictions, despite the merit of applying both these marketing sub-domains to improving our understanding of the measurement of terrorist propaganda effectiveness. We recommend that further research be undertaken into their applicability to measuring propaganda effectiveness. It is particularly important to conduct research into tracking how would-be and existing recruits make their journeys through the recruitment funnel from attention/exposure all the way through to action/conversion. Such an analysis could help reveal vulnerabilities in the effectiveness of adversary propaganda use, and potential step-off points, in the radicalization process. We highlight the multifaceted nature of the problem space of effectiveness measurement, including the consideration of barriers to measurement, identifying suitable effectiveness measures, identifying appropriate measurement methodologies, recognizing the centrality of fear appeal use in propaganda, evaluating terrorist leadership effects (and identifying ‘influentials’) in message effectiveness, identifying the center of gravity in terrorist group propaganda usage, and in understanding how to measure the effectiveness of terrorist group efforts to move people through the recruitment funnel from attentiveness to jihadi propaganda through persuasion/influence to engagement to action/conversion. We provide a number of social media metrics to help evaluate terrorist propaganda use at each stage of the recruitment process. The paper makes a contribution to developing our understanding of how marketing concepts can be used to aid the measurement of Islamist terrorist propaganda effectiveness.

This research was conducted under US Government sponsorship. This paper does not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of its research sponsors.

Notes 1  For an overview of the messaging themes/ aims used by the key Islamist terrorist groups considered in this paper, see Table 14.1. 2  Dearden, Lizzie. ‘Isis: UN study finds foreign fighters in Syria “lack basic understanding of Islam”’. The Independent, August 4, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ isis-islammic-state-foreign-fighters-syriarecruits-lack-basic-understanding-of-islamradicalisation-a7877706.html. A research study focusing on al-Qaeda in 2013 found a similar result, see: Lyons, D.K. ‘Analyzing the effectiveness of Al Qaeda’s online influence operations by means of propaganda theory’. Master of Science Thesis, El Paso, TX: The University of Texas at El Paso, 2013. Accessed November 3, 2017. https:// academics.utep.edu/Portals/4302/ Student%20research/Theses/Analyzing %20the%20Effectiveness%20of%20 Al%20Qaeda%20s%20Online%20Influence %20Operations%20(Lyons).pdf. 3  On the number of Daesh’s Indonesian foreign fighters, see: Jawaid, Arsia. ‘Indonesia and the Islamic State threat’. The Diplomat, March 15, 2017. Accessed October 11, 2017. https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/ indonesia-and-the-islamic-state-threat/. On the total number of Daesh’s foreign and British fighters, see: Wintour, Patrick. ‘Islamic State fighters returning to UK “pose huge challenge”’. The Guardian, March 9, 2017. Accessed October 11, 2017. www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/09/ islamic-state-fighters-returning-to-uk-posehuge-challenge. 4  Center of Gravity is defined as ‘the source of power that creates a force or a critical

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capability that allows an entity to act or accomplish a task or purpose’. See: Eikmeier, Dale C. ‘Center of gravity analysis’. Military Review 84, no. 4 (2004): 2–5 (p. 2). 5  One method used to analyze the effectiveness of UK politicians’ tweets was to analyze what factors were fundamental to whether or not they were retweeted. The same process could be used to evaluate when terrorists’ tweets are retweeted. See: Walker, Lorna, Paul R. Baines, Radu Dimitriu, and Emma K. Macdonald. ‘Antecedents of retweeting in a (political) marketing context’. Psychology & Marketing 34, no. 3 (2017): 275–293. 6  The hypodermic needle (stimulus-response) model suggests that people uncritically accept the precepts of a propagandist message and act upon them. 7  For a detailed paper and methodological approach on how terrorist propaganda can be analyzed using semiotic and propaganda analysis, see: Baines, Paul R., and Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy. ‘Al-Qaeda messaging evolution and positioning, 1998–2008: Propaganda analysis revisited’. Public Relations Inquiry 3, no. 2 (2014): 163–191. 8  We indicate that this approach is possible but given the ethical implications do not necessarily advocate it. 9  For an example of the use of focus groups to test adversary propaganda effectiveness, see: Baines, Paul R., Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy, Kevin Moloney, Barry Richards, Sara Butler, and Mark Gill. ‘The dark side of political marketing: Islamist propaganda, Reversal Theory and British Muslims’. European Journal of Marketing 44, no. 3/4 (2010): 478–495. 10  Kozinets developed the methodology to assess the behavior of Star Trek fans online. See: Kozinets, Robert V. ‘Utopian enterprise: Articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s culture of consumption’. Journal of Consumer Research 28, no. 1 (2001): 67–88. 11  For a full outline of what semiotics is, see: Lawes, R. (2002). ‘Demystifying semiotics: Some key questions answered’. International Journal of Market Research, 44(3), 251–264. 12  For an excellent discussion of Daesh doctrine and the ‘management of savagery’,

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see: Weiss, Michael, and Hassan Hassan. Isis: Inside the Army of Terror. New York: Regan Arts, 2015. 13  This is where a person feels that their behavior is being constrained and so are motivated to follow a different, sometimes opposite, course of action, see Brehm (1966).

REFERENCES Ali, Mohammed Al-Haj, and Justin Schuster. ‘Activists seek to counter “well-funded” child-soldier recruitment in Syria’s north’. Syria:direct, May 23, 2016. Accessed November 3, 2017. http://syriadirect.org/news/ activists-seek-to-counter-well-funded-childsoldier-recruitment-in-idlib-province/ Anon. ‘An important step towards victory!’ Al-Qaeda terrorist responsible for recruiting 3,000 child soldiers to fight in Syria CELEBRATES Donald Trump’s win’. The Daily Mail, November 11, 2016. Accessed November 3, 2017. Dearden, Lizzie. ‘ISIS claims “propaganda more powerful than atomic bomb” as group forms strategy for survival’. The Independent, February 14, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ middle-east/isis-propaganda-atomic-bombsurvival-strategy-iraq-syria-islaic-state-icsrreport-amaq-rumiyah-al-a7579511.html Dearden, Lizzie. ‘Isis: UN study finds foreign fighters in Syria “lack basic understanding of Islam”’. The Independent, August 4, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/isis-islammicstate-foreign-fighters-syria-recruits-lack-basicunderstanding-of-islam-radicalisationa7877706.html Department of the Army, Headquarters. Soldier’s Manual and Trainer’s Guide MOS 37F Psychological Operations Specialist Skills Levels 1 Through 4. August 28, 2008. Soldier Training Publication Series: STP 33-37F14-SMTG, USA, Washington, DC, P. 3-98:3.99. Econsultancy/Research Now. What Advertising Effectiveness Means to Modern Marketers in a Digital World. June 2017. London. www. researchnow.com/blog/what-advertisingeffectiveness-means-to-modern-marketersin-a-digital-world/ Eikmeier, Dale C. ‘Center of gravity analysis’. Military Review 84, no. 4 (2004): 2–5. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (trans. Konrad Kellen and Joan Lerner). New York: Vintage Books, 1965, pp. 259–302 and Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Camarillo, CA: Elite Minds, 2010. Farmer, Ben. ‘Five UK terror plots disrupted in past two months as MI5 battles ‘unparalleled’ threats’. The Telegraph, May 25, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.telegraph.

co.uk/news/2017/05/25/five-uk-terrorplots-disrupted-past-two-months-mi5-battlesunparalleled/ Gibbons, Katie. ‘Software exposes terror propaganda within minutes’. The Times, September 27, 2017, p. 22. Halkon, Ruth. ‘Anonymous launches online TRAINING CAMP to prime next generation of hacktivists for battle against ISIS’. The Mirror, April 19, 2016. Accessed November 4, 2017. www.mirror.co.uk/news/worldnews/anonymous-launches-onlinetraining-camp-7791120 Higbee, Kenneth L. ‘Fifteen years of fear arousal: research on threat appeals: 1953– 1968’. Psychological Bulletin 72, no. 6 (1969): 426–444. Home Office. ‘Operation of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, quarterly update to September 2016: data tables’. December 15, 2016. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.gov.uk/government/statistics/op eration-of-police-powers-under-the-terrorism-act-2000-quarterly-update-to-september-2016-data-tables Hovland, Carl I., Irving L. Janis, and Harold H. Kelley. Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953. Hughes, Tammy. ‘British ISIS recruiter Sally Jones is ‘training an all-female unit of foreign jihadis to carry out attacks in Englishspeaking countries’. The Daily Mail, September 12, 2016. Accessed November 4, 2017.  www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article3784860/British-ISIS-recruiter-Sally-Jonestraining-female-unit-foreign-jihadis-carryattacks-English-speaking-countries.html Jawaid, Arsia. ‘Indonesia and the Islamic State Threat’. The Diplomat, March 15, 2017. Accessed October 11, 2017. https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/indonesia-and-theislamic-state-threat/ Jenkins, Brian Michael. ‘Fifteen years after 9/11: A preliminary balance sheet’. RAND Corporation, Document No. CT-458. January 11, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www. rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/testimonies/CT400/CT458z1/RAND_CT458z1.pdf Jowett, Garth, and Victoria O’Donnell. Propaganda and persuasion. 5th ed. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012, p. 7.

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Jones, N., Baines, P., Craig, R., Tunnicliffe, I., and O’Shaughnessy, N.J. (2015). ‘The Islamist cyberpropaganda threat and its counterterrorism policy implications’. In: Richet, J.L. (Ed.), Cybersecurity Policies and Strategies for Cyberwarfare Prevention. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, In Press. Kingsley, Patrick. ‘Who is behind Isis’s terrifying online propaganda operations?’ The Guardian, June 23, 2014. Accessed November 3, 2017. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/ who-behind-isis-propaganda-operation-iraq Koerner, Brendan I. ‘Why ISIS is winning the social media war’. WIRED Magazine, April 2016. Accessed November 3, 2017. www. wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-socialmedia-war-heres-beat/ Kozinets, Robert V. ‘Utopian enterprise: Articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s culture of consumption’. Journal of Consumer Research 28, no. 1 (2001): 67–88. Lasswell, Harold D. ‘The theory of political propaganda’. The American Political Science Review 21, no. 3 (1927): 627–631. LaTour, Michael S., and Herbert J. Rotfeld. ‘There are threats and (maybe) fear-caused arousal: Theory and confusions of appeals to fear and fear arousal itself’. Journal of Advertising 26, no. 3 (1997): 45–59. Lawes, R. (2002). ‘Demystifying semiotics: Some key questions answered’. International Journal of Market Research 44(3), 251–264. Lawler, David. ‘Navy Seal who “killed Osama bin Laden” threatened by Islamic State’. The Telegraph, October 8, 2015. Accessed November 4, 2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/ 11920280/Navy-Seal-who-killed-Osama-binLaden-threatened-by-Islamic-State.html Liebling, Alison, and Christina Straub. ‘Identity challenges and the risks of radicalization in high security custody’. Prison Service Journal (special edition on Combatting Extremism and Terrorism), September 2012. Accessed November 2, 2012.ww.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/ crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/PSJ%20September%202012%20No.%20203.pdf Lyons, D.K. ‘Analyzing the effectiveness of Al Qaeda’s online influence operations by means of propaganda theory’. Master of Science Thesis. El Paso, TX: The University of Texas at El Paso, 2013. Accessed

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November 3, 2017. https://academics.utep. edu/Portals/4302/Student%20research/ Theses/Analyzing%20the%20Effectiveness%20of%20Al%20Qaeda%20s%20 Online%20Influence%20Operations%20 (Lyons).pdf Neumann, Peter R. Joining al-Qaeda: Jihadi Recruitment in Europe. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Ochab, Ewelina U. ‘The problem of Daesh foreign fighter returnees and homegrown terrorism’. Forbes, May 11, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.forbes.com/sites/ ewelinaochab/2017/05/11/the-problemof-daesh-foreign-fighters-returnees-and-thehome-grown-terrorism/#37c814d76933 Procter, Rob. ‘How 2.6m tweets were analyzed to understand reaction to the riots’. The Guardian, December 7, 2011. Accessed November 2, 2017. www.theguardian.com/ uk/2011/dec/07/how-tweets-analysedunderstand-riots Samu, Sridhar, and Namita Bhatnagar. ‘The efficacy of anti-smoking advertisements: the role of source, message, and individual characteristics’. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 13, no. 3 (2008): 237–250. Sanghani, Radhika. ‘Three women conned Isil out of cash. Now they’re internet heroes’. The Telegraph, July 31, 2015. Accessed October 9, 2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/ women/womens-life/11775228/ThreeChechen-girls-catfished-isis.-Now-theyreinternet-heroes.html Segell, Glen M. ‘Creating intelligence: information operations in Iraq’. International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 22, no. 1 (2009): 89–109. Singh, Sakshi. ‘Understanding the marketing funnel: How marketing funnels work?’ Feedough, August 2, 2017. Accessed November 4, 2017. www.feedough.com/ marketing-funnel/ Tracy, Thomas. ‘ISIS remains deadliest terrorist organization in the world, report says’. Daily News, August 21. Accessed November 2, 2017. www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ isis-remains-deadliest-terrorist-organizationworld-report-article-1.3429745 Walker, Lorna, Paul R. Baines, Radu Dimitriu, and Emma K. Macdonald. ‘Antecedents of

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retweeting in a (political) marketing context’. Psychology & Marketing 34, no. 3 (2017): 275–293. Warman, Matt. ‘Joseph Kony 2012: A model of modern campaigning’. The Daily Telegraph, March 8, 2012. Accessed November 3, 2017. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldness/ africaandindianocean/uganda/9131355/ Joseph-Kony-2012-a-model-of-moderncampaigning.html Weimann, Gabriel. ‘Terrorist migration to the dark web’. Perspectives on Terrorism 10, no. 3 (2016). www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/ index.php/pot/article/view/513/html Weiss, Michael, and Hassan Hassan. Isis: Inside the Army of Terror. New York: Regan Arts, 2015. Whitehouse, Kaja. ‘NYC terror suspect allegedly asked to hang ISIS flag in a hospital room’. New York Post, November 1, 2017. Accessed November 2, 2017. http://nypost.

com/2017/22/02/nyc-truck-attack-suspectfaces-terrorism-charges/ Wintour, Patrick. ‘Islamic State fighters returning to UK “pose huge challenge”’. The Guardian, March 9, 2017. Accessed October 11, 2017. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ 2017/mar/09/islamic-state-fighters-returningto-uk-pose-huge-challenge Witte, Kim. ‘Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model’. Communications Monographs 59, no. 4 (1992): 329–349. Witte, Kim. ‘Theory-based interventions and evaluations of outreach efforts’. National Network of Libraries of Medicine, nnlm.gov. Accessed November 3, 2017. https://nnlm. gob/archive/pnr/eval/witte.html Witte, Kim, and Mike Allen. ‘A meta-analysis of fear appeals: Implications for effective public health campaigns’. Health Education & Behavior 27, no. 5 (2000): 591–615

•  To dissuade enemy from fighting. •  To goad foreign nations into attacking Daesh. •  Moral conflict. •  A Caliphate now exists. •  Daesh’s victory is inevitable. •  Those who stand against Daesh will find no mercy and their fate will be grim.

•  Happy fighters mixing with locals, children. •  In the context of northern Nigeria, this resonates with Boko Haram’s •  Via Islamic imagery, music, quotes. members and supporters in that the •  Uses modern computer game formats (e.g. Western or Western-style education of Grand Theft Auto and Battlefield). a Nigerian elite and institutions of the •  Exciting (slow motion, night-time footage). Nigerian state have failed to address •  Graphic violence on the enemy. poverty and disadvantage for young •  Happiness/peaceful death in combat. people, particularly young men. •  Islamic justification for violence and duty to •  Images of captured weapons and violent struggle (jihad). equipment meant to illustrate the •  Emphasizes swiftness and victory. capability and enduring power •  The resources available to Daesh. of Boko Haram, relative to the •  That Daesh fights with passion and for a good Nigerian armed forces and police. cause but the enemy’s is not and so they will lose. •  Quick to provide footage or images •  Discusses possibility of death, emphasizing afterlife. of successful attacks/aftermath, •  In murdering hostages, blame is placed on and rationale for actions. foreign nations’ leaders. •  Media targeted to segmented audiences. Produced in Arabic, with a translation service to English, English and also languages found in Pakistan and India. ‘Softer’ videos for Western eyes, where the execution takes place off camera.

•  Global conspiracy against Islam. •  The iniquity of its enemies. •  Fight Jihad to save faith from extinction.

•  Excitement/danger to lure bored/ unemployed youth. •  Authority of significant spokespersons. •  Speed of response to unpredictable events. •  Dramaturgy, the suicide bomber narrative, of pious Islamic warrior, melds theatre and ritual, intermixing life and death. •  ‘Vox populi’ method where ordinary Palestinians in the street express their rage – set against other voices – notes of calm authority – the rational center of an irrational world. •  Emancipation of death as an ideal for the Muslim. •  Opportunities to celebrate fantasy. •  Piety. •  A binary universe: luxury/austerity: good/evil: Muslim/infidel: paradise/ hell – ‘sorts’ a complex world.

Narratives

Lines of persuasion

•  Nigerian elite/institutions fail to address poverty and disadvantage. •  Illegitimacy of Nigeria and its leadership. •  The state is a Western construct best replaced by an Islamic state under Sharia law. •  Threats to Nigerian economic interest and media.

•  To mock the west, Nigerian officials, and opposition Muslims.

•  To recruit and radicalize, especially foreign fighters.

•  To recruit and radicalize using a franchised model in different regions of the world.

Key aim

Boko Haram (Daesh West African Province since 2015)

Daesh

Al-Qaeda (and its subsidiaries)

Analysis Items

Appendix 14.1  Aims, narratives, lines of persuasion and dissemination used by four main Islamist terrorist groups

(Continued)

•  Use culturally relevant communications. •  YouTube posts depict intense combat training regime. •  YouTube videos include interviews with foreign fighters discussing why they decided to join the group, to glorify the experience. •  Videos show fighters rapping about jihad in Somalia amidst images of combat, dead bodies, and cheering children. •  Rap videos exploit gabei poetry tradition unique to Somalia. •  Respond rapidly to events or tweets live.

•  Islam under threat from the West. •  Amplification of its own importance in Somalia and internationally. •  Messages of success.

•  To recruit and radicalize, including foreign fighters.

Al Shabab (Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia since 2012) TOWARDS THE MEASUREMENT OF ISLAMIST PROPAGANDA EFFECTIVENESS 241

•  Media distribution media through fronts, such as Al Furqan Media and Al Hayat Media Center. •  ‘Official’ releases on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. •  Regional press offices (‘Wilayat’). •  Fighters’ tweets. •  Messages picked up, echoed and passed on by ‘media mujahidin’. •  Glossy online magazine (‘Dabiq’), videos, and ‘documentaries’.

•  Self-referential online propaganda, video of events and statements. •  Efficacy established through firsthand imagery and timely reporting and response. •  Glossy online magazine (AQAP: ‘Inspire’).

Propaganda dissemination

Source: Adapted from Jones et al., 2015, 353–355.

Daesh

Al-Qaeda (and its subsidiaries)

Analysis Items •  Release of video, with leader speaking direct to camera. •  First-hand video. •  Via social media e.g. Facebook, Twitter. •  Supporters generate and redistribute material.

Boko Haram (Daesh West African Province since 2015)

Via: •  Al Khataib media production group. •  Via YouTube, Twitter. •  Live interviews and relationship with journalists. •  Soundbites and catchy phrases – to suit traditional media. •  Live tweeting as attacks are in progress.

 

Al Shabab (Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia since 2012)

Appendix 14.1  Aims, narratives, lines of persuasion and dissemination used by four main Islamist terrorist groups (Continued)

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PART III

Tools and Techniques in Counter-Propaganda Research

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15 Propaganda and Disinformation: How a Historical Perspective Aids Critical Response Development Gill Bennett

INTRODUCTION Both propaganda and disinformation have been employed as tools of statecraft for centuries in the service of causes worthy and unworthy. In an age of instant global media and 24-hour news, it is important for both policymakers and the general public to try to understand what they both mean and how they intersect. This chapter begins by considering the difficulties of reaching definitions that are both workable and acceptable, when so many of the concepts involved rely on subjective judgement. It will then go on to explore some examples of the use of the terms propaganda and disinformation in a historical context, to try and discover where the dividing line between them may lie – if it exists at all – and whether those examples can offer helpful points on how to develop an effective critical response.

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION AND SUBJECTIVITY It is counter-productive to spend too much time considering the definition of terms, a discussion impossible to conclude satisfactorily. Grammatical definitions cannot address the main problem, which is that the concepts involved are subjective. Not everyone has the same idea of truth or falsehood, justice, morality or the public interest; all concepts that are innate to both propaganda and disinformation. Those who disseminate either propaganda or disinformation, even if they know that it is based on falsehood, may consider their actions are rooted in superior judgement, essential to the maintenance of political authority or justified by the beneficial outcome they hope to achieve. In certain situations, involving armed conflict or threats to national security, democratic governments

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may bend or suspend the normal ‘rules’ of accuracy and transparency. Non-state actors, such as campaigning organisations or those with a strong ideological or religious imperative, may feel justified in using both propaganda and disinformation in order to reinforce their arguments. All this muddies the narrow straits between propaganda and disinformation, and makes it necessary to pay some attention to their meaning. Deriving from the Latin verb propagare, meaning to spread, or enlarge, the gerundive form of the verb, propaganda, carries a purposive meaning: in the present context, therefore, it means information that needs to be, should be or is intended to be disseminated. From this comes the understanding that propaganda is intended not just to inform, but to persuade. It may be intended, for example, to communicate important information to the population, to persuade them to act in their own, or the state’s best interests, or to warn of an impending crisis. In wartime, these communications may be stirringly patriotic (Your country needs you!’ ‘Dig for Victory!’), while in peacetime, campaigns may be aimed at improving public health or road safety (‘Stop, Look and Listen!’), or to influence voters in favour of a political party during an election or referendum campaign (‘Vote Leave!’). There is, however, no clue within the word propaganda itself as to whether the information to be disseminated is factual or inaccurate (whether by design or error), so clearly one function of propaganda may be, in some circumstances, to spread false information.1 Jay Black, in an article on the semantics and ethics of propaganda, wrote that ‘how we define the slippery enterprise determines whether we perceive propaganda to be ethical or unethical’.2 Perception, however, is subjective. In the modern period and in certain contexts, for example in the military and social sciences, propaganda has typically been divided into categories, black (false information from a false source), white (accurate information from a correctly identified

source) and, sometimes, grey (somewhere in between, with both source and information of uncertain provenance).3 This categorisation is useful in theoretical discussion, but less so when considering historical examples, since those involved in creating and disseminating propaganda tended to have their own terminology or apply such distinctions only to opponents, rather than to themselves. This is particularly true, for example, when a state or government department initiates a propaganda campaign in direct response to a hostile campaign mounted by an opposing state; in such a case, disguising a source or fabricating information might be regarded as a legitimate part of the campaign, classified ‘white’ because its target is ‘black’. This complicates still further the distinction between propaganda and disinformation. Dictionary definitions generally agree that disinformation is false information communicated with the intention to deceive: it may have a basis in fact, but its purpose is to mislead the recipient. This is said to distinguish it from misinformation which may be false, but not intentionally misleading; though when picking misinformation as ‘word of the year’ for 2018, Dictonary.com defined misinformation as ‘false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead’, and insisted that the difference between dis- and mis- information ‘comes down to intent’.4 In other words, disinformation sets out to do harm, misinformation may not. But any assessment of intent is inevitably subjective; whether information is considered to be false, or distributed with harmful intent, depends on the viewpoint of the recipient. The fact that in the digital age large amounts of information are generated and distributed automatically complicates the distinction, since it may not be clear whether it is the content, the apparent source, or the context that has been manipulated. Despite the increasing volume of comment and analysis of disinformation and related concepts such as fake news or post-truth, a search for objective definitions seems, therefore, unhelpfully distracting. In this situation, the classification of ‘Information

PROPAGANDA AND DISINFORMATION

Disorder’ put forward in a 2017 Council of Europe report to cover all bases, seems useful.5 (Although ‘Information Warfare’ captures the aggressive aspects, its military connotations make its use problematic.6) In times ancient and modern, rulers and governments have exploited ‘information disorder’ both to deceive opponents and to influence their own citizens, and to promote their own agenda. It is not hard to think of both historical and more modern examples where both authoritarian and democratic regimes, as well as non-state actors, have justified such tactics for the same reasons. But though there has evolved a perception of propaganda as generally ‘true’ and disinformation ‘false’, the distinction between them is bedevilled by subjective judgement. For example, a propaganda campaign to encourage people to vaccinate their children against dangerous diseases may seem like promoting the public good, but in some societies, it is regarded with intense suspicion as spreading false information to mask malicious intent on the part of those promoting the campaign. Many people may consider that some historical examples of propaganda are obviously ‘wrong’ – such as Nazi propaganda spreading the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy, encouraging a prejudice fuelled by fake texts such as the so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’7 – but take a more ambivalent view of the dissemination of exaggerated material in order to persuade people to vote in favour of a political party, or a course of action, that those in authority genuinely believe to be beneficial. Where is the dividing line between a government’s right to persuade and the public’s right to free choice?8 When is propaganda the useful spreading of information or the dangerous distortion of facts, that is, disinformation? Such questions can never be answered conclusively, because the distinction clearly depends on the intent of the source of the information as well as its content. While there may be general agreement that the deliberate use of false information is pernicious, it can

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be very difficult to distinguish between the accidental dissemination of untruths and a calculated strategy of deceit. This is particularly true in the digital age, where a theory, ideology or piece of information, true or false, can be sent around the world in seconds by means of the internet. Candidates in elections all around the world promote positive information and pledges about their own intentions and policies, while criticising those of their opponents; and while the outright use of falsehood may spark outrage, our perception about the accuracy of this information is clouded by our own convictions. The end result may be a widespread belief that no-one and nothing can be trusted, and that ‘truth’ is a subjective concept, masking the distinction between propaganda and disinformation even further and undermining public trust in authority, as well as encouraging the development of conspiracy theories.9

The Greeks Had A Word For It Despite some recent attempts to link the origin of the use of the term to the Russian word dezinformatsiya, adopted by Soviet intelligence organisations during the Cold War to denote an operational device intended to give the enemy a false picture of events, and influence his decision-making,10 disinformation is a far more ancient concept. Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War written in the 5th century BCE, wrote about the deliberate manipulation of information in order to influence decision-making, and the corruption of public discourse to an extent that ‘a man with good advice to give has to tell lies if he expects to be believed’. At a time when rhetoric, the art of speaking or writing in order to persuade or influence people, was regarded as an essential skill for public figures, the way in which information was imparted was a key element in democratic discourse. Thucydides makes it clear that some of the most persuasive arguments in favour of an Athenian decision to mount a

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risky military expedition, or to put down a rebellion, were at best dubious and sometimes completely false.11 In The Republic, Plato has Socrates argue that rulers are entitled, and sometimes have a duty to disseminate false information – the ‘noble lie’ – in order to promote the wellbeing of citizens and the stability of the state; in the ‘right hands’, a lie can be useful against enemies and a way of diverting friends from ‘madness or folly’.12 With the development of international maritime trade, increase in immigration and the decline or religion and magic, 5th century BCE Athenian oligarchs felt their authority and the stability of society threatened, and felt the need to disseminate a narrative – if necessary a noble lie – to counter a breakdown in the old patterns of trust and deference.13 The argument seems strikingly contemporary, and it is not hard to map these classical references onto present day concerns and political discourse. And even if the term ‘propaganda’ was not used in its modern sense in classical times, that is clearly what Thucydides, Plato and other contemporary writers are talking about in some of their discussions of rhetoric, persuasion and manipulation of information. Going back to these classical texts is not merely a way of confirming that there is nothing new about propaganda or disinformation. Thucydides’ discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and historical truth14 is directly relevant when considering the relationship between fact-based evidence and comment on social media, as shown in evidence presented to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media Sport Committee during its investigation into Disinformation and Fake News.15

Evolving Concepts of Propaganda and Disinformation In the context of the current discussion of propaganda and disinformation, it is important to be wary of the narrative that propaganda is a long-established method of

disseminating information intended to persuade, while disinformation, intended to deceive, is a more recent strategy, employed by opponents rather than allies. In propaganda, the argument runs, material disseminated may be exaggerated or distorted, but its purpose is essentially benign, and it may be a legitimate tool of public diplomacy or commercial strategy. Disinformation, as its name suggests, involves falsehood, and digital media enable its dissemination on a global scale and at very high speed. While the subjective element means it is difficult to draw a definitive line drawn between propaganda and disinformation, history can, nevertheless, help to shed some light on the question and perhaps carry the debate further. What follows will consider some past attempts to define the relationship between propaganda and disinformation, including some more detailed examples that demonstrate its complexities. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the word propaganda was used principally to denote the spreading or promotion of religious doctrine to the faithful (or faithless), before acquiring the broader military and political connotations in common use today. The evolving interpretation of the term had its roots in a number of developments during the 19th and early 20th centuries. First, the combination of greater levels of public literacy through the broadening of compulsory primary education and the increasingly widespread availability of printed information (newspapers with foreign correspondents, as well as books and pamphlets), and later, the early use of wireless technology, made it easier for governments, political parties or even commercial interests, to get their message out to the general public. The second catalyst was global conflict.

Weaponising Information: The First World War The First World War (1914–1918) saw the first organised use of mass propaganda by governments on both sides of the conflict, as

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well as technological developments, such as wireless telegraph services, and the use of aircraft to drop printed material over enemy territory, that made dissemination easier. Each side wanted to convince their own populace and the wider world of the righteousness of their own cause, to promote recruitment and boost the morale of their own military forces. This might seem to fall squarely into the realm of propaganda, but each side also wished to paint its enemies in the blackest possible light, to demoralise and confuse them, to deter potential allies and to persuade their opponents, if possible, into taking decisions based on false information about the course of the conflict. This involved making use of information that was at best exaggerated, and often known to be untrue, in order to achieve these objectives. Some of those in charge, like Charles Masterman who headed the British War Propaganda Bureau (Wellington House), refused to spread some of the more lurid stories, such as a rumour about Germans cutting the hands off a Belgian baby: ‘Find me the name of the hospital where the baby is and get me a signed statement from the doctor and I’ll listen’.16 But he also arranged for Wellington House to distribute millions of books, pamphlets and speeches in support of the British war effort, using commercial publishers so that the material could not be linked back to the government; an early use of ‘unattributable material’ that was to become a staple technique of propagandists.17 A related development during the war was the use of propaganda and disinformation as a valuable tool for the purposes of espionage and counter-espionage. Of course, spying was not invented during the First World War, but the conflict produced an exponential growth in the secret intelligence capabilities and organisations of the warring states. This was true in France, Germany and Russia, for example, and in the United States after its entry into the war in 1917 (though the United States had a temporary fit of revulsion against ungentlemanly conduct in the post-war period18).

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In Britain, the Secret Service Bureau created in 1909 under the shadow of impending war with Germany had divided a year later into two agencies concerned with domestic (MI5) and foreign intelligence (the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, originally called MI1(c)). In addition, between 1914 and 1918, the Admiralty and War Office both developed significant signals intelligence capability in intercepting and deciphering enemy wireless communications. Although during the war, the efforts of these secret bodies were under military direction, each developed an independent capability that was to form the basis of their post-war activities (the Admiralty and War Office Signals Intelligence [SIGINT] sections combining to form the Government Code and Cypher School [GC&CS], precursor of Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ).19 All these secret intelligence organisations found that the manipulation of information was a valuable means of encouraging allies and undermining opponents, as well as gathering useful intelligence from material disseminated by the enemy. Propaganda could be used to inculcate a spirit of vigilance and patriotism in the population at home, or to disseminate overseas disinformation giving a false picture of the progress of the war. The spy fever and public paranoia encouraged in the years immediately preceding the war in Britain by writers like William Le Queux, who wrote over 150 novels about international intrigue and Britain’s vulnerability to European invasion, including The Invasion of 1910 and Spies of the Kaiser, or by Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, or John Buchan’s tales of foreign perfidy foiled by patriotic Britons, proved valuable to MI5 in sensitising the general public to the need for vigilance and security, even if the number of German spies unmasked turned out to be very small.20 For SIS, intelligence reports received from agents overseas, as well as material contained in enemy communications intercepted by the Admiralty or War Office, could provide useful

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information on what the population in enemy countries believed, feared or were ignorant of, were important – alongside intelligence on military matters. They could also use their agents overseas to plant information intended to mislead the enemy. Rapid technological developments during the First World War encouraged the use of information warfare by all intelligence-gathering organisations, civil or military. Although the agencies suffered drastic cuts in manpower and resources at the end of the First World War (an example of the illusory concept of a ‘peace dividend’ that was repeated after 1945 and again after 1991), the use of information, true or false – propaganda or disinformation – had found a permanent place in the secret intelligence toolkit.

The Interwar Period During the period 1918 to 1939, the meaning of propaganda and disinformation evolved still further. Further expansion of education, literacy and mass communications, together with the growth of the advertising industry, meant that more and more people were exposed to commercial propaganda. This could be more subtle, even subliminal, but persistent and inexorable: claims that certain foods were good for you, washing powders that washed whiter, cigarettes that made you feel relaxed and sophisticated; exaggerated claims, rather than being deceitful. At the same time, there was an element of public revulsion against government and military propaganda in Britain and France, and in other countries devastated by the earlier conflict, when it became clear that much of the information disseminated by the government during the First World War was untrue, while the real of horror of the conflict had been concealed. In Germany, resentment grew as the military, outraged by what they regarded as an unjustified surrender in 1918, mounted a propaganda campaign based on the idea that the German armies had not been defeated but had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the

civilian population, and undermined by British propaganda and Bolshevik ‘poison’.21 This provided a fertile breeding ground for National Socialism. On both sides, bitterness and loss were compounded by economic factors, exacerbated by the depression of the early 1930s, resentments that were to lead to a second global conflict. From a 21st century standpoint, the use of information, and the means of its dissemination during the 20 years between the two 20th century world wars may seem outdated and irrelevant, overtaken by political evolution and technological revolution. Yet it is an example from this period, the Zinoviev Letter episode of 1924,that is instructive. Despite occurring nearly a century ago, this episode (like Thucydides and Plato) contains elements that are strikingly relevant to contemporary circumstances.

The Zinoviev Letter: A Classic Case of Disinformation22 The Zinoviev Letter was ostensibly addressed in September 1924 by Grigori Zinoviev, the head of the Bolshevik propaganda organisation, the Third Communist International or Comintern, to the Central Committee of the British Communist Party. It exhorted them to greater revolutionary effort, and to lobby the British government – the first ever Labour government that had taken office in January 1924, headed by Ramsay MacDonald – to push through Parliament Anglo-Russian treaties that would guarantee a much-needed loan for the Soviet regime. Almost certainly a forgery, the Letter reached London through secret intelligence channels, arriving just as the Labour government had resigned over a vote of no confidence; it was leaked to the right-wing press and it was used to discredit the Labour party in the general election campaign by emphasising Labour’s supposed close connection with the communists and spreading the idea that the British government had been in thrall to Moscow.

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Though the result of the October 1924 election, a Conservative victory, was not affected decisively by the Zinoviev Letter (Labour actually polled one million more votes than in the election that had put them in power), its use during the campaign had a profound effect, not least because of the suspicions and uncertainties it engendered. Zinoviev denied writing it and the British Communists receiving it, and though neither seemed a trustworthy source and official investigations by both Labour and Conservative cabinets authenticated it initially, forgery was soon suspected, with possible authors including both ‘Red’ and ‘White’ (non-Bolshevik) Russians, Polish and German intelligence organisations, the Conservative Party, the British Foreign Office and all parts of the security and intelligence establishment. Depending on the viewpoint of the observer, therefore, motives for the Letter included: trying to disrupt the political process in Britain; to discredit the right-wing ‘Establishment’; to damage the Labour Party; to promote Soviet propaganda objectives; or to undermine the credibility of the Soviet regime and expose its subversive tactics. Since it proved impossible to be sure whether the Zinoviev Letter was genuine or false, by whom it was forged, leaked or manipulated, it was impossible to know who devised or mounted the campaign, for what purpose and with whose help. The Soviet regime itself put forward a number of competing narratives, keeping the story alive. Even if genuine (and it is not impossible that it was forged in Moscow, to discredit Zinoviev in an inter-Bolshevik power struggle), the way that the Letter was used in order to influence the British electorate against the Labour Party during a general election campaign qualifies as a disinformation campaign. No original was ever found and authorship has never been determined conclusively, ensuring that this particular political conspiracy has retained a potent resonance in British politics ever since. The wider context of the Zinoviev Letter affair is equally relevant to the relationship

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between propaganda and disinformation, and to the contemporary understanding of it. It was entirely in keeping with the strategy and tactics of Zinoviev and his Russian colleagues to send such a letter. The Bolshevik regime established after the revolution of October 1917 regarded propaganda as a principal and legitimate tool of statecraft, not surprisingly since its aim was to incite world revolution, as well as reinforcing the success of the communist ideal to an internal audience, the peoples of the USSR. The distinction between truth and falsehood was not material, since the ends – the destabilising of capitalism and the security of the Soviet state – were regarded as justifying the means.23 Britain and its Empire, particularly countries like Afghanistan and India bordering on the Soviet Union, were prime targets of such propaganda, disseminated through espionage and subversion, forged documents and planted articles as well as more overt channels. Some material was factual, some distorted and some completely false, and the secrecy of the Soviet regime made it very difficult to discern the difference. In addition to material propagated from Moscow, the Bolsheviks used a wide range of organisations and interest groups throughout the world to spread their message, infiltrating anti-Bolshevik groups in order to spread disinformation in their ranks as well. Despite the lack of modern technology, they achieved global reach through a sophisticated network of agents and agencies motivated by ideology, greed and a predilection for subterfuge: the example of Vladimir Orlov, who had worked for both Tsarist and Bolshevik intelligence and in the 1920s ran a forgery bureau in Berlin supplying documents, genuine and manufactured, to anyone who would pay, is a case in point (he was even thought to have been one of the forgers responsible for the Procotols of the Elders of Zion).24 It is hard to counter effectively those who use propaganda and disinformation interchangeably as a tool of statecraft without regard as to how they are perceived externally,

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particularly if the object is disruption and undermining of public confidence rather than a specific target. Even with the availability of sophisticated technological tools that can identify deliberate disinformation and trace its source, proving its impact on an event or outcome is much more difficult: detecting foreign interference in an election process through a disinformation campaign is easier than proving such interference influenced the result. This is as true nearly a century later as it was in 1924, as shown by the ongoing investigations into possible Russian interference in the US 2016 Presidential Election.25 The Bolsheviks made no secret of their desire to foment revolution and overthrow capitalism, adopting a standard response if challenged: denial, while accusing the challenger of spreading disinformation. Again, this remains a classic strategy of disinformation purveyors, with the added advantage of convincing a domestic audience of what their government wishes them to believe. Yet the very scale and aggression of Bolshevik propaganda meant that it could be useful to those responsible for mounting a response. During the period from 1917 until the mid-1930s (when the Nazi threat became more urgent), the primary focus of British and other Western European intelligence organisations was the Bolshevik target. All kept extensive records on Bolshevik propaganda activities throughout the world, which helped to inform counter-intelligence operations against Russian subversion and espionage, to improve understanding of Soviet intentions, organisations and policy, and as a helpful guide to the depth and accuracy of the information collected by Moscow about Western intentions, organisations and policy. Knowing what the Bolsheviks did not know could be very helpful: although when Soviet documents appeared to reveal a woeful level of ignorance, those evaluating them had to take into account that they might have been concocted in the knowledge that they would fall into the hands of those they were targeting; another means of propagating

disinformation.26 Although methodology, technical means of collecting intelligence and sophisticated counter-intelligence techniques have developed a great deal since the Bolshevik period, these fundamental principles can still inform a response to disinformation campaigns mounted by states intent on disruption and subversion. The widespread availability of open source evidence of disinformation and propaganda activities by a range of states, together with the intelligence collected by covert means, can inform contemporary responses to hostile campaigns in just the same way.

Uses of Propaganda and Disinformation in the Second World War The difficulties faced by governments, officials and the general public of distinguishing between factual and misleading material – propaganda and disinformation, if the distinction is maintained – were sharpened during the Second World War, when information warfare became even more pervasive and sophisticated. British authorities, including the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE),27 drew a distinction between what was called ‘White’ and ‘Black’ propaganda28 in preparing their response to the aggressive and information warfare mounted by enemy opponents, particularly Nazi Germany under the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. For PWE, white propaganda was understood to have a factual base, albeit slanted in favour of those disseminating it. It was often spread through the press, broadcasting (with the help of the BBC) and film, and included using BBC broadcasts to publicise (positive) news of Allied achievements and promote the war effort.29 It also promoted information campaigns to persuade the general populace to conserve food, grow vegetables and work more productively in factories; propaganda films, such as the 1942 film Night Shift

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encouraging women to work in industry and describing their ‘curls showing under their caps’ as they worked ‘energetically’, fell into this category.30 White propaganda included factual material intended for overseas consumption, to spread war news, keep alive the spirit of resistance and counter propaganda put out by the enemy. What PWE termed ‘black’ propaganda, on the other hand, was disinformation, though the term was not often used. Essentially covert, created and disseminated clandestinely, sometimes in collaboration with the secret intelligence organisations, it might involve forgery, or the use of radio broadcasts to undermine enemy morale or to encourage subversion and sabotage. It also included the false material – chickenfeed, in intelligence parlance – fed by to the enemy by deception, by agents overseas or by double agents such as those ‘turned’ by MI5 in the Double Cross system.31 In PWE, journalist Sefton Delmer and his colleagues mounted a hair-raising series of operations designed to demoralise Germany and her allies, sow rumours, deceive the population and promote anti-Nazi activity throughout occupied Europe. This included broadcasting pornography as a way of attracting German radio audiences, and spreading a rumour that the British government had imported 200 maneating sharks from Australia for release in the English Channel to eat Germans whose boats had been sunk (the latter surely qualifying as a piece of disinformation). In wartime, many norms of governmental and public conduct are suspended or disregarded; and after the conflict is over, those on the winning side are usually willing to accept, or even celebrate the successful use of tactics, including deception, disinformation, sabotage and subversion, that would not be regarded as acceptable in peacetime. Indeed, the enduring popularity of documentaries and films about the Second World War might itself be seen as a form of propaganda, in the sense of perpetuating the positive perception of such tactics. Even if their portrayal

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takes liberties with the facts, it is accepted as dramatic licence, rather than disinformation. Overall, the distinction articulated during the Second World War reflected general agreement that ‘white’ propaganda was essentially truthful, and ‘black’ false, that is, disinformation, although various shades of grey might be found in between. That understanding, however, also depends on subjective judgement. For those on the losing side, or who felt the post-war settlement neglected or damaged their national interests, propaganda might be used to rationalise defeat, to create a more positive or hopeful version of events, or to perpetuate resentment. As with the peace settlements at the end of the First World War, the way in which the 1939–1945 conflict ended, and its consequent impact on the political or economic situation of victors and vanquished alike, had an enduring impact. In this context, propaganda could form the basis for the construction or manipulation of a national narrative.

The Role of Information in the Cold War During the 40 years from the immediate post-war period until the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact between 1989 and 1991, governments on both sides of the East-West conflict commonly called the Cold War used both overt and covert information warfare in order to undermine the security of the other, as well as to convince their own citizens of the justice of their cause. At one level, the conflict was ideologically driven, rooted in communism and capitalism, providing a basis for East and West to promote the moral superiority and success (military, political and social) of their respective systems. Each side used propaganda to project an image of themselves that would deter defectors and demoralise opponents, as well as reassuring their citizens of the rightness of their cause. In the case of the Eastern bloc, this meant restricting severely the ability of

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citizens to travel overseas, to avoid exposure to Western prosperity and compare their own position unfavourably. In the West, this meant continuing suspicion and opposition to extreme left-wing politics, particularly in the United States. The resulting distortion meant each side had an imperfect understanding of the true position of the other’s strength and weaknesses, despite intensive intelligence-gathering activities. Three examples from the so-called Cold War period offer an illustration of how difficult it is to disentangle the meaning of propaganda from that of disinformation, and how the subjective judgement of intent complicates the task. The first, and most detailed is an example from the early post-war years, the creation of the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) in 1948; the second concerns the information aspects of the British campaign against insurgency in Indonesia in the 1960s; the third draws on an analysis by a former CIA analyst on the importance of achieving ‘strategic surprise’. For the first two years after the Second World War, the British government under Clement Attlee that took office after Labour’s victory in the General Election of July 1945 pursued a policy of cautious and defensive cooperation with the Soviet Union, a key member of the victorious wartime ‘Big Three’. Military alliance with the West during the war had not moderated the Soviet ideological stance, and difficult negotiations over peace-making soon confirmed that the Russians were not just going to be tough and aggressive interlocutors, but were mounting a propaganda campaign throughout Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia and indeed globally, to counter what they regarded as a triumphalist Western narrative and American economic imperialism. Since the campaign tactics included subversion and espionage, as well as encouraging colonial insurgencies and supporting local communist parties, the distinction between disinformation and propaganda was blurred. According to the

Soviet narrative, if Allied victory had, as the Americans said, made the world safe for liberal democracy, why should it not also make the world safe for state socialism? And if the Americans could ‘interfere’ in European states through the European Recovery Programme, or Marshall Plan, launched by the United States to help its Western European allies in 1947,32 why should there not be a similar grouping in the East, dominated by the Soviet Union? By the autumn of 1947, it was clear that Stalin’s plans for exerting political control on the states bordering the USSR and their immediate neighbours posed a threat to Western interests, not just in Europe but globally, that required a response. For the Soviet Union, 30 years’ experience of Bolshevik propaganda, disseminated on a global scale as described earlier, provided the perfect basis for a renewed campaign of information warfare; it was almost a seamless transition. The campaign was formalised in October 1947 at a conference held in Poland, when nine communist states declared ideological warfare against the ‘imperialism’ of the US and UK, and announced the establishment of an Information Bureau (the Cominform) to coordinate activities and information. This declaration, in the view of the Foreign Office’s Russia Committee, marked the end of the ‘Popular Front’ phase – exerting influence through cooperation with communist parties in other countries – and the opening of a new phase that might be called ‘Communism versus the Rest’, designed to undermine other countries’ socialist or social democratic parties in favour of communists.33 By contrast, the British government’s information warfare capability had been diffused and diluted at the end of the war. With the winding up of the Ministry of Information in March 1946, its responsibilities had devolved to the Foreign, Colonial and Commonwealth Relations Offices, the Board of Trade and the newly created Central Office of Information. Within the Foreign Office itself, a number of different departments, including a News Department and an Information Policy

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Department, pursued parallel and sometimes conflicting campaigns, working through overseas missions and putting out overlapping publications. But none of these efforts was targeted specifically at countering communist propaganda until the creation of the Information Research Department in 1948. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin did not give his agreement for a targeted strategy until the end of 1947, even though a number of diplomats and officials, particularly those with long experience of dealing with Russia, had long argued in favour of a more aggressive policy.34 Bevin, though firmly anti-Communist, understood Stalin’s determination to keep his place at the top table, to establish Russia as a superpower on equal footing with the United States, to gain recognition for the enormous human and material sacrifice that Russia had made in pursuit of Allied victory, and to secure as much reparation as possible to restore the Soviet economy. He also understood the resentment felt in Russia against what was regarded as American arrogance, if not imperialism: indeed, a large section of Bevin’s own party shared that view, though he and Attlee understood the vital importance of solidarity with the United States. In long and draining negotiations on the post-war settlement, Bevin had tried to pursue a fair, but robust policy in response to Russian intransigence, but by the end of 1947, the breakdown of yet another Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, combined with evidence that Soviet propaganda was damaging Western credibility in key areas such as the Middle East,35 finally persuaded Bevin to approve plans for a response. It is the strategy underlying these plans, far more nuanced than the standard anti-Communist line pursued by the Americans, that is interesting in the context of information warfare. For at this stage, the war was to be one of words, not weapons. In a memorandum presented to the Cabinet in January 1948, entitled ‘Future Foreign Publicity’, Bevin argued that to counter the threat to Western civilisation from Soviet Russia and the Communist bloc, it was necessary to

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mobilise ‘spiritual forces’, as well as political and material ones. He carefully drew a distinction between Britain and Europe on the one hand, and the United States on the other: It is for us, as Europeans and as a Social Democratic Government, and not the Americans, to give the lead in spiritual, moral and political sphere to all the democratic elements in Western Europe which are anti-Communist and, at the same time, genuinely progressive and reformist, believing in freedom, planning and social justice – what one might call the ‘Third Force’.

Hitherto, he said, Soviet propaganda had dominated the public space, while Britain had attempted to be non-provocative. Now it was time to go on to the offensive, but in order for the message to reach the broad mass of workers and peasants across the globe, rather than scaring people by stressing Communist aggression and the level of danger posed by the Soviet bloc, British strategy should be to relax international tension. Despite the closeness of the Anglo-American relationship (especially in matters of security and intel­ ligence), Bevin deliberately emphasised the differences between Europe and the United States in their approach to the Eastern bloc, positioning Britain as a bridge between the two.36 ‘What we have to offer in contrast to totalitarian Communism and laissez-faire capitalism’, Bevin wrote, ‘are the vital and progressive ideas of British Social Democracy and Western European civilisation’. It was a classic propaganda strategy, designed to persuade a mass audience of the advantages of freedom and social democracy, as opposed to communism imposed by an authoritarian state. Cabinet approval of the strategy set the wheels in motion for the creation of the new FO Information Research Department, tasked with countering communist propaganda. Its mission was to disseminate factual information – White propaganda, to use the wartime term – to counter what was regarded as disinformation – Black propaganda – being put out by the Soviet Union and other communist countries. But if regarded from the viewpoint of the Eastern bloc, these categorisations

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would naturally be reversed. Both sides continued this information warfare until the end of the Cold War (though IRD was wound up in 1977 by Foreign Secretary David Owen, who disapproved of its secretive nature). Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, with the virtual removal of the ideological element from the modern concept of information warfare, commentary on IRD’s work has been generally critical, based on its secrecy, the use of prominent writers and publishers to ‘front’ its product, the semi-detached relationship it maintained with the rest of the Foreign Office and its ties with the intelligence establishment. There is almost a presumption that while disinformation was only to be expected from the Communist bloc, the Western counterpart should (sticking to the colour metaphor) have been whiter than white. Instead, the perception remains that IRD propaganda was ‘never white and rarely black, but spanned a range of greys’.37 In recent years, a considerable amount of IRD documentation has been transferred to The National Archives, enabling a more balanced view to be taken of its activities, but the full story of IRD has yet to be told. But it is the context of the department’s creation, and an understanding of the subjective element in assessing its work, that sheds light on the complexities of the debate, and of the role of subjective judgement – of discerning intent – in defining what is propaganda, and what disinformation. During the Cold War, these problems of definition preoccupied a number of analysts, as well as those directly involved in adversarial information activities, as the following two short examples illustrate. Sir Robert Thompson, who wrote a seminal work, Defeating Communist Insurgency, based on his experience as a British commander fighting insurgencies in Malaya and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, had some useful observations on what he called ‘information work’, vital to the successful implementation of a strategy that has been quoted ever since for its emphasis on winning ‘hearts and minds’. Though Thompson said firmly that ‘the function of information is to

inform, that of propaganda to persuade’, his description of information work seems identical to propaganda. It was, he said, counter-productive to engage in polemical battles with the opposition, since this inevitably gives publicity to enemy argument. Information work might be directed at the enemy, to reduce the will to fight and encourage surrender; or it might be directed at the local population, to rally support for the government. Thompson advocated the use of understatement and factual information as far as possible, since in order to persuade, you have to be believed, and the ‘most precious asset of the government is its credit in the eyes of the people’. Above all, ‘Propaganda must not be allowed to grow into an object for its own sake: gilding the lily is worse than superfluous, it is actually harmful, for truth made to sound too glowing is no longer believed’. Nevertheless, he admitted the need to tailor information to specific audiences, and to work closely with the intelligence authorities in disseminating it and ensuring it achieved the desired effect. This seems to be straying well over the line into disinformation, so it is perhaps just as well that Thompson notes that it is not the detail, but the impression left on the hearer’s or reader’s mind that is important: the tone of the information, true or false, must, he insisted, be confident and authoritative.38 Another practitioner who attempted in retirement to define the elements of propaganda and disinformation was Cynthia Grabo, a former CIA analyst who published an important work in 2004 called Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning. Grabo is very clear on the meaning of propaganda: ‘all information put forth by any means under national control or direction, which is designed to win over or influence the intended audience’. According to her, if based on fact, propaganda constitutes public diplomacy; but if based on falsehood, should be labelled as disinformation.39 This distinction seems too simplistic: as has been seen, some propaganda may be based, perhaps unintentionally, on falsehood, while a

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disinformation campaign may have a solid basis in fact, albeit distorted. It also begs the question of how she considered that truth and falsehood can be evaluated (even with the analytic resources of the CIA available) and raises the issue of subjective judgement once more. Grabo does not answer this, but does have useful advice on the risks of ignoring information on the grounds that it may be ‘mere propaganda’. Rather, it might be a valuable indication of intention, reflecting what is important to a country’s leadership. She illustrates this with an example from the Vietnam war. In 1965–1966, when the government of North Vietnam issued public appeals for mass enlistment in the armed forces, urging people to work longer hours, and women to take up jobs that freed men from military service, the US intelligence community dismissed these statements as propaganda, refusing to believe that North Vietnam was really planning to send more troops to the South. Instead, they accepted the official line that there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South. But in this case, it was the public statements that were accurate, not the official line, which was a piece of disinformation.

How History Can Help to Develop A Critical Response to Information Twentieth century examples of propaganda and disinformation, and the difficulty of distinguishing them, may seem outdated or even archaic in the digital age. But they contain certain valuable pointers on to how to deal with modern information warfare. They can also inform a discussion about how people can best protect themselves from being victims of disinformation, or at least increase awareness so that they can detect it. Much of the discourse in the early 21st century about both propaganda and disinformation is based on the recognition that instant communications, the 24-hour news cycle and pervasive social media platforms (not to mention cyber

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operations) make it very difficult to distinguish between them or to control their influence. Governments, organisations and major corporations are increasingly exercised about the impact of the availability of constant, uncontrolled information on their institutions and operations, their citizens, clients or consumers. Some are concerned by reports of the detrimental effects of negative information on public health, the potential for encouraging extremist views or the damage to democratic processes. Others are alarmed by the availability of information that might undermine their authority, encourage dissidence and threaten the official monopoly on the ‘truth’. But on all sides, there is a tendency to regard this as a peculiarly modern problem. The speed of technological development has masked the fact that these issues have troubled people since ancient times, and that looking at the past can inform the approach to the problems of the present day. With the historical context in mind, the first question to consider is whether, if it has always been so difficult to distinguish between propaganda and disinformation, and that difficulty is now increased greatly by the speed of modern communications, the distinction really matters at all. In the digital age, everyone, individuals, businesses, organisations and governments, is bombarded constantly with information, factual, accidentally or deliberately misleading, or manufactured. Instead of expending effort on trying to decide whether information is ‘white’ propaganda or ‘black’ disinformation, a more fruitful approach might be to regard it all as ‘information work’, as Sir Robert Thompson formulated it half a century ago when his means of dissemination were erratic radio communications, despatch riders and people delivering messages by hand. It is also useful to ask what we can learn from the way that those who deal professionally in information, in the intelligence or military context, tackle these issues. It may appear that technological advance and differences in global context render the experience

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and knowledge gained through 20th century warfare experience obsolete. In fact, the ways in which intelligence organisations have adapted, and continue to adapt, in a digital environment owe much to developments during both world wars, and during the Cold War. The tests applied by professional analysts to pieces of intelligence: interrogation of sources, fact checking, the need to avoid mirror imaging (assuming that others think and behave like you) and confirmation bias (a tendency to accept information that accords with what you already believe); and the importance of separating separate capability from intent (in the military context, capability plus intent=threat, a formula useful for disinformation too). This provides a sound basis for a critical response to disinformation. And such techniques can be adapted for use by anyone, not just those dealing with propaganda and disinformation on the front line. The most important lesson is that everyone should be aware and accept that, willingly or not, they are exposed to disinformation, and that not everything they see, hear or read is going to be based on fact. In parallel runs the realisation that the understanding of truth and falsehood is not universal: a basic concept, of course, but worth emphasising nevertheless. All information should be assessed critically even if – especially if – the material fits in with what the recipient already believes or ‘knows’. Everyone, young or old, can benefit from learning to adopt a critical approach to information. There are some recent positive developments: for example, the BBC has developed a game, iReporter, in which young people take on the role of a journalist and are challenged to make decisions on which sources, claims, pictures and social media comments should be trusted40; Facebook is hosting a game, devised by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, to teach people how to spot disinformation.41 But much more could, and should, be done to increase public awareness and to enable the development of a critical approach to information of all kinds.

CONCLUSION Elements in this critical approach to propaganda and disinformation, informed by history, might include: • Thinking about and investigating the source of the information. • Checking the content independently. • Asking who might have an interest in putting forward a certain view on the subject. • Rejecting the assumption that the person or organisation expressing a particular view will share your values or world view. This test should be applied to information even when received from trusted contacts, if the original source is not obvious, and to all information acquired through search engines. • Being aware that even if it is impossible to be certain whether information is accurate, distorted or intentionally false, its timing may be significant: sometimes information can be released in order to deflect attention from what is actually happening elsewhere. The motive for this distraction technique may be benign, to avoid panic or prepare the public for unpleasant news; but it may also be to project uncertainty and damage the credibility of an opponent. It may be impossible to detect this while it is happening: the important thing is to be aware that it can happen.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list. It is clearly impossible to expect everyone to adopt a rigorous approach to everything they read, see or hear. But accepting a level of risk is itself part of the educative process. It will always be impossible to weed out deliberate disinformation completely, however much governments may hope to tackle the problem by regulation (a strategy that brings its own risks, of limiting freedom of speech and expression). But if everyone accepts that not all information can be accurate, that a range of different views have validity and that propaganda and disinformation are not just two sides of the coin but may be the same thing, depending on the identity and viewpoint of the source, it would be an important first step. Thucydides and Plato understood that: it is even more vital to do so in the digital age.

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Notes 1  For a useful if dated review of the meanings of propaganda see Fellows, Erwin G. (1959), ‘“Propaganda”: History of a Word’, American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp.182–189. There is, of course, a biological meaning of propagation, not relevant to the current discussion. 2  Black, Jay (2001), ‘Semantics and Ethics of Propaganda’, Journal of Mass Ethics, 16(2&3), pp. 121–137. 3  Among the rich literature on this issue see Jowett, G.S. and O’Donnell, V. (2015), Propaganda and Persuasion (Los Angeles, CA: Sage). 4  www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year/ 5  Wardle, Claire and Derakhshan, Hossein (2017), Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, October, https:// rm.coe.int/information-disorder-report-november2017/1680764666) 6  See, for example, Gery, William R., Lee, SeYoung and Ninas, Jacob (2017), ‘Information Warfare in an Information Age’, Joint Force Quarterly, 85, April, pp. 22–29. 7  Andrew, Christopher (2018), The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (London: Penguin Random House), pp. 436–437. On German attitudes towards the Jews see Kershaw, Ian (2008), Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution (London: Yale University Press), pp. 211–216. 8  For a discussion of this issue, see Sproule, J. Michael (1997), Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 9  An interesting discussion on this point can be found in Davis, Evan (2017), Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit, And What We Can Do About It (London: Little Brown), pp. 165–168 and pp. 180–184. 10  See Mitrokhin, Vasily, ed (2002) KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook (London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd), p. 193. 11  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (1972 edn), (London: Penguin, trans. Rex Warner): see in particular Book Three, discussions on how to deal with the Mytilene Revolt, and Book Six, on the Athenian expedition against Sicily, based on a report that was ‘encouraging, but untrue’ (p. 414). I am grateful to Professor Neville Morley for pointing me to these examples. 12  Plato, The Republic (Everyman’s Library edn,1992), Book III, p. 389, p. 414. 13  Popper, K.R. (1945, reprinted 1986), The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 176–177.

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14  Morley, Neville (2014), Thucydides and the Idea of History (London: IB Tauris), Chapter 4. 15  For evidence presented to the Committee in 2017, particularly that of Professor Neville Morley of Exeter University, see www.parliament.uk/ business/committees/committees-a-z/commonsselect/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/ inquiries/parliament-2017/fake-news-17-19/ 16  Masterman, Lucy (1939), C.F.G. Masterman: A Biography (London: Nicholson and Watson Ltd), quoted in Downing, Taylor (2014), Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code-Breakers and Propagandists of the Great War (London: Little Brown), pp. 282–283. 17  Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 271–282. 18  Andrew, The Secret World, pp. 588–589. 19  On the origins of British intelligence organisations and their development during the First World War and early post-war period see Andrew, Christopher (2009), The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London: Penguin), Section A; Jeffery, Keith (2010), MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909– 1949 (London: Bloomsbury), Part One; on the early history of GC&CS (now GCHQ) see www. gchq.gov.uk/features/story-signals-intelligence1914-2014 20  For a compendium edition of Le Queux’s books (2017) see 15 Dystopian Novels and Espionage Thrillers (Musaicum Books, Kindle edn); Buchan, John (2010), The Complete Richard Hannay Stories (London: Wordsworth Editions); Childers, Erskine (1903) Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (London: Smith, Elder & Co.). 21  Steiner, Zara (2005), The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 62–70. 22  Bennett, Gill (2018), The Zinoviev Letter of 1924: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford: Oxford University Press) gives a full review of this case. 23  Smith, Stephen A. (2014), ‘Towards a Global History of Communism’ in Smith. Stephen A. (ed), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 1–39; Carley, Michael Jabara (2014) Silent Conflict: A hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield), Chapters 3 and 4. 24  On Orlov, see Bennett, The Zinoviev Letter, pp. 38–39 and pp. 239–242; also Bennett, Gill (2006), Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (London: Routledge), pp. 53–54, pp. 75–76. 25  The subtitle of the new book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018), ‘What we Don’t Can’t and Do Know’ indicates the ongoing uncertainty, despite her confident title Cyber War: How Russian

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Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 26  Both MI5 and GCHQ have released a good deal of material from the pre-war and wartime period that demonstrates and range of the British security and intelligence response to Soviet propaganda and disinformation: for this material see classes KV/2, 3, 4 and HW 3, 7, 12, 43, 53 at The National Archives (TNA). SIS archives are not released, but for an account of their anti-Bolshevik activities written with privileged access see Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery, Chapters 3-4. 27  The novelist David Garnett, who worked within the Political Warfare Executive during the Second World, drafted an official history of the organisation some time after 1945. It was published in 2002 as The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939–45 (London: St Ermin’s Press). 28  For the definitions of white and black propaganda in a Second World War context see Foot, M.R.D. (1995), ‘Subversive warfare’, in the Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford University Press), 1084–1090. 29  ‘How the BBC’s truth offensive beat Hitler’s propaganda machine’, The Guardian, 15 April 2017: www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/15/bbctruth-offensive-beat-hitler-propaganda-machine 30  Edgerton, David (2011), Britain’s War Machine (London: Allen Lane), 205–207. 31  On the ‘Double Cross’ system, whereby a large number of German spies were recruited as double agents, see Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, Section C; also Macintyre, Ben (2012), Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (London: Bloomsbury).

32  The British Ambassador in Moscow reported that the Marshall Plan led the Kremlin to decide that ‘the primary objective must be to resist the expansion of American influence in Europe’: Moscow telegram of 8 November 1947, printed in Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO), Series I, Vol. XI (London: Routledge, 2017), No. 192. Detailed documentation on British policy towards the Soviet Union, the Marshall Plan and Western security policy can be found in Volumes X and XI. 33  Note by Russia Committee, 7 November 1947, printed in DBPO, Series I, Vol. XI, No. 167. 34  See FCO Historians, IRD: Origins and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research Department 1946–48 (FCO History Note No. 9, 1995, https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/ historynote9 35  Vaughan, James R. (2005), The Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East, 1945–47 (London: Palgrave). 36  Memorandum by Ernest Bevin for the Cabinet, ‘Future Foreign Publicity’, 4 January 1948, printed in DBPO, Series I, Vol. X, No. 8. 37  Lashmar, Paul and Oliver, James (1998), Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing), Introduction. 38  Thompson, Sir Robert (1966), Defeating Communist Insurgency (London: Chatto & Windus), Chapter 8. 39  Grabo, Cynthia (2004), Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning (University Press of America), 90-92. 40  www.bbc.co.uk/news/school-report-43391188 41  https://apps.facebook.com/login/?next=https %3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fthenewshero

16 Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I Ewan Lawson

INTRODUCTION Whether executing captives en masse, beheading western hostages or burning alive a Jordanian Air Force pilot, the organisation known as Islamic State or Daesh has become infamous for their use of the propaganda of the deed. The idea of the propaganda of the deed has its roots in the late nineteenthcentury actions by anarchists against western states. These were violent acts of terror deployed against the state with the intent of encouraging those states to respond with an excessive and disproportionate use of force such that they lost legitimacy in the eyes of their public (Bolt, 2012 p. 1). As the twentieth century progressed, the ubiquity of the media intensified to such an extent that the approach moved to a focus on committing outrages that captured media attention to highlight the cause of terrorist organisations, reaching a new point with the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 that was played

out live on 24-hour news channels. What Daesh understood and utilised some ten years later was that the information age and digitally enabled social media meant that it could spread its message faster and more widely than ever before. Thus, as it launched attacks on the cities of northern and western Iraq in 2014, it was able to portray itself as a ruthless military organisation evoking sufficient fear that Iraqi security forces simply melted away. However, the focus of this chapter is not on the use of the propaganda of the deed as such, but rather how those on the receiving end of atrocities use this for their own propaganda purposes and the associated risks. Indeed, those very same images from 9/11 were used by the United States to generate political support for a coalition to confront the attackers of Al Qaeda and consequent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as counter-terrorism operations across the globe. It might be argued that Bin Laden

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was ultimately successful in a way that his anarchist forebears would have appreciated in causing the United States to lash out and over-extend itself, but this chapter will instead consider the specific implication that the use of atrocity propaganda can undermine both the impact of the incidents and the use to which they are put. In particular, it will be argued that the careless use of evidence, that could potentially be later used for legal purposes, undermines the utility of that evidence. Further, such use if the evidence can be contested can contribute to the arguments of the ‘anti-propagandists’; those who consider any effort to influence people in the context of conflict as worse in some cases than the act of killing. The chapter will examine the case of atrocity propaganda in World War I (WW1). German actions in Belgium and France, particularly in the first 12 months of the war, were the focus of investigations initially aimed at identifying the perpetrators and the offences, but which later became the material for propaganda efforts targeted at audiences both at home and abroad (Horne and Kramer, 2001, p. 4). In the post-war period, these British propaganda activities became the focus for criticism by pacifists and those who saw wartime propaganda as an evil in itself. The debates still resonate amongst historians today and point to some important considerations for contemporary consideration of communications strategies linked to atrocities. The chapter will first outline the context of the early part of the Great War, the nature of German atrocities, how evidence was collected and for what purposes. It will then consider how this evidence, and also that published by the other allied nations, was used for propaganda purposes focusing particularly on the domestic audience and efforts to encourage the United States to enter the war. It will then highlight the post-war antipropaganda narrative before considering the implications for contemporary communications strategies.

ATROCITIES AND THEIR INVESTIGATION The iconic imagery of WW1 is the mud, death and destruction of trench warfare as portrayed in Blackadder on television and Oh What a Lovely War on the stage and at the cinema. The dominance of these images does not leave much space for consideration of the impact of the war on civilians and yet much of the propaganda imagery produced by the allies was based on the brutality of the German military and showed civilians, particularly women and children, as victims. This apparent contradiction reflects the importance of the impact of the opening months of the war, and in particular, the German invasion of Belgium on how the war was subsequently perceived and exploited for propaganda purposes as compared to later narratives which focused on trench warfare. German military planning was based on the need to defeat France quickly to allow the focus to be switched to fighting Russia in the east. The experience of France’s rapid collapse in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 contributed to a German operational design that sought to overwhelm the French army from the north, and hence to encircle Paris leading to French capitulation. Named after its author, this was the Schlieffen Plan, and a key element of it was the need to move German forces through neutral Belgium. Belgium’s neutrality and independence had been guaranteed by the 1839 Treaty of London, which was signed by Britain, Austria, France, the German Confederation, Russia and the Netherlands, and thus Schlieffen’s Plan inherently necessitated a German breach of international treaty law. Whilst it is not the place of this chapter to analyse the complexities of international law at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is important to note that one of the key debates amongst statesmen and lawyers was the extent to which ‘military necessity’ could and should override the provisions of international agreements (Hull, 2014, p. 27).

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Thus, in August 1914, Germany attacked Belgium with around a million men, calling on the Belgians not to resist as they were not the enemy, and the German army was only seeking transit (Horne and Kramer, 2001, p. 13). This was accompanied by a warning of harsh reprisals for acts of sabotage, in part because this was a German Army that had been scarred by its experience of being attacked by civilian francs-tireurs in the Franco-Prussian conflict in the 1870s. As early as the 5th of August 1914, the first punishment executions of civilians took place and by 8th August there were reports of some 850 civilians being killed and 1,300 buildings burnt down. The Belgian government immediately established a commission of enquiry and ordered that its citizens should not resist unless part of organised military formations (ibid., p. 19). However, the atrocities continued with allegations of hostage taking, the use of human shields, pillage and increasingly offences of sexual violence against women and the deliberate murder of children. These last atrocities against the family were going to be significant in the subsequent development of propaganda narratives, but by the time the conflict froze into the stalemate of trench warfare, 6,427 civilians had been deliberately killed, the town of Louvain had been razed to the ground including its medieval library, the cathedral of Reims had been shelled and Antwerp bombed by a Zeppelin cementing an image of Germany as ruthless and brutal (Hull, 2014, p.53). This was an image that would be reinforced throughout the war through German decisions to use poison gas and conduct unrestricted submarine warfare, but it was those early atrocities that framed the conflict and much of the contemporary propaganda imagery. As early as September 1914, the British Home Secretary and Attorney General, at the instigation of the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, had signed a minute calling for an investigation of the ‘accusations of inhumanity and outrage brought against German soldiers’ (HO 45). However, it was not until December of that year that a Royal warrant was issued

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establishing a Committee under the leadership of Lord Bryce to examine alleged German outrages. Bryce appeared to be a choice designed to limit the potential for criticism of partiality on behalf of the Committee. Educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, he had also studies at the University of Heidelberg and expressed his admiration for German scholarship and German Kultur. Indeed, before the war, he had been a sceptic about the commitment to France implicit in the Entente Cordiale and a supporter of the British Neutrality Committee (Wilson, 1979, p. 370). It is also notable that he had been a highly respected Ambassador in Washington DC which would only add to the credibility of his findings in the United States, a potential target for British propaganda, although there is no evidence that this was a key factor in his appointment. When it was finally published in May 1915 in some 20 languages, the Bryce Report (also known as the Blue Book) was unremitting in its condemnation of the German army. Its conclusion stated that: It is proved:

(i) That there were in many parts of Belgium deliberate and systematically organised massacres of the civil population, accompanied by many isolated murders and other outrages. (ii) That in the conduct of the war generally innocent civilians, both men and women, were murdered in large numbers, women violated, and children murdered. (iii) That looting, house burning, and the wanton destruction of property were ordered and countenanced by the officers of the German Army, that elaborate provision had been made for systematic incendiarism at the very outbreak of the war, and that the burnings and destruction were frequent where no military necessity could be alleged, being indeed part of a system of general terrorisation. (iv) That the rules and usages of war were frequently broken, particularly by the using of civilians, including women and children, as a shield for advancing forces exposed to fire, to a less degree by killing the wounded and prisoners, and in the frequent abuse of the Red Cross and the White Flag (HO 45).

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Perhaps more powerful than these general accusations were the graphic descriptions of incidents that made up the bulk of the report, and in particular those that described the mutilation and sexual abuse of women and children. These descriptions were supported by annexes of evidence made up of excerpts from individual depositions from Belgian civilians and soldiers now refugees in Britain, as well as from British soldiers and also some evidence collected from the diaries of German prisoners of war and their dead. In the introduction to his report, Bryce placed great emphasis on the way in which the evidence had been collected and analysed, emphasising the efforts that had been made to ensure that the process was as scrupulous as possible. It noted that the Committee had reviewed some 1,200 depositions nearly all of which had been collected under the supervision of the Director of Public Prosecutions and had been taken by individuals with ‘legal knowledge and experience’ (ibid.). Whilst the statements had not been taken under oath, the Committee had sought to critically engage with the material and to exclude any that caused concern as to its veracity. However, they also considered the extent to which statements corroborated each other, particularly where those statements had been collected by different people at different times and places. Ultimately, the Committee sought to ‘test the evidence severely’, and stated that ‘so far as conditions permit, we have followed principles which are recognised in the Courts of England, British Overseas Dominions and the United States’ (ibid.). Whilst it is not clear that in 1915 there was any expectation that the material would eventually be used for prosecutions in some form of war crimes tribunal, it is of note that the Committee felt it was important to meet a British legal standard. However, this also makes it clear that the potential of the Report in influencing public opinion in the United States had already been identified. However, despite these reassurances there have been challenges to the credibility of

the Bryce Report. In the Report, the committee had noted that the identity of the witnesses had been deliberately obscured to protect from German reprisals those family members still living in occupied Belgium. However, readers were reassured that the original signed depositions had been retained by the Home Office, where they would be available ‘in case of need, for reference after the conclusion of the war’ (ibid.). Bryce sought to have the original depositions made available in the immediate aftermath of the Report bring published, but unfortunately at some point after the war they disappeared (Wilson, 1979, p. 379). The disappearance contributed to the case made by those who later sought to discredit the role of atrocity propaganda. Further, an examination of Lord Bryce’s correspondence highlights that some of the committee members raised concerns about the nature of the evidence as it had been collected and supplied to them. Sir Frederick Pollock described ‘mere hysterical fiction or delusion’, whilst Sir Kenelm Digby highlighted that the Committee was being asked to comment on evidence that it had not been involved in collecting (Wilson, 1979 p. 374). This was a point reinforced by Harold Cox, who suggested that the Committee ought to be able to directly examine some of the witnesses and noted that in the case of the diaries of German soldiers, they had only been provided with translations and never the original source material (ibid., p. 375). Despite this, the final Report was ultimately supported by the entire Committee which suggests that whilst there might have been debates about the precise legal standard of the evidence, overall, they were convinced of the nature and extent of German atrocities. However, whilst the members recognised that their role was to ‘inform’ the public both at home and abroad, it was the part the Report was to play as a tool for ‘influence’ in British propaganda that contributed most to its chequered history.

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THE ‘RAPE’ OF BELGIUM Much has been written both scholarly and otherwise about the role of propaganda in the Great War and even an episode of the previously mentioned BBC comedy series Blackadder had as its focus the production of propaganda. It is not clear where the specific label of atrocity propaganda comes from, but as early as 1928, the pacifist and antipropagandist Arthur Ponsonby was referring to the importance of ‘atrocity stories’ in Britain’s propaganda campaign (1928, p. 128). Building on the legacy of Ponsonby, there have been suggestions by academics that Britain operated a ‘vast machinery for the production and distribution of propaganda’ albeit recognising that this included government, the press and even charities (Green, 2014, p. 310 and Gullace, 1997, p. 715). In particular, there has been a focus on the strength of the anti-German feeling and the demonisation of Germans prevalent in the Northcliffe Press, and particularly the Daily Mail (Neander and Marlin, 2010, p. 67). In reality, unlike some of its counterparts in the conflict, Britain did not have an established propaganda organisation at the outbreak of the War. However, the government clearly understood the importance of controlling the flow of information, cutting the transatlantic communications cable between Germany and the United States as soon as war was declared (Taylor, 2003, p. 177). Thus, as well as establishing a blockade of maritime trade into Germany, Britain also sought to control how the story of the war was delivered out of Europe as well. This control enabled a positive narrative of Britain’s role to cross the Atlantic and thus initially ensure continuity of trade as well as ultimately contributing to bringing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. So, what were the purposes of Britain’s use of atrocity propaganda in this context? One analysis produced at the start of the World War II suggested that there were six key functions: encouraging soldiers to enlist,

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enabling fighting spirit, contributing to war loans, influencing neutrals, justifying the rejection of peace proposals and imposition of severe peace terms, and to justify breaches of international law, this indicating a broad range of target audiences and emotions to be accessed (Read, 1941 cited in Smith, 1942, p. 127). Recognising the importance of winning the battle of the narrative, the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George was tasked with establishing a propaganda organisation. He chose a fellow Liberal, Charles Masterman MP, to establish the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in London. This was a secret organisation which sought to disguise the source of much of the material about German atrocities, particularly that which made its way to the United States. The approach adopted was low key and selective, seeking to persuade rather than exhort the British government’s case and utilising networks of sympathetic and influential Americans (Taylor, 2003, p. 177). Further, the control of cable communications allowed the news flows into US media outlets to be carefully selected and censored at the direction of the Foreign Office with this latter being part of the reason for the secrecy (ibid., p. 178). By June 1915, less than a year after its inception, Masterman estimated that some two and a half million copies of books, official publications, pamphlets and speeches in 17 different languages had been circulated by Wellington House (Gullace, 1997, p. 717). This included the evidence of atrocities described in the Bryce Report, extracts of which had been published in newspapers across the United States alongside similar material from publications released by the French government and the Belgian government in exile. It should be remembered that in the summer of 1914, the case for Britain to go to war with Germany remained controversial at home. The invasion of Belgium in light of Britain’s commitments to its neutrality in the London Treaty of 1839 gave the moral and legal impetus needed, when the reasons for

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getting involved had been less clear when the cause appeared to be a dispute between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. It was reported in August 1914 that the German Chancellor had referred to the London Treaty as a ‘scrap of paper’, and this apparent disregard for international law became a key theme of the rhetoric deployed by British politicians against Germany even before the focus on atrocities (Hull, 2014, p. 41). Lloyd George told an audience that ‘the man who declines to discharge his duty because his creditor is too poor to enforce it is a blackguard’ and Professor J H Morgan (who had contributed to the Bryce Committee as Britain’s investigator into German atrocities in France) warned against ‘this terrible perversion, this prostitution of words until … they have lost their meaning’ (Gullace, 1997, p. 722 and Morgan, 1916, p. 53). Indeed, this became a theme used by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in a poster describing ‘The Scrap of Paper: Prussia’s Perfidy – Britain’s Bond’ (Imperial War Museum Poster 11370). However, framing the argument in the arcane language of international law did not make engaging the public particularly easy, whereas German atrocities were something that everyone could understand. Thus, the narrative for supporting the war shifted from a primarily legalistic emphasis to one that was more humanist and empathetic, particularly as stories from both the Belgian authorities and refugees arriving in the UK started to be reported in the press. Whilst sympathy can be a significant motivation for a public response, it is also important to consider the role of moral indignation that brought the legal and the humanitarian narratives together. It has been argued that scholars have tended to elevate benevolent moral emotions such as sympathy above those of a more rancorous nature (Woods, 2015, p. 654). The atrocities that would be documented in the Bryce Report became a significant focus for the British propaganda effort, albeit remaining entwined with the legal basis for war: violation of the Treaty of London. In particular,

the assault on families by German soldiers was emphasised (Gullace, 1997, p. 735). From women being raped, mutilated and murdered to children having their hands cut off and killed in front of their families, there was a steady release of atrocity stories. The Hague Conventions, that were the effective laws of war for conflict on land, had sought to broaden the protection of civilians but had remained relatively quiet on issues of sexual violence and the abuse of children, referring only to ‘family honour’ briefly in Article 46. However, the sexualisation of the justification for war proceeded with a developing conflation between the violation of Belgian neutrality with the violation of its citizens thus creating the narrative framework of the ‘rape of Belgium’ (ibid., p. 735). This was accompanied by the portrayal of the Germans as a bestial ‘other’, reflecting the demonisation of the enemy that is so commonplace in wartime propaganda (Imperial War Museum Poster 6066 and Green, 2014, p. 319). This narrative appeared to resonate with audiences both at home and abroad. Whilst the effectiveness of propaganda in influencing attitudes remains contested, the pervasiveness of atrocity propaganda would seem to have contributed both to motivating the home front and encouraging the United States to enter the war in 1917. In the latter case, there is evidence from posters that sought to raise war bonds in the Philippines (under US jurisdiction) and with US domestic recruitment (Imperial War Museum Poster 17281 and Imperial War Museum Poster 0243). Even where the imagery references the unrestricted submarine warfare that did so much to convince President Wilson to join the allies, the resonance of the focus on innocent women and children is maintained (Imperial War Museum Poster 3284). This admittedly limited selection of examples does, however, highlight the pervasiveness of this narrative long after the initial stages of the war and the events described in the Bryce Report, which indicates the extent of its influence on framing

Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I

opinion. However, it is this very success that provided the impetus for the post-war anti-propagandists.

ATROCITIES AND THE ANTI-PROPAGANDISTS As has been noted previously, the Bryce Report, and other allied publications describing German atrocities in addition to their propaganda function, contributed to a developing political and public debate as to whether these atrocities represented crimes and should be dealt with as such through some form of international tribunal. As early as the summer of 1916, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith stated that ‘such crimes shall not … go unpunished’ and ‘when the time arrives [we] are determined to bring to justice the criminals’ (cited in Willis, 1982, p. 31). Asquith’s statement to Parliament came in the aftermath of the execution by Germany of a British merchant ship captain, Arthur Fryatt, who was accused of ramming a German U-boat and sinking it. At around the same time in mid-1916, in an echo of the reports from Belgium in 1914, German forces forcibly deported tens of thousands of men, women and children from occupied cities in France, with stories of families torn apart, young girls raped and mothers forced into prostitution (ibid, p. 32). The issue of potential international prosecution of the Kaiser, his advisers and individual Germans1 for what would later be called war crimes continued to be discussed throughout the war amongst the Allies. Perspectives varied as the war and its conduct ebbed and flowed, but these discussions set the foundation for the formation of the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties as a key element of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (FO 608/245). It was the outcome of the work of this Committee that was enshrined in Articles 227–230 of the final Treaty of Versailles.

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These sought to prosecute and punish the Kaiser and other Germans for the initiation and conduct of the war and were to become part of the controversy that continues to surround the Treaty and its role in creating the conditions for the war to follow less than two decades later. However, in the separate report issued by the Commission, there is an extensive Annex that details the specific crimes with which the Central Powers are charged and includes cases that are ‘not exhaustive or complete but rather a number of typical examples’ including from the Belgian equivalent of the Bryce Report highlighting once again how material ostensibly collected for judicial processes was subsequently used as propaganda (FO 608/245). However, a faltering war crimes process, undermined by the inability of the Allies to extradite the Kaiser from exile in the Netherlands, culminated in a few low-profile trials in Leipzig in the early 1920s. At the same time, in the Allied states themselves, there was a growing argument attacking the war guilt clauses in the Versailles Treaty, primarily based on the view that the war itself was the crime, and therefore all of the participants carried a share of the blame. This was accompanied by an increasing relativisation of German wartime atrocities through three comparative frameworks. First, it was argued that whilst the atrocities were terrible in themselves, they were as nothing compared with the industrial scale of death in trench warfare with nine million dead overall. Second, as stories of Allied soldiers killing prisoners became public, there was a growing idea of a moral equivalence between all combatants in their conduct of the conflict. Last, there was a growing narrative that German atrocities were nothing more than the product of British propaganda (Horne and Kramer, 2001, p. 367). In France, Georges Demartial, a civil servant and pacifist, published a study of ‘the mobilisation of wartime consciousness’ in 1922 which rejected what he believed was a manufactured war culture and its associated

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demonisation of Germany. Further, he suggested that the use of atrocity propaganda, despite the moral equivalence of Allied actions, was designed to induce the people to go to war when they would otherwise not have done so (ibid., p. 368). In Britain, it was the work of Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, that had the most significant impact. As a publication in English, it had a substantial impact in the United States as well, and indeed it contributed significantly to the idea that British propagandists were devious liars and cynical manipulators becoming an orthodoxy (Gregory, 2008, p. 40). Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) was a diplomat, politician, writer and committed pacifist. He was a founder member of the Union for Democratic Control (UDC) which was founded in the early days of the War and which included Ramsay MacDonald, Bertrand Russell and Clement Attlee amongst its members. It was formed as ‘an organisation created to secure the control over their Foreign Policy by the British People, and for the promotion of international understanding’ (Higson, 1984, p. 60). This pacifism influenced Ponsonby in his views on propaganda in general, and atrocity propaganda in particular. From the outset of his work, propaganda is a term used interchangeably with falsehood and lies, with its use by a government being to ‘deceive its own people, attract neutrals and to mislead the enemy’ (Ponsonby, 1928, p. 13). The book is built around efforts to dismantle some of the main propaganda stories of the War including the German Corpse Factory, the Crucified Canadian and the Mutilated Nurse.2 Whilst many of the chapters are about stories that could be included under the heading of atrocity propaganda, Ponsonby delivers an entire chapter labelled as ‘Atrocity Stories’ (ibid, pp. 128–134). He recognises the significance of the Bryce Report, but dismisses the Chairman himself as having been only selected in order to influence opinion in the United States. He then challenges a few of the specific atrocity stories, for example highlighting how the Mayor of Sempst had

given a statement refuting an allegation that a Belgian family had suffered rape, mutilation and murder at the hands of German soldiers in that town. This is typical of Ponsonby’s work, in that individual stories are apparently debunked with a criticism of how the stories were originally collected or created. However, Ponsonby himself does not appear to hold himself to his own standards. For example, that statement apparently given by the Mayor of Sempst was taken in April 1915 when the town was occupied by the Germans. This was clearly not a particularly propitious environment for giving statements critical of the occupiers. Further, Ponsonby’s source was not the statement itself but rather an anonymous pamphlet. Despite these criticisms, academics in the inter-war period began to engage with the concept of atrocity propaganda and in 1938, Read outlined an analytical framework which considered the origin of the material, how it was circulated and the intended use (1938, p. 230). More recently, some historians have begun to engage critically with Falsehoods in Wartime, noting that it contains itself some contentious interpretations and downright invention (Gregory, 2008, p. 41). For example, Gregory analyses Ponsonby’s suggestion that the German Corpse Factory Story had been created by a British Army brigadier, who had admitted such in 1925. He highlights not only the weaknesses in Ponsonby’s use of press sources (referring to stories in publications without reference to dates and which have subsequently not been possible to locate) but also that the idea was mentioned in a poem by Siegfried Sassoon even before it had hit the press. From this and other sources, he suggests that the idea of corpses being rendered was as much a popular folktale or urban myth, rather than a piece of propaganda carefully constructed by the manipulators of Wellington House (ibid, p. 42). However, whilst there is a growing literature that highlights the shortcomings in the work of Ponsonby and other anti-propagandists, their impact remains significant.

Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I

In one of the key phrases of Falsehood in Wartime, Ponsonby states: ‘the injection of the poison of hatred into men’s minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in war-time than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body’ (1928, p. 18). This passionate and strident statement entered the public consciousness at a time at the end of the 1920s when there was a significant revision of perspectives on the outcome of the war. The Amritsar massacre in 1919 had caused some degree of retrospection on Britain’s own legacy of atrocities in war. More broadly, the situation developing in Europe suggested that the hard line taken against Germany in the Paris Peace Process was contributing to instability and lastly, the popular memory of the war was increasingly focused on the experiences of trench warfare. This last took the form in part of a recognition that whilst the press had been quick to talk up the extent of German atrocities, they had been more positive about the conduct and experience of war at the front (Horne and Kramer, 2001, p. 371). Thus, Ponsonby’s apparent identification of widespread manipulation of a gullible population by a Government led conspiracy was received by a broadly sympathetic audience.

ATROCITIES, ANTI-PROPAGANDA AND THE CONTEMPORARY LEGACY Perhaps the greatest impact of the anti-propaganda movement arising out of WW1 and exemplified by Ponsonby was the way that propaganda continues to be a synonym for lies (Robertson, 2014, p. 248). The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: ‘Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view’. NATO’s book of definitions AAP-6 reflects this tone with: ‘[Propaganda is] Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used

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to promote a political cause or point of view’ (NATO 2017, p. 91).3 This negative image has been such that the western democracies in particular have struggled with the use of information in conflict. At a very basic level, this has been reflected in the efforts to find an appropriately neutral terminology in both the military and civilian domains, from psychological operations through information warfare to strategic communications. This terminological dysfunctionality has contributed to further challenges in organisation and resourcing that has been notable in the efforts to counter the messaging of both non-state actors like Al Qaeda and Islamic State as well as states including Russia and China. Whether as individual states, informal coalitions such as that to counter Islamic State, or as alliances and multi-national organisations such as NATO and the EU, it has proved difficult to build the structures and processes to counter the propaganda of that range of adversaries. The debate about the US State Department’s campaign ‘Welcome to ISIS Land’, which used graphic images to challenge Islamic State propaganda, but which was taken offline for embracing the very approaches of the adversary, exemplifies the lack of conceptual clarity. The discomfort moves beyond the negativity associated with the labels to an underlying moral concern, arising in part from Ponsonby’s assertion that falsehoods were worse than killing. Indeed, this has been reflected in military operational targeting procedures that enable the use of force being arguably less controversial than those authorising the use of information. Put bluntly, it can be argued that it has become easier to kill someone than to give them a leaflet. Whilst this is a gross over-simplification, it reflects a frustration that the legacy of the WW1 anti-propagandists has limited the utility of a vital cognitive tool. Discomfort has moved to distrust with evidence of the use of ‘spin’, ‘dodgy dossiers’ and ‘fake news’. Lastly, as has been argued by academics including Robertson (2014), Gregory (2008)

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and Horne and Kramer (2001) the dominance of the narrative of the anti-propagandists has impacted upon the ability to genuinely understand the interaction between messages and the population during WW1. It says something of the power of that narrative that the idea of an all-powerful British propaganda organisation from 1914 and its overwhelming influence on populations both at home and abroad is taken by so many academics as a given when considering that conflict. In particular, it fails to recognise the extent to which the relationship between the government, the press and the public was much more of a conversation. Particularly in the early years of the war, the British public was genuinely shocked by events such as the sinking of the Lusitania, the shelling of small ports on the east coast of England and Zeppelin attacks such that it had no problem recognising the atrocities that had taken place in Belgium as part of a recurring pattern by the German military. This understanding of the historical context of atrocity propaganda and the environment in which it is viewed and understood has been largely neglected by scholars, and study would contribute to both a better understanding of WW1 propaganda and to developing better approaches to the use of information in the contemporary period.

CONCLUSION History has much to teach contemporary policy makers and practitioners, although it is important to recognise that it rarely mirrors but rather resonates and hence provides ideas, lessons and frameworks through which to address the challenges of today. The example of atrocity propaganda during WW1 provides significant insights as to how to approach a number of the issues of communication but it is arguably even more important to recognise the way that it has framed current thinking about information in conflict, particularly in the western democracies.

This is a legacy that can only be addressed by further consideration of that case study, including a more nuanced understanding of the social context in which governments sought to utilise atrocities as a source for propaganda. At the heart of this is a continuing debate about the extent to which any process of communication can be simply about informing an audience without any expectation of influencing them. The case study also highlights a potential tension between the requirement to collect evidence for potential use in legal processes and information for use as propaganda. Whilst the Versailles Treaty is often labelled as a failure with regards to war crimes prosecutions, the discussions in the Paris Peace Process created a foundation which contributed significantly to the development of international humanitarian law. The report of the Commission on Responsibilities discussed in this chapter listed a range of war crimes which for the first time in an international agreement included sexual violence, and specifically rape and enforced prostitution. This list became the baseline for the International Military Tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo at the end of the World War II, and this was of course built at least in part on the work of Bryce and his allied colleagues. In using the material gathered and assessed by the Commission as both potential evidence and as a source for propaganda led to a blurring that subsequently allowed the anti-propagandists to undermine its role for the former as much as the latter. Lastly, given the negative legacy of the anti-propagandists for today’s efforts at communication in conflict, it remains important to build on the work of those such as Robertson (2014) and Gregory (2008) in critically engaging with those works as much as the material which they criticise. Through a combination of a better understanding of the original atrocity propaganda, as well as the work of the anti-propagandists, there is the clear potential to reach a better understanding of the possibilities and practicalities for today.

Atrocities, Investigations and Propaganda: Lessons from World War I

Notes 1  It is recognised that the broader process considered allegations against all of the Central Powers but the focus here is on the relationship between Britain and Germany. 2  Each of these stories are described in detail elsewhere but it was suggested that German corpses from the front were being rendered down for glycerine, that a Canadian soldier had been crucified by German troops during the battle for Ypres in 1915 and that a Scottish nurse working in Belgium had been mutilated by having her breasts cut off, again by a German soldier. 3  It is of note that as recently as 2011 this was not the NATO definition which was at that time identical to that of psychological operations. It was changed to reflect that propaganda is something that adversaries do rather than NATO.

REFERENCES Primary Sources Imperial War Museum: WW1 Poster Collection PST 11370, PST 6066, PST 17281, PST 0243 and PST 3284. Library of Congress: Treaty of Peace with Germany (Treaty of Versailles) www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/ m-ust000002-0043.pdf accessed 1 July 2018 UK National Archive: HO 45 – Bryce Committee Materials FO 608/245 – Materials from the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties

Secondary Sources Bolt, Neville (2012), The Violent Image (Hurst: London). Green, Leanne (2014), ‘Advertising War: Picturing Belgium in First World War Publicity’, Media, War and Conflict, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 309–325. Gregory, Adrian (2008), The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge). Gullace, Nicoletta F. (1997), ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honour: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 102 No. 3, pp. 714–747.

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Higson, N. (1984), ‘The Union of Democratic Control’, Bulletin – Society for the Study of Labour History, September 1984, pp. 60–61. Horne, John and Kramer, Alan (2001), German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (Yale University Press: New Haven). Hull, Isabel V. (2014), A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Cornell University Press: Ithaca). Morgan, J. H. (1916), German Atrocities: An Official Investigation, (E. P. Dutton and Company: New York) – Accessed via Project Gutenburg. NATO (2017), NATO AAP-6 Edition 2017: NATO Glossary of Terms and Definitions (English and French), February 2018. Neander J. and Marlin R. (2010), ‘Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War 1’, Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 67–82. Ponsonby, Arthur (1928), Falsehood in Wartime (Dutton & Co: New York) – Reprinted as a Kissinger Legacy Reprint. Read, James M. (1938) ‘Atrocity Propaganda and the Irish Rebellion’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 229–244. Robertson, Emily (2014), ‘Propaganda and ‘Manufactured Hatred’: A Reappraisal of the Ethics of First World War British and Australian Atrocity Propaganda’, Public Relations Inquiry, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 245–266. Smith, Charles W. (1942), ‘Reviewed Work: Atrocity Propaganda 1914–1919 by James Morgan Read’, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 126–129. Taylor, Phillip M. (2003), Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester University Press: Manchester). Willis, James F. (1982). Prologue to Nuremburg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (Greenwood: Westport). Wilson T. (1979), ‘Lord Bryce’s Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium, 1914–15’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 369–383. Woods Michael. E. (2015), ‘A Theory of Moral Outrage: Indignation and EighteenthCentury British Abolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 662–683.

17 Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda Ron Schleifer

INTRODUCTION This chapter outlines the basic principles of Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s propaganda efforts in assisting their battle against Israel, and the feeble attempts Israel is making in order to counter its opponent’s measures. This battle has far wider implications than solely among the Middle Eastern regions where they take place, as both organizations are merely branches of a global radical Islamic network reaching the Western world as well. Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928 in Egypt. Al-Banna’s purpose was to implement Islam as a political movement, replacing the secular regimes in the Arab world. Its word was carried to the Gaza Strip, which was controlled by Egypt, crowded with Arab refugees who mostly fled the battle zones of southern British Mandate Palestine after the Egyptian army’s failed attempt to take over the newly founded Israel in 1948.

The secular regime in Egypt, headed by Nasser, kept tight control over religious Islamic activists until Egypt lost control over Gaza in the Six Day War of 1967; it then became much easier for proponents of Islam to advance their activities. In the early 1980s, Israel was preoccupied with the secularist PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), which openly declared its wish to obliterate the ‘Zionist entity’. Only in 1988 did the Muslim Brotherhood decide to come out in the open with a coherent ideology mixing Palestinian belief with Islam. The territory of Israel had once been under Islam, and therefore became a sacred ground (waqf); it is therefore the religious duty of all Palestinian Arabs to restore it to Islamic hands. In the ever-shifting balance of power in the Middle East, the Gulf states – primarily Qatar, who supported Hamas in the past, and in recent years, Iran – who took over as Hamas’ main supporter. Saudi Arabia, which found itself surrounded by Shiites from Iran

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

and Yemen, moved to having the semi-clandestine support of Israel. A distance of 280 miles (450 km) to Israel’s northern border, southern Lebanon, hosts the local branch of Iran’s Hezbollah (‘Party of God’). The organization was founded after Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran in 1979, and became the international tool to advance Iranian interests, primarily spreading the Shiite version of Islam throughout the Arab world and planting the seeds of Shiism elsewhere. The mountainous area of Lebanon had been for a millennium a retreat for persecuted religious minorities, and the Shiites were no exception. The large Shiite population in Lebanon received religious indoctrination since the 1950s through clerics sent from Iran. The late 1970s saw the military organization of the Shiites protect their interests, like any other minority in Lebanon, after the civil war of 1976. The Israeli military and their Lebanese-allied Maronite Christians operation, which intended to uproot the PLO from southern Lebanon, deteriorated into a protracted war in 1982 and gave rise to the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. There are many parallels between Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s modus operandi. Both owe their rise to fame to their battles with Israel, and both hide their global aspirations, their affiliation with Iran, and their use of revolutionary warfare doctrine. The revolutionary doctrine formulated by General Giap of North Vietnam comprises of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and psychological warfare. This chapter will focus on the latter. Our time span is from the Second Lebanon War (2006) to the present (2019), where the Gaza Conflict has been in the global media almost daily for the past ten months. Keeping it at the top of the list of global news as a means to politically pressure Israel is quite relevant to the Western world while confronting the challenge of radical Islam. Based on the principles of revolutionary warfare, in particular, psychological operations (PSYOP), this chapter will present the details of how such an operation works.

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PRINCIPLES OF PSYOP The West has grappled with war propaganda for over a century. Propaganda is a complicated subject to deal with, primarily since the Second World War, and connotes a dictatorial tool that liberal democracy should distance themselves from. However, there are no such qualms in the Arab world. The authoritarian regimes rely heavily on propaganda in order to maintain control besides physical measures, and its population perceives it as an inseparable part of political reality. In addition, rhetoric has a very important role in Arab culture; it includes exaggerations, hidden meanings that stem from the rich Arabic language and history. A very thick veil of political correctness hinders the West from seeing through the cultural barriers of the machination of the Arab way of thought; this originates from the goodwill of wellmeaning Westerners not to offend ‘the other’ and less well-meaning Islamic elements that worked hard to blur Islamic intentions regarding the West (see Kramer 2002).1 Since their reorganization in 1968, Palestinian political groups realized that the continuation of Arab propaganda of three decades was of no use and turned to the West to seek assistance. The famous speech of Yasser Arafat at the UN in 1974, where he held an olive branch while wearing a gun holster on his side, was an indication to that switch, considering that the PLO used global-scale terror just two years previously in Munich. Using the basic formula of communication termed by Harold Lasswell nearly a century ago (Lasswell 1948), there are three basic target audiences to whom the PSYOP message is directed in wartime: (i) home, (ii) enemy, and (iii) neutrals. For the home audience, the need is to persuade in order to continue the sacrifice until victory. To the enemy, the messages entail promises of defeat, arguments that war is futile, proof of inferiority, and a bleak future. To the neutrals, the messages are directed at smearing the enemy, through demonization, justifying selves, and

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generally attempting to prevent support to the enemy. In this chapter, we will discuss the audience of the enemy, which is closely interlinked with the neutrals. The delivery of messages also proves difficult in wartime, since the enemy is over the border and knows that messages sent are designed for manipulation and to work against his interest. Yet, the past century provided many creative solutions to this problem, by methods such as falsifying the true source of the message (euphemistically called ‘black propaganda’), taking over the enemy’s broadcast channels, making the message relevant to the enemy’s wellbeing, and many more. The emergence of the global digital age has introduced a variety of methods of communicating with the enemy, giving the doctrine of PSYOP an unprecedented boost.

PSYOP IN THE MIDDLE EAST The history of modern use of PSYOP in the region dates back to the Second World War.2 The Italian fascist regime promoted its policies in the Middle East through Radio Bari, which aired programs in 17 regional dialects of Arabic (MacDonald 1977). The German Ministry of Propaganda headed by Dr Joseph Goebbels had a large Arabic section, assisted by Haj Amin al-Husseini (Herf 2010). The British were also fighting for the hearts and minds of Arabs in the region, using radio and leaflets, knowing all the while that their presence in Egypt was conditional to winning the Second World War. After the Egyptian and Syrian failure to take over Israel in 1948 in a coordinated attack, former Nazi propaganda operators were hired both by Egypt and Syria to launch a propaganda war against Israel (Wegner 2007). The sediment of such antiSemitic imagery remains in Arab stereotypes of Jews to this day. Following the Six Day War, the Palestinians reorganized under Arafat’s Fatah movement, the largest faction of the umbrella organization

known as the PLO. Fatah activists realized that old infiltration tactics into Israel were not sufficient for a significant political change and looked for a substitute. They saw the success of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algiers and that of the Cuban revolution, and primarily to that of the North Vietnamese over the United States; Moscow sent Cuban trainers to Lebanon to train the PLO (Shultz 1988, 111). The latter was most significant because in real time, Fatah activists were able to see how a small national movement could cause a global superpower to lose its political will, despite enormous investments in material and manpower. What the Americans called PSYOP became of special interest. As mentioned previously, it was coupled with terrorism and guerrilla warfare, but these were now coordinated differently to maximize effect. The PLO switched to global-scale terrorism, expulsion from its Lebanese base in 1982, and an Intifada, and a covert dialogue with the United States moved to open politics, resulting in the Oslo Accords of 1994.

HAMAS All the while, Islamic organizations kept a gradual build-up of their use of PSYOP. The process in Arabic is called daawa, which loosely translates as spreading the faith by preaching; in practice, it is more like the process of enabling full conscription to a movement. With foreign assistance, mosques were erected in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, as were religious schools, social welfare allocations, football clubs, and summer camps. Hamas, which was headed by blind disabled Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, kept quiet on the public arena while conscripting disillusioned Palestinians weary of secular corrupt PLO activists, who, as often happens with revolutionary movements, had a taste of the good life that comes with success (Uzrad 2005).

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

Hamas appeared in the open shortly after the outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987. For fear of becoming obsolete and irrelevant, it joined forces with its rival, the PLO. The PLO paid lip service by giving the so-called spontaneous outbreak of the Palestinians a religious flavour; the leaflets that instructed and encouraged the Palestinians were adorned with religious phraseology. Hamas set out to copy the PLO in terms of PSYOP, coupled with terror and guerrilla operations, such as kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers, which the PLO had abstained from in order to give the Intifada a nonviolent image. Hamas began by publicizing a charter just like the PLO did in 1965 and 1968 (see Israeli 1990). It relied heavily on the Quran and Islamic traditions, ignoring the positive sections on the Jews (‘people of the book’) and emphasizing the negative parts (‘sons of apes and pigs’). It set up a network of newspapers, magazines, and media relations with Israel and the foreign press corps just like their secular rivals had done since the mid1970s. Hamas soon had another rival who thought it was becoming soft on the ultimate goal: the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Yet despite internal strife, assassinations, and struggle for local hearts and minds, all three organizations joined forces in order to convince the Israeli government and public that Israel’s presence in the Gaza Strip was futile. The strategy was ancient. The Romans called it divide et impera (divide and rule) and in PSYOP jargon it is called ‘driving a wedge’. The purpose is to split enemy society and set each faction against each other. The results were astonishing. In October 2000, Arafat launched the Second Intifada, replete with suicide bombers and violence, unlike the first Intifada 12 years earlier. The PLO had to show that it was a match to Hamas and developed its own suicide units. Many of the recruits came from official Palestinian Authority orphanages (Sabag 2018).

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In 1994, following the Oslo Accords, Israel withdrew from Gaza City, then gradually from parts of the Gaza Strip, and finally, in 2005, evacuated by force 10,000 Israeli settlers who were encouraged by the former government three decades earlier to settle there in order to increase Israeli security. For the duration of the ‘disengagement’, as it was called, all Palestinian factions kept still in order not to give opponents of the evacuation any political ammunition. When the evacuation was complete, Hamas struck again; in June 2006, it abducted an Israeli soldier and started a brilliant campaign that wrecked Israeli society for five years. IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was held in captivity, and whenever Hamas thought the Israeli public interest had died down, it stirred the Israeli debate with another sign of life from the abducted soldier. Five years later, Hamas felt (according to the guerrilla rule) that it should not push Israel too much and returned the abducted soldier in exchange for 1,100 convicted Palestinian terrorists.

PRINCIPLES OF GUERRILLA WARFARE A fundamental rule of the guerrilla is what the US Army field manual on battlefield deception calls ‘the law of small numbers’ (Department of the Army 1988). The guerrilla, due to its inferiority in resources, has to walk a tightrope; on one hand, it harasses the state, yet on the other, it is very careful not to overdo it, for fear of reprisal by the government. Thus, Hamas started shooting mortar shells at uninhabited areas in southern Israel at long intervals, then shortened the time between each shooting, then increased the payload using homemade rockets (Qassam, named after Islamic rebel Abdul Azziz al Qassam, who fought the British Mandate authorities in mid-1930s Palestine).3 Finally, it launched heavy rockets at Israeli towns and communities in southern Israel. Hamas

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knows it has to be careful not to cross the line in order not to provoke a large-scale Israeli attack.

oil refineries. The purpose of this cat-andmouse game was to wear out the IDF, boost Palestinian morale, and return the world’s attention to the Palestinian issue – an age-old Palestinian goal.

‘Whatever You Do, You’ll Fail’ Another guerrilla principle designed to despair the enemy is the principle of effective measures. The guerrilla shows that whatever means the government will undertake, it is bound to fail. If Israel tried to bribe the Palestinians through improving conditions, the PLO made sure – occasionally using brute force – not to take part.4 When Israel used nonlethal means, wooden batons, to quell mass demonstrations, the Palestinians created an effective campaign highlighting Israeli brutality. When the IDF used tear gas, the Palestinians responded with a campaign whose sarcastic theme was the irony of Jews using ‘gas’. Palestinians realized that rubbing an onion on one’s face when a tear gas grenade is launched undermines the majority of its effects.5 During Hamas’s 2018 Million Man March, it used the old PLO stratagem of nonviolent action (NVA), combining Gandhian nonviolent strategies with arson and guerrilla operations. One million Palestinians threatened to cross the Gaza fence and walk to their ancestral homes in Jaffa and Lod. Israel positioned snipers to prevent Hamas operatives from cutting the fence. The march was stopped, but Hamas announced that in the next attempt, the marchers will use thousands of mirrors to undermine Israeli snipers. Hamas also showed photographs taken from Hamas operative cameras that were installed on their guns. Hamas dragged the IDF into a cat-andmouse attrition process; it set tent encampments next to the border, providing a human shield against IDF attempts at securing the border. When that failed, Hamas gathered car tires in large quantities and set them on fire, creating a smoke screen. Israel retorted with large water cannons and blowers taken from

Overloading the Enemy System One of the main principles of a revolutionary movement is what Maurice Tugwell (1981) called the switch from ‘asset to liability’. It is designed to persuade the enemy that the cost of his position is going to override the reward. The costs can be financial, political, or social. The Palestinians have been using this principal since the mid1970s; they had a smear campaign against Israel during a period longer than the Cold War. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, on the street, or on campus is but one result of this campaign. The terror and guerrilla campaigns forced Israel to invest vast sums in anti-missile campaigns. The Israeli media noted that while an Iron Dome missile costs $50,000 to $100,000, a Qassam (also known as a Katyusha) rocket costs merely a fraction of this sum. The same applies to the tunnel warfare copied from Vietnam. The tunnels dug by the Palestinians are seldom used, but the idea that the Gaza Strip has a subterranean tunnel network causes the IDF great concerns. In March 2018, the Palestinians cleverly revived the date of the once effective IsraeliArab protest ‘Land Day’ of the 1970s, which fell on the Jewish holiday of Passover. By sounding war drums, the IDF annulled leave for tens of thousands of soldiers and officers, causing wide-scale bitterness among them and their families. The diplomatic and the public image battleground were activated as well, bearing achievements for the Palestinians, such as a positive image in the international media and with international organizations. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced its intention to investigate

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

whether Israel performed war crimes, and the UN issued a favourable statement. The subject fell perfectly under the old module of the persecuted versus the pursuer, the nonviolent versus the aggressive, of the past successful decades since the First Intifada.

Demonization The major theme underlying most of Hamas’s messages is demonization. Mastered by the British during the First World War, the Germans in the Second World War, and the Communists in the Cold War, Hamas has brought its use against Israel to new heights. One could argue against the invented elements of previous campaigns of German or Bolshevik cruelty or of Jewish cleanliness, but when Hamas brings Muslim religious quotes about Jews being descendants of apes and pigs, it is impossible to argue since they are based on religion. This message is directed towards home, enemy, and neutral audiences alike. To the home audience – Gazans, Palestinians in general, and the Arab world – the purpose is to dehumanize Israelis, and Jews in general, who are perceived as supporting them. Hatred rallies against an enemy and makes it easier to kill that enemy. To the Israelis, the purpose is to frighten, to show them there will be no compromise: ‘See how primitive our hatred is’. To the neutrals, the purpose is a mixture of both. It is as if they are saying, ‘We are primitive and therefore ruthless. If you withdraw your support of the Jews, you’ll have a (temporary) respite, and possibly enhance dormant anti-Semitism, where medieval Christian anti-Semitism used the image of Jews feeding from a sow as well’.

Hamas Inside Israel As part of the overall strategy to subdue Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood joined hands

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with Sheikh Raed Salah, the leader of the Northern Faction. Salah, a born-again Muslim, is an Arab-Israeli who heads a growing Islamic organization within Israel. He is generally careful with his statements, yet his sermons and calls for redeeming ‘the sacred land on which Israel is built’ keeps him in and out of Israeli prisons. Salah’s headquarters in central Israel provide a constant reminder to the Israeli public that the conflict is insoluble, unlike the promises of the secular PLO of old. The Northern Faction (complementing the southern Israel Muslim Bedouins) organizes demonstrations, has an active media centre, and cultivates political connections with various bodies, primarily Israeli Arabs and international Islamic and pro-Arab bodies.6 It treads the thin line of not harming Israeli security,7 while publicly decrying the injustice caused to Palestinians, all the while continuing the process of preaching and teaching radical Islam to Israeli Arabs – especially the young generation.

HEZBOLLAH Like all other factions in the Middle East, Hezbollah hastened to found an information branch from the first stage of its inception. The network included newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations, most famously the TV station Al-Manar (The Beacon), which attracted even Israelis when it cleverly exploited their anxiety over the wellbeing of their soldiers in the security zone in Lebanon in 2006 (Schleifer 2009). Years later, the Iranian involvement in Hezbollah became clear when the FBI uncovered networks that transferred funds of contraband and drug deals. A legal battle ensued when Israel complained that Al-Manar had become a global cable television broadcasting service in the US and in EU countries (Commonwealth of Australia 2010; Conway 2008; Weiser 2008).

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Messages Hezbollah had a very simple message at first: ‘Leave Lebanon’. It was short, comprehensible, and sensible. It was along the line of messages from an ‘asset to liability’ shift, namely to exact a price for the lives of Israeli soldiers and worked in an unclear relationship with the Israeli Four Mothers organization.8 The latter gathered momentum in Israel by pushing the government to leave from the security zone back to Israel. Israel attempted to exploit the historical rift between the Maronite Christians and the Shiites in South Lebanon and formed the South Lebanese Army (SLA), but Hezbollah penetrated the SLA through assassinations and threats, first aimed at intelligence units and later towards operational forces. The SLA deteriorated in efficiency and had to rely on Israeli support. Hezbollah gave a few interviews to the international media, branding itself as ‘freedom fighters’ who have no other claim but throwing Israel back over the border. This goal was achieved in May 2000, when overnight the IDF withdrew from Lebanon swiftly, leaving behind military equipment and thousands of its former supporters. The message of Hezbollah shifted immediately afterward. It was coined in a speech given by leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on May 26, 2000, comparing Israel’s social strength to that of a spider’s web. The idea in essence delineates the old revolutionary message ‘You have more guns, but we have more willpower to sacrifice’. After a while, the organization started the next phase, ‘Freedom of Jerusalem’, which went in line with the Iranians commemorating Jerusalem Day, one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s strategies to bridge the gap between Sunnis and Shiites. From then on, until 2006, the strategy has involved a gradual increase of armed hostilities against Israel. Then Nasrallah made the mistake of miscalculation, attacking an IDF patrol on the Israeli side and abducting two soldiers. The abduction deteriorated quickly into a full-scale war,

dubbed the ‘Second Lebanon War’. Central Israeli cities were bombed with mediumrange missiles, and Israel retaliated by flattening the Dakhia quarter in Beirut, which housed Hezbollah’s headquarters. Nasrallah had over-yanked the chain of the enemy, a mistake he fully acknowledged (Smith 2006).

‘We Are Always Victorious’ Shortly after the war ended in October 2006, Lebanese Shiite children were taken to a hastily erected ‘victory museum’ housed in a large tent, displaying a damaged Israeli armoured vehicle and light firearms. The idea was to establish a victory consciousness among the Lebanese Shiites and their supporters; after all, Israel retreated, the Israeli prime minister was demoted, and Nasrallah remained in power. The same process occurred in Egypt after the Yom Kippur War (1973), where three weeks after the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack, Israel defeated the Egyptian army and was within close range to Cairo. Yet the Egyptians developed a campaign outlining the Egyptian ‘victory’, and the crown jewel was the enormous October 1973 victory museum in Cairo.

Deterrence Hezbollah leaked information about its missiles’ ability to cover all of Israel. Israeli sources estimated Hezbollah’s arsenal included 100,000 rockets of various size and carriage capacity (Kenner 2018). Though no missile was shot at Israel by Hezbollah since the 2006 war, the idea that Hezbollah had such a capacity was a scratch on the Israeli collective psychological cortex. In the ensuing conflict in its southern border, Israeli officials admitted that the IDF was instructed to contain the conflict, for the real issue was the threat from the north, namely Hezbollah’s missile arsenal. This was a clear indication that Hezbollah’s deterrent messages were working.

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

‘You Will Fail’ In a master stroke of amplification of their war message, Nasrallah announced in a prerecorded message during the 2006 war, that an Israeli vessel would soon be hit. Indeed, a land-to-sea Iranian missile was shot at an Israeli navy vessel, killing three. Though the damage was controlled, it gave the organization great prestige. It showed once again that the enemy may have superior war machines, as if Hamas is saying: ‘But we are the cunning ones – under all circumstances’. When Israel tried to silence Hezbollah’s mouthpiece, namely the Al-Manar TV station, by bombing from the air, Hezbollah switched to an alternative relay station and continued broadcasting. The content of the messages was less relevant than the principle ‘Despite your might, you cannot silence us’, which projected the overall message of ‘whatever you will do, you will fail’.

ISRAELI PSYOP Israel has a very dubious record regarding deploying PSYOP in its war doctrine. When asked about hasbara (Israel’s synonym for counterpropaganda), Prime Minister Menachem Begin quipped, ‘We have no need for Goebbelses’ (Jews Sans Frontieres 2010). This reflects the Israeli attitude towards promotion of its image, especially in wartime. A small PSYOP unit called LOM (acronym for Lochamat Modi’in [Intelligence Warfare]) worked within the operations security branch of Aman (the IDF’s intelligence branch). LOM was disbanded in 2004, only to be hastily reassembled in 2006 and had to improvise – in the best of Israeli military tradition – four months later, when it was called upon to perform in the Second Lebanon War (Shadmi & Ravid 2005). Israel’s predicament vis-á-vis Hamas originates primarily from the indecision surrounding the future of the Gaza Strip. The

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Palestinians have conducted an effective revolutionary warfare campaign (i.e. terror, guerrilla, PSYOP) and managed to make Israel withdraw first from Gaza City, then from the entire Gaza Strip, only to find that a fence is no obstacle to tunnels and missiles. Israel is reluctant (save for a few thousand evacuated settlers) to return to the Gaza Strip for fear of a renewed counter-campaign, taking into consideration the state of hundreds of thousands of youth radicalized by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad educational systems. This state of indecision prevents Israel from formulating the military goal that PSYOP is called upon to support. This state of affairs places the IDF in a permanently passive state. Meanwhile, Israel is losing its sovereignty in the south to an arson attack torching thousands of acres of forest and cultivated fields. There is no indication, at least as identifiable in open source intelligence – in Israel that the IDF has a plan for ‘the day after’, once the Gaza Strip is taken and Hamas is overthrown. It signifies a lack of will to govern the strip.

Dissemination In the past, Israel relied on two main channels for dissemination: its government’s Kol Israel Arabic Service and paper leaflets. Until the 1980s, the Voice of Israel had wide listenership among Arab audiences in the Middle East, but deteriorated quickly once environmentalist protests banned installing antennae in the centre of Israel, thereby curbing reception as far as the Gaza Strip a mere 50 miles away. Lack of government investment in the Arabic service, coupled with the gradual retirement of the veteran Jewish broadcasters born in Arab countries, led to low moral and political accusations with their Israeli-Arab replacements, which led the deterioration further. Since the War of Independence in 1948, in times of armed conflict, the IDF used paper leaflets scattered from airplanes and continue

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to do so to this day. The limitations of the paper leaflets are quite obvious: messages are limited to one page, distribution is dependent on weather conditions and on the cooperation with the air force, to mention but a few. However, leaflets are an effective tool when it comes to directing desired behaviour, such as the evacuation of an area before a ground operation, or to announce cease-fires and times or the location of human aid. During the great Hamas campaign of the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010, a young officer initiated a YouTube channel of clips coming (extremely late) from the IDF. This was the beginning of a small IDF operation in the social media sphere. Nowadays, the IDF delivers messages through Twitter, Facebook, and its own website. It deploys an Arabicspeaking officer to communicate directly with Arab audiences; however, this activity is still in its embryonic stages.

Israeli Counter-PSYOP Messages A review of Israeli PSYOP messages reveals that nearly all Israeli messages have been reactive or apologetic. As mentioned previously, since its inception, the IDF had a minuscule PSYOP component that was kept very low in the army’s pecking order. To this day, despite declarations to the contrary, the IDF prefers kinetics to persuasion. Therefore, a lack of resources has led to small-scale activities, and the army’s policy of short time spans between commission has caused a lack of organizational memory. Along with a tradition of secrecy on PSYOP operations, this leaves any new PSYOP officer to begin operations from scratch.

Obstacles Israeli messages are crippled by two more elements: a lack of cultural understanding and the religious obstacle. In the 1940s and 1950s, Israeli intelligence had the advantage

of comprising officers who grew up in Arab countries, with a close cultural understanding of the Arab world. The younger generation of analysts acquire their knowledge of Arabic and Arab culture from academia, which for decades has been hindered by political correctness and focuses on the admittedly rich culture of the Arab world rather than the deadly aspirations of radical Islam. The most serious obstacle is the religious barrier. From its inception, Israel has been based on socialist Zionism, which overtook the Zionist movement since the beginning of the twentieth century. Zionism to a large extent perceived itself as a rebellion against the older Jewish community and excluded religion from its operational code. Therefore, when the Palestinians regrouped in 1968, they spoke in secular terms such as, ‘We aspire for a secular democratic independent Palestinian state’. It fitted well with the Israeli political, security, and intelligentsia leaders to seek a political rational territorial solution that would lower the Palestinian pressure while safeguarding Israeli interests. This all changed when Hamas and Hezbollah came to the fore. The messages they presented were essentially religious, stating that Israeli leadership, secular by nature, is ill-equipped to deal with it. The Israeli message and general modus operandi seek the rational interest, the Western-style short time span, and honouring of signed agreements. They cannot fathom that the Islamic tradition is authoritative by nature and, based on Islamic principles, seeks to implement ‘God’s will’ on the world; it can therefore wait centuries if needed, and a signed agreement is as Mohammad had shown, but a temporary means to an end. Hamas and Hezbollah are opting for the long-range goal, that is, the vanquishing of Israel with no interim stages or step-by-step strategies. The backbone of their message is ‘prepare to die’ or at best acquire the status of tax-paying dhimmis. In terms of appealing to the neutrals, Hamas and Hezbollah use the fundamental theme of demonization,

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

according to which Israel is the incarnation of Satanism. It kills mercilessly women and children, all it desires is to expand, it controls via the Jewish lobby and the international banking system of the US government and the international media.

‘Driving A Wedge’ Despite all the above-mentioned constraints, Israeli PSYOP managed to succeed in some cases. Their main practice has been the wedge-driving principle. As both Hezbollah and Hamas operate within a polarized society to the verge of taking to arms, Israel appealed to Lebanon that Hezbollah is a foreign agent operating for the benefit of Iran; as such it would not hesitate to burn Lebanon to the ground. The purpose was to set the Lebanese Christian and Sunni population against Hezbollah, which diverts much effort to position itself as a Lebanese patriot. The same applies to Hamas. Since the Palestinian society comprises of tribes, clans, and minorities, which were politically divided between PLO and Hamas supporters, Israel was able to appeal to PLO supporters in Gaza, raise concerns over Hamas, and tighten its grip over the Gaza population, which in turn raised the Gazan dissatisfaction level. Thus, Israel aired clips taken from unmanned aerial vehicles that showed Hamas stealing humanitarian aid for its members and cement meant for home reconstruction being used for tunnels. An oft-used ploy that is designed to drive a wedge is the message that provides contact details for those Lebanese or Gazans who wish to save their lives and report to the IDF that their homes were turned into weapon caches by Hezbollah or Hamas. Israel promises it will give ample warning before it bombs the location in order to give the family a chance to flee in time. There is no data about how many calls were made, but there are reports of successful efforts to hack into those websites. In the Gaza War of 2009,

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reports were saying that Hamas confiscated cell phones from Fatah activists for fear that they would contact Israel and give over vital information (Hass 2009). The overall survey of Israeli propaganda vis-à-vis Hamas is reflexive; most Israeli efforts are conducted to negate Hamas’s messages, mainly allegations of using excessive force against noncombatants. The IDF’s military police is tasked with the investigation, which naturally takes a long time. By the time conclusions are published, Hamas produces numerous other stories. In general, the occasional Israeli discoveries of Hamas’s breach of agreements, by smuggling war materials into Gaza, hardly reaches international media. This is due partly to the nondramatic factual manner in which this information is presented to the international media (as in the capture of the weapon-loaded ship Karine A) or the Palestinian meta-story that Israel is to blame for the closure regarding the Gaza Strip.

COMPARING PROPAGANDA METHODS It is clear that the Islamic movements rely on propaganda, while Israel focuses on kinetics. However, the IDF has been taking measures to use propaganda to some extent, especially during particularly violent periods (Schleifer 2016, 149–164). The overriding theme of Hamas and Hezbollah is essentially religious, that since they are followers of the ‘true faith’ (regardless of their enmity as Sunnis and Shiites), they are certain of their godly victory. This idea is embedded in most of their PSYOP themes and strategies, such as Israel’s due failure, imminent victory, or demonization.9 In sharp contrast, Israel totally ignores the religious aspect of warfare and focuses on a pragmatic, rational approach: cease resistance and keep the calm for our mutual benefit. This is presumably because the leading ethos in the Israeli social elite is fundamentally

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secular. Israel stresses its hi-tech achievements, its Western culture, and its location in the Middle East as a ‘villa in the jungle’, according to former Defense Minister Ehud Barak. The use of the Jewish religion is highly polemic. No better example is the uproar caused by infantry Givati Brigade commander Colonel Ofer Winter, who is religious, quoting verses from the bible in a letter to his troops before entering the battle over Gaza in 2014. There is a tremendous misunderstanding on behalf of the IDF as to the potential of religion as a propaganda theme against two enemies whose prime declared motivation is religious.

Recent Advances In the latest phase of the conflict, in summer 2018, beginning with Hamas’s alleged nonviolent March of the Million, some small advances in the distribution channels have been made. Social media is slightly more in use by senior Israeli officials. Thus declared the Ministry of Defense that the Israeli ‘code red’ warning that is used in cases of Hamas rockets landing in Israel can colour the Gaza Strip as well. General Kamil Abu Rokon, head of the Israeli government’s COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), which is in charge of contact with Palestinians, tweeted that Hamas does not see the interests of the Gazan population but rather the Iranian. Obfuscating the Israeli message, the IDF chief of staff was leaked as saying that his moral standards prevented him ordering the IDF to shoot at youths who were using helium balloons to set Israeli southern fields ablaze (Sadan 2018). In the north, the IDF organized a smallscale media event by exposing some of Hezbollah’s attack tunnels reaching into (or under) Israel. These tunnels were designed to move hundreds of operatives and their equipment in a short time in order to take over territory and proclaim a temporary victory

until Israel summoned a counterattack. In an Islamic context, such a victory has a far higher propaganda value than holding territory. The tunnels are a superb craftsmanship of work, as the terrain is rocky, unlike the sandy texture in Gaza. The discovery of the tunnels was a serious blow to Iran’s strategy in the region. Yet in terms of propaganda, the IDF failed to exploit the episode into a propaganda victory and the story died within a few days.

CONCLUSION Looking at the PSYOP aspect of the ArabIsraeli Conflict from a decade-long perspective reveals the old adage of ‘nothing new under the sun’. The Israelis have the upper hand in manpower, material, and technology; the Palestinians respond with propaganda along with a gradual increase of violence, yet are careful not to over-yank the chain, preventing Israel from having to use its kinetic military capability. This study highlights the importance of PSYOP as a politico-military tool to withstand against a stronger military force. As mentioned previously, the lessons from Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s rivalries with Israel have further-reaching consequences beyond just the Middle East. Both Sunni and Shiite radicals have worldwide aspirations. They maintain a global network of both material and ideological support (Leuprecht et  al. 2015). Their methods of propaganda use are therefore of great significance, particularly the religious aspect. If propaganda is to be used throughout the Western world in countering radical Islam, it is worthwhile studying the Israeli case. As in the past five decades, the Palestinians have always demonstrated a high level of originality, ingenuity, and organizational flexibility in deploying PSYOP against Israel. This brought them a de facto state, split Israeli society, and embittered Israel’s existential routine. Hezbollah has done the

Countering Hamas and Hezbollah Propaganda

same and caused Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, endanger its northern flank, and limited Israel’s options of political and military manoeuvres. To Israel’s detriment, the changes in Syria over the past decade have brought the Iranians into a closer involvement against Israel. Nasrallah’s oft-repeated messages regarding Hezbollah’s bombing capabilities deter Israel from operating against the organization, as the worst-case scenario may be a coordinated attack against Israel from the south, the north, the east, and, as indictments show, also from the centre by Arab-Israelis (Lewis & Fisher-Ilan 2010). Hezbollah’s novelties in the north have been to erect a long line of watchtowers along the Israeli–Lebanese border and man it with operatives openly filming and taking notes. These watchtowers are so close to the border that a battle of shouts and obscenities often takes place in order to upset the Israeli soldiers.10 Needless to say, Hezbollah covered the watchtowers with signs in English saying these structures are used by the NGO Green Without Borders for environmental purposes (Tazpit Press Service 2017). In the south, Hamas keeps yanking the Israeli chain by torching Israeli fields and forests via primitive yet inventive methods. This has been going on for eight months and is having far more serious consequences than just in the south due to the copycat effect taking its toll in other regions of the country. The theme of the government’s imminent failure has endured for a long time, and Israeli government sources keep leaking to the Israeli public that in light of the tension in the north, the best solution is the policy of containment. In the second half of the twentieth century, Communist regimes exploited Western guilt by initiating incidents where its civilians were purposely injured, like North Vietnam’s setting the homes of the weapon industry workers next to the factories, knowing they would be bombed by the United States Air Force. Afterwards, the North Vietnamese

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government would invite celebrities, such as Jane Fonda, to be publicly shocked by the consequences. The PLO shelled Israel from hospitals and schools in South Lebanon in the late 1970s, and after Israeli artillery shot back at the ‘source of fire’, the PLO invited the Western media to protest against Israeli brutality. Hamas followed suit and placed its rocket launchers in UNRWA schools and civilian locations to invoke the same results. Israel tried protesting and provided evidence to that effect, but results were minuscule. It was either due to the fact that an investigation takes time or to the successful control over the foreign media in the Gaza Strip, as they were forced to rely on local stringers – who are, incidentally, Hamas operators. On the other side of the equation is Israel, with its ambiguous attitude towards PSYOP. In one particular case, Hamas operatives captured a hawk and fitted it with a harness carrying an incendiary charge. The hawk was photographed trapped on a tree on the Israeli side of the border. The photo was a golden nugget in terms of PSYOP, but nothing was done with it by the Israeli PSYOP unit or the IDF spokesman. On a much larger scale, the IDF failed to use the images of the scorched areas, flora and fauna, to invoke international anger at Hamas. All in all, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s military failures can be attributed to their sponsor, Iran, which opts for a head-on collision with Israel towards a decisive quick victory. This strategy stands in stark contrast to the previous PLO policy of the ‘stage doctrine’, which stresses step-by-step progress towards eliminating Israel. In this case, apparently PSYOP has no strategic influence over Israel and causes it to rely on its kinetic power while absorbing small-scale blows to its image along the way. A possible explanation to this situation is the anomaly pointed out by countless surveys on the happiness index, which shows that Israelis are most satisfied with their lives; they feel that their army is among the strongest on a global scale, and that the Israeli economy is

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booming, while its past arch-rivals are preoccupied in a struggle of survival.

Notes 1  The popularity of Columbia University professor Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism unintentionally contributed much to this blur. 2  It can be argued that the Balfour Declaration in 1917, stating the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was a British PSYOP move in order to curb Jewish support of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 3  During the 2014 operation against Hamas in Gaza, Hamas demonstrated its missile abilities by reaching central Israel. The greatest question is whether Hamas has US-made mobile Stinger missiles, which were given to Afghan forces in the 1980s to down Soviet jets. 4  Such improvements included sewage projects in Gaza and building projects in refugee camps in the West Bank, which the Palestinians did not make use of. However, during the First Intifada (1988–1990), Palestinians used Israeli medical facilities even during declarations of disengagement from Israel. Senior Palestinian operatives are treated in Israeli hospitals regardless of extremist statements on their part against the country. 5  In the age of international shopping via Amazon and Ali Express, gas masks are becoming a common sight. This forced Israel to start developing other nonlethal methods of warfare. 6  During the Second Lebanon War (2006), the organization provided assistance to Arab villages in northern Israel that were hit by Hezbollah missiles. According to Arab tradition, the villagers are now indebted to the helpers. 7  Some of its supporters were prosecuted for joining Al-Qaeda and spying for Hezbollah. 8  The extent of coordination between Hezbollah and Four Mothers is unclear. Activists are unwilling to be interviewed and a correspondence sent from the Ministry of Justice, in charge of the taxfree associations, flatly says that the reports on contributed funds is unavailable and the archives of the organization were stolen. 9  The description of Jews as Nazis is mentioned in Hamas’s charter, as well as by ninth-century commentator Muhammad al-Bukhari, that before ‘the Day of Judgment’, trees and rocks will call to come and kill the Jews hiding behind them (Yale Law School 1988). 10  When a unit of Druze soldiers, whose language and culture is Arabic, was holding that section of the border, the officers had to make huge efforts to keep the calm.

REFERENCES Commonwealth of Australia. 2010. ‘Al-Manar Television Programming Investigation Report’. Australian Communications and Media Authority, December 2010. Conway, Maura. 2008. ‘Terror TV? An exploration of Hizbollah’s Al-Manar Television’. Working Papers in International Studies Series. Centre for International Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland. Department of the Army. 1988. Battlefield Deception. US Army Field Manual 90-2, Washington, DC. www.globalsecurity.org/ intell/library/policy/army/fm/90-2/90-2ch1. htm. Hass, Amira. 2009. ‘Oferet yeztuka: HaHamas menatzel et halechima kdei ledakeh anshei petach u’lechasel meshatfim’. Haaretz, January 8, 2009. www.haaretz.co.il/news/ politics/1.1239854. Herf, Jeffrey. 2010. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Israeli, Rafael. 1990. ‘The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)’. In The Annual on Terrorism, 1988– 1989, edited by Yonah Alexander and Abraham H. Foxman. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp.99-107 https://fas.org/irp/ world/para/docs/880818.htm. Jews Sans Frontieres. 2010. ‘Israel Establishes Hasbara Central’. (blog), February 1, 2010. http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/ 2010/02/israel-establishes-hasbara-central. html. Kenner, David. 2018. ‘Why Israel Fears Iran’s Presence in Syria’. The Atlantic, July 22, 2018. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ 2018/07/hezbollah-iran-new-weapons-israel/ 565796/. Kramer, Martin. 2002. Ivory Towers on Sand. Washington, DC: The Washington for Near East Policy. Lasswell, Harold D. 1948. ‘The Structure and Function of Communication in Society’. In The Communication of Ideas (pp. 117–129), edited by Lyman Bryson. New York: The Institute for Religious and Social Studies. Leuprecht, Christian, Olivier Walther, David B. Skillicorn, and Hillary Ryde-Collins. 2015. ‘Hezbollah’s Global Tentacles: A Relational

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Approach to Convergence with Transnational Organized Crime’. Terrorism and Political Violence 29(5), 902–921. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09546553.2015.1089863. Lewis, Ori, and Allyn Fisher-Ilan. 2010. ‘Israel Convicts Israeli-Arab of Spying for Hezbollah’. Reuters, October 27, 2010. https:// uk.reuters.com/article/uk-israel-lebanon-spy/ israel-convicts-israeli-arab-of-spying-for-hezbollah-idUKTRE69Q43K20101027. MacDonald, Callum A. 1977. ‘Radio Bari: Italian Wireless Propaganda in the Middle East and British Countermeasures 1934–38’. Middle Eastern Studies, 13(2), 195–207. www.jstor.org/stable/4282642. Sabag, Yaakov. 2018. Zichronot Abu Yousuf. Jerusalem, Israel: Sela Meir, p. 89. Sadan, Tsvi. 2018. ‘The Moral Position of the IDF’s Chief-of-Staff’. Israel Today, July 19, 2018. www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/ tabid/178/nid/34439/Default.aspx. Schleifer, Ron. 2009. ‘Psyoping Hezbollah: The Israeli Psychological Warfare Campaign During the 2006 Lebanon War’. Terrorism and Political Violence, 21(2), 221–238. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546550802544847. Schleifer, Ron. 2016. ‘Psychological Operations in Warfare’. In Military Psychology: Concepts, Trends and Interventions (pp. 149– 164), edited by Nidhi Maheshwari. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Shadmi, Yoni, and Barak Ravid. 2005. Hayechida sheteshage’a l’oiveinu et hamoach. NRG, December 17. www.makorrishon.co.il/nrg/ online/1/ART1/020/638.html. Shultz, Richard H. 1988. The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Warfare: Principles, Practices,

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and Regional Comparisons. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Smith, Lee. 2006. ‘The Real Losers: Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah Admits that the War Was a Mistake’. Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, August 28, 2006. www.hudson.org/ research/4178-the-real-losers-hezbollah-shassan-nasrallah-admits-that-the-war-was-amistake-. Tazpit Press Service. 2017. ‘Hezbollah Uses Environmental NGO to Spy on Israel’s Border, IDF’. BreakingIsraelNews, June 26, 2017. www.breakingisraelnews.com/90293/hezbollahuses-environmental-ngo-spy-israels-borderidf/. Tugwell, Maurice. 1981. ‘Politics and Propaganda of the Provisional IRA’. In British Perspectives on Terrorism (pp. 13–40), edited by Paul Wilkinson. London: Routledge. Uzrad, Lev. 2005. Betoch hakis shel haRa’is [Inside Arafat’s pocket]. Or Yehudah, Israel: Zemorah-Bitan. Wegner, Gregory Paul. 2007. ‘A Propagandist of Extermination: Johann von Leers and the Anti-Semitic Formation of Children in Nazi Germany’. Paedagogica Historica, 43(3), 299–325. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 00309230701363625. Weiser, Benjamin. 2008. ‘A Guilty Plea in Providing Satellite TV for Hezbollah’. The New York Times, December 23, 2008. www. nytimes.com/2008/12/24/nyregion/24plea. html. Yale Law School. 1988. ‘Hamas Covenant 1988’. August 1988. http://avalon.law.yale. edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.

18 Defending against Russian Propaganda Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses Russian propaganda, explains why it might work, and explores options available for Western countries to protect themselves from manipulation through propaganda. In previous research, we characterized the Russian approach to propaganda as a ‘firehose of falsehood’, capturing its volume, frequency, and lack of commitment to objective reality (Paul & Matthews 2016). The discussion here begins with a description of the nature and character of Russian propaganda, Russia’s various techniques, their goals, and several examples of specific propaganda efforts as reported by news sources and other observers. This discussion should provide you, the reader, with a better understanding of the scope and scale of Russia’s efforts. Why is this firehose of falsehood effective? We then turn to experimental results from psychology and social psychology that match characteristics of Russian propaganda with human psychological vulnerabilities

and limitations. This research reveals that falsehood-based attempts to manipulate people through propaganda are far more likely to be successful than we might realize or prefer. What might we do about it? The chapter concludes with a review of various proposals and suggestions for defending against propaganda. We evaluate each of these against evidence and practical considerations.

THE CHARACTER OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA In many ways, the current Russian approach to propaganda builds on Soviet Cold War-era techniques with an emphasis on obfuscation and getting targets to act in the interests of the propagandist without realizing that they have done so (Oliker 2015). The Soviets would routinely employ ‘active measures’, a term that encompassed disinformation, forgery, and subversion (Averin 2018). However,

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these old models are much better suited to the contemporary global information environment than they were to the level of communications technology available during the Cold War. Russia has taken advantage of the technology and media available in the contemporary context in ways that would have been inconceivable during the Cold War. While most Western observers focus on Russia’s use of propaganda outside Russia’s own borders, other countries are not the primary targets. Russia uses propaganda to mobilize internal opposition in other countries, but also to mobilize Russia’s own public (Andriukaitis 2018). Thus, Russia produces as much, if not more, propaganda aimed at its own domestic audiences. Much of this internal propaganda seeks to divide Russia from the rest of the world and create the perception that Russia is being besieged on all sides by enemies. This makes it easier for Russian leaders to invoke support for aggressive action in the name of defending the motherland and to silence domestic resistance as being unpatriotic (Snyder 2018). The focus of this chapter, however, is on Russian international propaganda. Our primary concern is finding ways to protect others from Russia, not Russians from their own government.

SOURCES AND TYPES OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA Russian propaganda includes text, video, audio, and still imagery propagated via television broadcasting, satellite television, traditional radio, and the Internet and social media. The producers and disseminators include a substantial force of paid internet ‘trolls’ who manage dozens of false online personas and amplify Russian propaganda themes through online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comments sections on news and other websites (Chen 2015, Pomerantsev & Weiss 2014). These various media and modes are discussed below.

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Television is a staple for Russian propaganda, both traditional broadcast TV and satellite or cable dissemination, echoed online through station websites and video sharing platforms such as YouTube. RT (formerly Russia Today) is one of Russia’s primary multimedia news providers. With a budget of more than US$300 million per year, it broadcasts in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and several Eastern European languages. The channel is particularly popular online, where it claims more than a billion page views. If true, that would make it the most-watched news source on the Internet (Pomerantsev & Weiss 2014). RT and Sputnik (another selfstyled ‘news’ station) project a mixture of actual journalism, infotainment (feel good and human-interest stories), and lightly spun anti-Western stories that highlight shortcomings and perceived hypocrisies in the West, such as corruption, abuse of power, or infrastructure failures (Lucas & Nimmo 2015). While some RT content is good journalism and some is spun to be selectively critical of the West, some is unambiguously designed to mislead or obfuscate. Consider, for example, the period immediately following the 2014 shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Crimea: RT broadcasted more than six different possible explanations for the shootdown (some plausible, some less so; Snyder 2018), with manufactured evidence supporting more than one, but never presenting the actual explanation (a Russian-made missile fired by pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists; Thomas 2015). Russian international broadcasting also includes Russian-language broadcasting in Eastern European countries with significant Russian-speaking populations. Russia has bought available TV and radio stations throughout this region over the past decade, so it can easily control content and format. Russian programming has high-production values and is generally entertaining, so it is preferred to genuinely local Russianlanguage programming, which is ‘dry and unattractive’ (Lucas & Nimmo 2015:7).

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Viewers tune in to see flashy and entertaining shows; they then stay tuned for ‘news’ that is sometimes heavily laced with propaganda and spin. The internet is a heavy focus for Russian propaganda. In addition to online echoes of Russian international broadcasting, the internet is infested with Russian trolls (fraudulent online accounts operated by humans) and bots (accounts operated by automated processes; Averin 2018). Volchek and Sindelar (2015) report that ‘thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte’ are maintained by Russian propagandists. The 2018 indictment of the Russian ‘Internet Research Agency’ (a centralized structure for organizing, paying, and tasking trolls) by the US District Court for the District of Columbia revealed several features of the efforts of this infamous Russian ‘troll factory’, including: • Employing hundreds of individuals to manage fake personas, with an annual budget of millions of US dollars; • Attracting US audiences using false personas and posing as Americans; • Disparaging political candidates prior to the 2016 US election, buying political advertisements (again posing as Americans), staging political rallies, pretending to be American grassroots organizations; • Promoting allegations of vote fraud through personas and groups on social media, as well as through ad buys.

It is worth noting that the Internet Research Agency is not the only source of Russian trolls, just one that has been exposed and documented (and criminally indicted). It is entirely possible that Russia maintains other such troll factories, as well as relying on entities less directly tied to the state, such as trolls paid and coordinated by criminal oligarchs or collectives of patriotic hackers. Sometimes, Russian propaganda is picked up and rebroadcast by legitimate news outlets; more frequently, innocent social media users repeat the themes, messages,

or falsehoods introduced by one of Russia’s many dissemination channels (Lucas & Nimmo 2015). For example, German news sources rebroadcast Russian disinformation about atrocities in Ukraine in early 2014 (Lelich 2014), and Russian disinformation about European Union plans to deny visas to young Ukrainian men was repeated with such frequency in Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian general staff felt compelled to post a rebuttal (Goble 2015). As evidenced by the above descriptions, Russian propaganda has relied on manufactured evidence. This fabricated information is often photographic. Some of these images are easily exposed as fake due to poor photo editing, such as discrepancies of scale, or the availability of the original (pre-altered) image (Davis 2014). Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russian’s Zvezda TV network) and faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which ‘reporter’ Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with recorded explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording; Smith 2015). In addition to manufacturing information, Russian propagandists often manufacture sources. Russian news channels such as RT and Sputnik, as well as other forms of media, misquote credible sources or claim a more credible source as the origin of a selected falsehood (Miller 2013). Similarly, several scholars and journalists, including Edward Lucas, Luke Harding, and Don Jensen, have reported that books that they did not write – and containing views clearly contrary to their own – had been published in Russian under their names (Lucas 2015). Using these different modes and media, general Russian tactics have been described as efforts to perpetrate the ‘four Ds’: dismiss

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the critic, distort the facts, distract from the issue, and dismay the audience (Lucas & Nimmo 2015:5). Thus, Russia is not just spreading false stories, but trying to sow confusion about or distract from truths shared by other sources. Examples include the denials of the presence of ‘little green men’ in Crimea in 2014, or the aforementioned interpretations offered for the MH-17 shootdown (Thomas 2015).

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA Various scholars and observers have imputed a range of goals, objectives, and motives to Russia in its use of propaganda. All are plausible, and none are mutually exclusive. For example, Brooking and Singer (2016) note two broad objectives for Russian propaganda: to overwhelm Russia’s adversaries with misinformation, challenging the very basis of their reality; and to mobilize and maintain the support of their own citizens. Lucas and Nimmo (2015) note that Russian propaganda is often less about winning factual arguments and more about spreading confusion. Matthew Armstrong (2014) has described this as a ‘war on information’, seeking to destroy trust in and credibility of all sources of information. Overall, this nihilistic goal of weakening credibility in general and sowing chaos and discord in the West is a common theme in goals imputed to Russia: ‘Sometimes, the goal is simply to stack tinder, throw matches, and see what happens’ (Brooking & Singer 2016:22). This is consistent with Freedom House (2017) reporting on Russian efforts to use propaganda to influence elections in at least 18 countries in 2016 and 2017. Beyond these broad goals, McGeehan (2018) asserts that Russia seeks to achieve its political and military objectives without escalating to military confrontation. One path to undercutting resistance to Russian

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aims is to manipulate foreign opinion to be sympathetic toward Russian objectives, since in Western democracies, the people are the ultimate decision-makers. Russian propaganda can also seek narrow, specific goals. For example, in 2016, a small protest outside Incirlik Air Base in Turkey was portrayed as a much larger demonstration as part of a campaign to try to undermine US-Turkish relations (Brooking & Singer 2016).

A NOTE ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA Just how effective has Russian propaganda been? That is difficult to quantify. Measuring the success of an influence effort requires clearly articulated goals and measurement both before and after the campaign, among other things (Paul et al. 2015). This is difficult because our understanding of Russian goals is partially speculative, and even where we have high confidence in their general goals, we lack specificity about their intended targets; we also lack clear baselines against which to measure change. Research on the effectiveness of Russia’s efforts to date is possible, but it is difficult and little has been done in this regard. Such measurement should be a priority going forward (Applebaum et al. 2018). Peisakhin and Rozenas (2018) have used Russian-language television broadcast footprints to form a natural experiment to study the influence of Russian propaganda on Ukrainian voters. They found that Russian propaganda was most effective on those who were already favorably disposed toward Russia while having no or negative effects on anti-Russia Ukrainians. Further, they found that Russian propaganda contributed to increasing political polarization in Ukraine, a concerning finding if it proves to generalize to other countries subjected to Russian propaganda. While we do not have good general assessments of the effectiveness of Russian propaganda, we can put it

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between a left and right bounds: Russian propaganda is more effective than we in the West would prefer that it be, and is less effective than they (the Russians) would like. Further research can only help narrow that bounds.

THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RUSSIAN FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD PROPAGANDA MODEL Based on our observations of Russia’s propaganda efforts, we have identified four central characteristics of their approach. First, Russian propaganda is high volume and multi-channel. As noted, Russia uses numerous modes, and has multiple channels (in the broadest possible conception of channels) in each mode. Russia does not just have one international broadcasting arm, but several (and more that are Russian funded but not clearly attributed). The trolls of the internet research agency each managed dozens of false personas. Second, Russian propaganda is rapid, continuous, and repetitive. Contemporary Russian propaganda is continuous and very responsive to events. Due to their willingness to perpetuate falsehoods, Russian propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives. This allows them to be remarkably responsive and nimble, often broadcasting the first ‘news’ of events (and, with similar frequency, the first news of non-events, or things that have not actually happened). They will also repeat and recycle disinformation. The January 14, 2016, edition of Weekly Disinformation Review reported the reemergence of several previously debunked Russian propaganda stories, including that Polish President Andrzej Duda was insisting that Ukraine return former Polish territory, that Islamic State fighters were joining pro-Ukrainian forces, and that there was a Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital (Disinformation 2016).

Third, Russian propaganda makes no commitment to objective reality. Contemporary Russian propaganda makes little or no commitment to the truth. This is not to say that all of it is false. Quite the contrary: It often contains a significant fraction of the truth but is spun as a selective truth. Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, as described above. Wardle (2017) notes seven different types of disinformation, and the Russians employ them all: satire or parody, false connection (when the images or headlines do not match the content), misleading content, false context (genuine content but out of context), imposter content (impersonating a genuine source), manipulated content (genuine information or imagery that is then changed), and fabricated content. Fourth, and finally, Russian propaganda makes no commitment to consistency. Different Russian media do not necessarily broadcast the exact same themes or messages. Different channels do not necessarily broadcast the same account of contested events. Different channels or representatives show no fear of ‘changing their tune’. If one falsehood or misrepresentation is exposed or is not well received, the propagandists will discard it and move on to a new (though not necessarily more plausible) explanation (Snyder 2018). Lack of commitment to consistency extends to the statements of Russian President Vladimir Putin. For example, he first denied that the ‘little green men’ in Crimea were Russian soldiers but later admitted that they were. Similarly, he at first denied any desire to see Crimea join Russia, but then he admitted that that had been his plan all along (Pifer 2015).

FINDINGS FROM PSYCHOLOGY: WHY RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA MIGHT WORK Russia propaganda’s lack of commitment to objective reality or to consistency flies in the

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face of the conventional wisdom on government persuasion, wisdom that holds credibility as paramount and infers credibility is lost through untruths or inconsistencies (US Department of Defense 2008; Paul 2011; Muñoz 2012). How can Russia’s approach to propaganda be inconsistent and often untrue but still persuasive? We turned to the relevant literature in psychology and social psychology to find out. In what follows, we review psychological findings relevant to each of the four distinctive characteristics of the Russian ‘firehose of falsehood’ propaganda model.

HOW DO VOLUME AND DIVERSITY OF SOURCES CONTRIBUTE TO PERSUASIVENESS? Russian propaganda involves dissemination of a high volume of messages across multiple sources, and decades of psychological research provides insights into the persuasive efficacy of this tactic. For example, experimental research has demonstrated the persuasive advantage of multiple arguments presented by multiple sources over other conditions in which a single argument was presented by multiple sources and in which multiple arguments were presented by one source (Harkins & Petty 1981). More recent research addressing the influence of cross media campaigns on consumer perceptions has also shown that presentation of information across more than one media type (e.g., television and the Internet) has a stronger effect on perceptions, attitudes, and intentions than presentation through one media type (Lim et al. 2015).

HOW DO RAPIDITY AND REPETITION CONTRIBUTE TO PERSUASIVENESS? Rapid dissemination of fabricated information provides Russian propaganda with a first

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mover advantage, thereby providing an early opportunity to frame how and whether people process subsequent information. Various studies have shown the competitive advantage that first movers can achieve, such as consumer preferences for first-in market brands over later brands (Kerin et al. 1992), preferences for options presented first during a serial order presentation (Hung et al. 2017), and a primacy processing effect where individual judgements favor messages presented first (Haugtvedt & Wegener 1994). Although people tend to accept that first impressions matter, it is easy to underestimate the power of the first mover advantage. Some of that power comes from how humans store information. Our memories are not card catalogs in which we store individual facts in isolation. We store information in stories, in an integrated model of intertwined and interrelated bits of information that collectively frame our understanding of the world and support our worldview (Narvaez 1998; San Roque et al. 2012). When we receive a new factoid (something presented as fact, whether it is true or not) and we accept it, we do not simple store it in a cognitive card catalog. Rather, we integrate it into our understanding of the world. Therefore, when someone or something subsequently calls that factoid into question, we do not remove a single cognitive data card that holds that factoid. Instead, removing a factoid is a challenge to our existing story, and it is easier to continue to embrace a false impression than to change our understanding (Swire & Ecker 2018). In addition to rapidity of dissemination, Russian propaganda’s use of repetition can also have powerful effects on attitudes and perceptions, such as by increasing familiarity with a message. Research suggests that stimuli or messages that match with one’s memories (e.g., are recognizable) are more positively evaluated than those that do not (Montoya et  al. 2017). Through some repetition of messages, people can come to perceive the information to which they are repeatedly exposed as accurate and justified.

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HOW DOES A LACK OF COMMITMENT TO OBJECTIVE REALITY CONTRIBUTE TO PERSUASIVENESS? Russian propaganda’s frequent use of falsehoods, or lack of commitment to objective reality, has the potential to be particularly persuasive. For example, research suggests that the more misinformation that people are presented with, the more difficulty they have in identifying misleading information (i.e., in differentiating true and false information; Pena et  al. 2017). In addition, pathbreaking research by Vosoughi et al. (2018) examined the spread of verified true and verified false news stories from more than ten years of Twitter data. They found that false stories spread farther, faster, and deeper than true stories, with those effects being even more pronounced for false political news than for other categories. Their work confirms the old aphorism that lies are half-way around the world before the truth has its boots on. However, one should also consider when and why lies can be persuasive. Generally, sources and messages perceived as more credible are more persuasive than those seen as less credible (Pornpitakpan 2004), and ingroup members are perceived as more credible than individuals who belong to another group (Clark & Maas 1988). De Dreu (2013) shows how humans are ‘parochial altruists’, willing to bear costs on behalf of groups to which they feel they belong and to fight, resist, or derogate rival outgroups. This creates considerable vulnerability to being persuaded by false messages that are propagated by members of a group or appear to have been propagated by members of that group. Group membership is one of many heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, that people us to evaluate credibility. People use credibility heuristics in attempts to quickly determine source and message credibility. However, use of these heuristics can contribute to errors in credibility evaluations. As evidenced by their tactic of pretending to belong to another’s

ingroup (either by claiming membership or by manifesting characteristics consistent with ingroup membership), Russian propagandists attempt to use these heuristics to their advantage. The endorsement heuristic is an additional manipulatable cognitive shortcut used in the online environment, such that people are more likely to believe sources and messages when others have done so (Metzger & Flanigan 2013). Russian propagandists can influence this heuristic by spreading and supporting one another’s accounts, comments, and sites. Another heavily used heuristic is the self-confirmation heuristic, or a bias toward placing greater weight on individuals and messages that support pre-existing beliefs (Metzger & Flanagin 2013). Whether a piece of information or news is consistent with our worldview is one of the first things we consider when evaluating its credibility and truthfulness (Lewandowsky et al. 2012). People search for and favor information consistent with their beliefs, also known as confirmation bias, and they subject information inconsistent with their pre-existing beliefs to greater scrutiny, known as disconfirmation bias (Marsh & Yang 2018). Our natural tendency toward confirmation bias is served in the contemporary information environment by ‘filter bubbles’ driven by our own choices about television programs and websites, and reinforced by algorithm-driven advertisements and search results (Pariser 2011). As evidenced by the limitations of heuristics, the potential persuasive efficacy of Russian propaganda might be bolstered due to human difficulties in differentiating truths from falsehoods. Demonstrating this difficulty, previous research found that participants relied on information from clearly fictional stories when subsequently responding to general knowledge questions, suggesting that people integrate incorrect information from untrue descriptions with their own understanding of the world (Marsh et al. 2003). Various additional studies have also demonstrated

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the impact that rumors, political misinformation, and misleading media claims can have on individual beliefs (see Lewandowsky et al. 2012). Despite this difficulty in differentiation fact from fiction, people tend to overestimate their own ability to identify misleading information (Pena et al. 2017).

HOW DOES INCONSISTENCY AFFECT PERSUASIVENESS? The fourth characteristic of Russian propaganda, its lack of consistency, runs counter to traditional wisdom regarding persuasion. Indeed, inconsistent messaging can hinder persuasion, such that message recipients tend to more carefully scrutinize inconsistent messages from a single source (Ziegler et al. 2004). At times, however, recipients may overlook inconsistencies. For example, when a source appears to have modified their messaging after greater consideration of different perspectives, recipient attitudinal confidence can increase (Rucker et al. 2008). Even if a source changes accounts, recipients are likely to evaluate the new message without overweighting the prior, ‘mistaken’, account, when the new message is sufficiently strong and the source is believed to be credible (Reich & Tormala 2013).

DEFENDING AGAINST PROPAGANDA Thus far, Russia’s disinformation campaign has been met with limited effective resistance (Lucas & Nimmo 2015). What can Western governments, citizens, and companies do to protect themselves against Russian propaganda?

EDUCATION One of the most frequently proposed avenues to addressing the existence and potential

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influence of Russian propaganda and falsehoods is the promotion of media literacy. Media literacy education encourages people to use critical thinking when making decisions informed by media messages (Hobbs & Jensen 2009). Media literacy education might include provision of information that increases knowledge regarding potential influencer goals and the tactics used to mislead and influence audiences, also known as persuasion knowledge (Friestad & Wright 1994). Persuasion knowledge increases abilities to resist the influence of misleading claims and information (e.g., Xie & Quintero Johnson 2015). Generally, media literacy interventions appear to have positive impacts on multiple outcomes, including knowledge and criticism of the media and awareness of media influence (Jeong et  al. 2012). However, the full utility of media literacy education in promoting knowledge of and resistance to Russian propaganda across diverse audiences requires additional investigation. In addition, the design of media literacy education efforts must be considered when promoting resistance to influence, such that it cannot be assumed that any media literacy education will be effective. For example, individuals exposed to media literacy education might assume that they are already resistant to persuasion and propaganda, reducing the effectiveness of this education. Possessing knowledge of manipulation tactics and disinformation does not guarantee that people will use this knowledge (Pratkanis & Aronson 2001). People underestimate their own susceptibility to biases and misperceptions, such that they perceive they are less susceptible to biases in judgement and inferences than others, and this tendency might reduce the extent to which people pay attention to and use media literacy education. Pronin and colleagues have termed this phenomenon ‘bias blind spot’, wherein people see themselves as less susceptible than others to multiple biases in cognition and motivation (Pronin,

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2006; Pronin et al. 2002). This bias blind spot appears when people evaluate the perceived effects of fake news and online comments. Research has demonstrated that individuals believe that others, particularly those who are members of different social groups than themselves, are more susceptible to the harmful effects of fake news (Jang & Kim 2018) and more influenced by online comments (Chen & Ng 2016) than the individuals themselves are. To be most effective, individuals need to be aware of, or made aware of, their personal vulnerability to be influenced by information, including deceptive and illegitimate messages (Sagarin et al. 2002). Through awareness of their own vulnerability to influence, people may be more inclined to monitor their own responses to information and messages. For example, if someone experiences an emotional response to a message, their acknowledgement of these feelings might stimulate analytic considerations of why they have experienced these emotions, or what characteristics of the message primed these emotions (Pratkanis & Aronson 2001). However, for people to remain vigilant to their own exposure and responses to false and misleading messages, they must have the cognitive resources to do so. Although they may have knowledge regarding different disinformation sources and tactics, individuals might not draw from this knowledge when fatigued. In other words, the ability to detect manipulative intent and falsehoods is diminished when people are distracted, tired, or cognitively overloaded (Wentzel et al. 2010). Avoiding propaganda rich environments when fatigued, preoccupied, or in a similar cognitively vulnerable state may reduce the potential to be influenced by propaganda. Promoting analytic thinking and careful consideration of sources, messages, and one’s own cognitive biases and limitations can help individuals to develop a healthy skepticism to use when exposed to different pieces of information. However, ill-considered use of different strategies, such as by never trusting

any new information, has the potential to lead to the development of unhealthy skepticism, or fear of and an unwillingness to consider new ideas (Johnson 2002). Certain practices might promote unhealthy skepticism. For example, as part of efforts to appear neutral, reporters often present claims from two or more sides of an issue or story without adjudicating this information, known as he said/she said reporting. The issue with this strategy is that it can provide credibility to clearly false claims and promote misperceptions (Weeks 2018). Although he said/ she said reporting might be implemented as part of journalistic efforts to appear unbiased, research suggests that journalistic intervention through provision of additional facts and analyses not only minimizes misperceptions but also promotes positive perceptions regarding news quality (Pingree et al. 2014).

DEBUNKING, REFUTING, COUNTERCLAIMS, AND ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES One tactic that has been used in attempts to counter falsehoods is to disseminate clear and credible corrections to this incorrect information, or to debunk the myths. The common, yet false, assumption about debunking is that misperceptions are a function of a lack of knowledge, so simply conveying correct information will be sufficient in eliminating the influence of the false information. This model, known as the ‘information deficit model’, is wrong (Cook & Lewandowsky 2011). Corrections are often of limited use in reducing or eliminating reliance on misperceptions developed through exposure to falsehoods. Even if people receive and believe corrections, the previous falsehoods to which they were exposed, and had believed to be true, continue to impact their reasoning (Ecker et  al. 2011). Successful debunking requires an understanding of not just what people know and think, but how they think.

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Reliance on false information following a correction is thought to be due to mental models, or stories, that people develop after receiving initial information on a topic or event. A correction produces a gap in the mental model one had developed, and as noted previously, people would rather hold onto an incorrect mental model that contains falsehoods than an incomplete mental model that has gaps due to removed inaccuracies. To address this, corrections can include correct and factual alternative information to replace the incorrect information people held in their mental models (Swire & Ecker 2018). In their Debunking Handbook, Cook and Lewandowsky (2011) propose that successful debunking efforts must have three major elements: 1) a focus on core facts rather than the myth or falsehood being debunked in order to avoid reinforcing the familiarity of the falsehood; 2) preceding any explicit mention of the falsehood with forewarning that upcoming information is false; 3) an alternative explanation to replace the falsehood being debunked.

INOCULATION AND FOREWARNING One way to address the potential influential effects of Russian propaganda and falsehoods is by inoculating audiences against these messages or moving first. The concept underlying this approach is that, just as one’s immune system can be inoculated against viral infections, so can one’s attitudes be inoculated against false and misleading information. Inoculation typically involves both forewarning individuals about falsehoods to which they may be exposed and providing counterarguments to these falsehoods. Multiple studies have shown that inoculation promotes resistance to persuasion (Compton 2013). For inoculation to be most effective, audiences must understand that they will be the targets of persuasive attacks, acknowledge their

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potential vulnerabilities, have information that they can use to counterargue falsehoods to which they will be exposed, and be motivated to counterargue these falsehoods. Moving first can also be advantageous in addressing crises and negative information. Proactively communicating negative information about one’s organization or self is known as ‘stealing thunder’ (Pratkanis & Aronson 2001). This approach allows those who implement it to control the information flow and minimize others’ ability to sensationalize a topic. Further, stealing thunder can promote positive perceptions, such that the voluntary release of negative information promotes perceptions that the entity of interest is honest and credible. However, if audiences perceive this approach is being used to manipulate them, then the positive effects of stealing thunder disappear (Lee 2016). Naming and shaming, or discounting, the sources of and outlets for Russian propaganda and discussing Russian tactics are additional strategies for countering disinformation that also assume a protective advantage can be gained by providing individuals with pertinent information. James Farwell (2018) advocates transparent discussion of Russian tactics and practices, both to increase public awareness of their efforts and to signal to the Russians that the United States is aware of and does not approve of these activities. He also advocates better enforcement of the requirement for various entities to register as foreign agents (in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act) and would like to see Russia’s Sputnik International, RT, and other foreign agents required to label their informational materials (web pages, broadcasts, etc.) with a conspicuous disclosure of their foreign agent status. This source identification strategy is most likely to effectively counter falsehoods when people must attribute information to a source or otherwise remember where information came from. However, people often forget the sources of information. As such, they may remember the influential

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information and forget that this information came from a source with little or no credibility (Marsh & Yang, 2018).

FACT-CHECKING AND VERIFICATION Consumers increasingly use social media sites and applications to get their news, and social media are major sources through which Russian propagandists can spread disinformation (Lazar et  al. 2018). Keir Giles (2017:2) at the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that ‘Social media companies should more aggressively police their platforms for malicious state-sponsored content, and they should work with news organizations to promote verified and fact-checked content on their platforms’. Anne Applebaum and her colleagues (2018) suggest broader revision to the digital rules, including a social media code of conduct, more transparency regarding political advertising, and better systems for authentication of users. Categories of services for addressing online disinformation include fact-checking and verification services (Brandtzaeg et al. 2017). Fact-checking services examine and ascertain the validity and credibility of online content, and verification services analyze the authenticity of users and pieces of online content (e.g., images). Three potential social media approaches to fact-checking are (i) increased use of human editors; (ii) crowdsourcing; (iii) technological or algorithmic solutions (Althuis & Strand 2018), and each of these approaches has its own inherent limitations. The volume of online content hinders the ability for human editors and experts to review all, or even most, online claims, and crowdsourcing fact-checking can be both highly prone to error and resource intensive (Babakar 2018). Ensuring accuracy among computational fact-checkers can also be challenging, in part due to large variability in online content and the ability of disinformation disseminators

to modify messaging content and strategies (Boididou et al. 2014). As discussed earlier, debunking previously believed claims can be ineffective. As such, consumers would ideally receive information regarding the validity and credibility of claims before they have a chance to believe them. This might be accomplished by encouraging consumers to include information from credible fact-checking sites in the feed of information they receive (e.g., ‘follow’ factchecking sites) and by labeling social media content. Traditionally, social media has sought to democratize the news, allowing that egregious political clickbait and items from respected news media appear without discrimination in newsfeeds. However, sources could be scored based on criteria that users value and contribute to trust, and those scores could be displayed (Waldrop 2017). Such a labeling approach must be implemented carefully, however. A 2017 study by Pennycook and Rand found that a newsfeed in which some items were labeled as ‘disputed’ backfired, in that all items that had no flag were then considered to be more credible. This suggests that, to function effectively, a labeling system would need to label all items, even if just with a placeholder tag that indicates an item is new and has not yet been either verified or disputed. Better verification of users and content through identity resolution and bot removal has also been considered as part of efforts to disinformation. In April of 2018, the European Commission announced the introduction of a European Union-wide code of practice on disinformation. Among the things that will be required of online platforms are transparency about sponsored content (particularly political advertising) and taking measures to identify and close fake accounts and accounts run by bots (European Commission 2018). Supporting increased use of regulations requiring user and content verification, James Farwell (2018) has noted that the freedom of

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speech commonly guaranteed in democracies does not extend to robots, and inauthentic speech or speech artificially echoed should not be protected. However, there are risks involved in indiscriminate use of verification, particularly with regard to a user’s identity. While identity resolution and elimination of false personas (run by bots or otherwise) would be a positive step in protecting established democracies, it could be dangerous in fledgling or non-democracies. If discoverable by an authoritarian regime, it would not be a positive development for pro-democracy advocates to be restricted to one account per platform, each associated with a confirmed identity.

CHANGING THE INCENTIVES Beyond fact-checking and verification services, sites and application can also reduce incentives for promoting misinformation. Some entities may use disinformation to bolster their ad revenues or brands, so making it harder to profit from disinformation may help to decrease its production and dissemination. Addressing this, Waldrop (2017) noted positive steps by Facebook and Google in 2016 and 2017 to prevent blatantly fake news sites from earning money on their advertising networks and lowering the newsfeed ranking of low-quality sources.

REGULATING CONTENT Several countries have implemented regulations or policies aimed at reducing the flow of propaganda. For example, in 2014, Latvia suspended broadcasts from Russia’s RTR Planeta for three months based on a violation of their national law on Electronic Mass Media (Freedom House 2015). In addition, Indian authorities have warned social media group administrators that they can be held

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accountable for disseminating false news or fabricating stories that could inflame communal tension (Connolly et al. 2016). Notably, content regulation has the potential to become, or might be considered to be, censorship that prevents the human right to freedom of expression. In addition, if a site or application removes content without educating users regarding why or permitting appeals, then users may feel dehumanized and frustrated (Myers West 2018). This can lead users to search for alternative online communication avenues.

CYBER-BLURRING An additional possible avenue for addressing Russian propagandists’ tactics is to create confusion through the use of cyber-blurring. Cyber-blurring includes creating fake email accounts and fake documents to confuse and slow hackers. This tactic appears to have been used as a counteroffensive measure employed by Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team during the 2017 French presidential election to address Russian hackers (Nossiter et al. 2017). Although this might be effective in addressing hacker activity, deliberate dissemination of falsified information to the public could harm the credibility of an individual or organization.

CONCLUSION In summary, Russia’s approach to propaganda represents a firehose of falsehood with four distinctive features. It is high volume and multi-channel; rapid, continuous, and repetitive; shows no commitment to objective reality; and shows no commitment to consistency. Although difficult to quantify, at least some research suggests this approach has been effective in influencing audiences. This runs counter to conventional wisdom on

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government persuasion, which suggests that truth and consistency are of paramount importance, However, research in psychology suggests these features can be persuasive. Various studies have demonstrated that dissemination of a high volume of messages across different types of media sources can influence attitudes and perceptions. In addition, rapid dissemination of information provides a first mover advantage that can influence the mental models, or stories, that individuals create; thereby influencing an individual’s interpretation of related subsequent information. Repetitive and continuous presentation of falsehoods makes it more difficult for audiences to identify misleading information, and propagandists can use false and misleading information about themselves (e.g., pretend to be in a group) and a topic to manipulate the cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, that people employ. Although a lack of consistency can reduce persuasive impact, there are instances when a lack of consistency might promote persuasion, such as when a source that is believed to be credible appears to have been previously mistaken. Although research suggests that the characteristics of Russian propaganda might promote its ability persuade audiences, there are avenues to countering this propaganda. For example: • Media literacy programs that both increases awareness of personal vulnerabilities to being influenced and educate audiences regarding the goals and tactics of propagandists are avenues to reducing the persuasive efficacy of Russian propaganda. • Debunking efforts that not only indicate previous information to which audiences were exposed was false but also provide an alternative explanation to replace the incorrect information can also be used in efforts to counter disinformation. • Inoculation efforts that inform audiences that they will be targeted and might be vulnerable to persuasive attacks and that also provide audiences with information to counterargue falsehoods can be pursued to reduce audiences’ potential to be influenced.

• Rapid and increased fact-checking of claims and verification of information can be used to reduce audiences’ exposure to disinformation on social media. • Reducing the potential for disinformation disseminators to profit from their messaging tactics may also help to reduce the creation and spread of disinformation. • Another avenue that different governments have considered or used is that of increased regulation of social media users and content. Importantly, the multiple implications of and potential issues with this approach, including the potential to limit freedom of expression, should be strongly considered. • New strategies to counter propagandists and disinformation, such as cyber-blurring, continue to be considered and developed, and their utility in reducing the effectiveness of Russian propaganda should be evaluated.

Use of only one approach to countering disinformation is likely to be far less effective than a multi-pronged approach that promotes multiple different avenues. Further, any set of approaches that is pursued with little or no consideration of the social contexts and audience characteristics of those who will be exposed to these efforts will also be less effective. Continued development of new strategies, based in theory and research, followed by implementation and systematic evaluation is also needed to effectively counter Russia propaganda.

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19 Fighting and Framing Fake News Maria Haigh and Thomas Haigh

INTRODUCTION Discussion of ‘fake news’, a once obscure concept, was catalyzed in late 2016 when a gunman started firing inside a Washington, DC pizzeria that he, and many others, were convinced held children being imprisoned and sexually abused by senior members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Reporters discovered that this was just the tip of a previously underreported iceberg. The surprise victory of Donald Trump in the US Presidential election had been facilitated by a wealth of fabricated reporting and conspiracy theories spread through websites and social media. Still more strikingly, a succession of statements, reports, and eventual criminal indictments (Kahn, 2018) from US intelligence and justice officials revealed that this disinformation campaign had been in large part fomented by Russian agents, including trolls using social media tools to spread divisive messages and fabricated stories. Russia’s success led other

governments, including those of Myanmar (Reed, 2018) and Saudi Arabia (Benner et al., 2018), to set up their own troll farms and online disinformation campaigns. Realizing the scope of the online fake news problem led Western scholars to study it and propose cures, from technical fixes like tweaks, through the algorithms used by Facebook to place stories in the newsfeeds of its users, to calls for the public funding of quality journalism to inoculate the public against disinformation. We focus here not just on the United States but also on Ukraine, where exposure to Russian-sponsored fake news peaked not in late 2016 but in mid 2014. Because the Russian campaign in Ukraine accompanied more traditional modes of military attack, Ukrainians were quicker to recognize the threat posed by state-sponsored fake news. Their efforts to fight it have shifted over time from debunking efforts to broadly based media literacy campaigns.

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DEFINING FAKE NEWS In the summary above, we did not systematically distinguish between fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. Researchers have defined or categorized fake news according to the intent of its creators and initial disseminators: ‘most taxonomies agree that the phrase refers to the intentional dissemination of false information’ (Levi, 2017). One recent definition suggests that ‘Fake news is the deliberate presentation of (typically) false or misleading claims as news, where the claims are misleading by design’ (Gelfert, 2018). By that definition, fake news would be disinformation, which is conventionally distinguished from misinformation by the intent of its disseminator to deceive. Some have identified degrees of fakeness, based on the truth content of the news and/or the intent of its disseminators. For example, Verstraete et  al. (2017) categorized several kinds of fake news. They distinguished satires from hoaxes based on the intent of the hoaxer to deceive, even though both were purposefully false and financially motivated. They also distinguish between propaganda and trolling based on intent: both intend to deceive, but trolls are ‘motivated by an

Satire or Parody No intention to cause harm but has potential to fool

attempt to get personal humor value’. Claire Wardle (2017) similarly categorized different kinds of fake news on a scale based on an increasing intent to deceive (see Figure 19.1). When we tried to operationalize these taxonomies to categorize fake news stories, we discovered a problem: they center (literally in Wardle’s case) on the intentions of the creator. In Wardle’s taxonomy, for example, satire and fabricated content are both entirely false but are placed at opposite ends of her spectrum, based on the intent of their creators. Yet, intent is a mental state, impossible to document with certainty. Typically we must infer it from clues in the news story and its context. Even when one can observe the creation of the news story, for example in the 4chan threads that gave birth to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (Tuters et  al., 2018), intent is elusive. White nationalists and other extremists routinely describe their propaganda as satire. How to categorize specific anonymous posters as paid trolls, frustrated satirists, or would-be patriots who sincerely believed themselves to be uncovering a monstrous conspiracy? Neither the production nor distribution of such a story can be attributed to a single individual. Giglietto et al. (2016: 30) have argued that disinformation should be studied not as

Misleading Content

Imposter Content

Misleading use of information to frame an issue of an individual

When genuine sources are impersonated

Fabricated Content New content that is 100% fake, designed to deceive and to do harm

INCREASING INTENT TO DECEIVE

False Connection When headlines visuals or captions don’t support the content

False Content When genuine content is shared with false contextual information

Manipulated Content When genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive

Figure 19.1  Wardle’s (2017) taxonomy of ‘7 types of mis- and dis-information’ is centered on the intent of the creator of fake news, which may be challenging to determine Source: Wardle (2017).

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the result of the deliberate actions of mischievous actors but as the ‘emergent result of a series of interconnected actions’ taken by loosely coordinated actors. Even if we could somehow determine whether the creator of a news story was malicious or unhinged, this would change nothing in the impact of the story or its relationship to reality. We prefer to define the difference between fake news and real news with reference to the process by which it was produced and disseminated. To infer the intent of a story, one must do the following: 1 Compare the claims made in the story to the sources it draws on, to look for places where information is misleadingly contextualized, claims are made that can’t be found in any other sources, etc. 2 Draw inferences from this about the process by which the story was produced. For example, its author mischaracterized evidence to support an argument it does not truly support. Or the author must have fabricated information, because it contradicts trusted sources. 3 Draw a further inference about the intention of the author, based on the processes he or she chooses to use. For example, in Wardle’s taxonomy, someone who manipulates a photograph has a high intent to deceive.

Hence, to infer intent is to first make a judgment about the process used to produce a story, and then to make a second judgment about the motivations of someone who would use such a process. Process can potentially be observed, but intent must always be inferred. It would surely be more reliable to categorize a news story as fake based on its production process.

Fake News is Bullshit Some experts dislike the term ‘fake news’ and prefer to use the more general categories of disinformation or misinformation. Wardle and Derakhshan (2017: 15), for example, have called the term ‘woefully inadequate’. In contrast, we feel that it has a valuable

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specificity. The concept of ‘fake’ news distinguishes shoddy, unreliable, or biased journalism from material that is not journalism at all but is presented as if it were. Fake news takes the form of a news report but is not a news report, just as a fake Vermeer is not a Vermeer and a fake diamond is not a diamond. Other disinformation takes other forms: fake science, fake history, fake letters, fake government documents, or fake statistics. Mimicking the form of the news report gives disinformation an aura of trustworthiness, misappropriated from the news stories it resembles, just as certain flies mimic wasps to exploit the deterrent power of stingers they do not possess. In that sense, fake news is, to use the category established by philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005), bullshit – something produced without regard to the truth, or even to the need to appear truthful. This distinction was clearest in the avalanche of poorly faked news that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, some of which was produced in bulk by workers in Saint Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. The pages linked by its trolls and bots looked like news reports, but the images they included were often misidentified or doctored, supporting details were imagined, and quotes were misattributed or distorted. As Frankfurt (2005: 47) pointed out ‘What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it is made’. A real news story is the visible product of an elaborate process, unseen by its readers, of reporting, writing, verifying, and editing. A fake news story is produced by a different process, one that makes no effort to create verifiable correspondences between the claims made in the news story and the real world. Real vs. fake news therefore constitutes a different analytical axis from true vs. untrue reporting. Fake news is usually untrue, but it doesn’t have to be. As Frankfurt (2005: 47–8) observed, ‘although it is produced without concern for the truth, [bullshit] need not be

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false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong’. Real news reporting is full of factual errors and misleading conclusions. Journalists are fooled by seemingly plausible sources, mix up their notes, or do shoddy work; newspapers run corrections every day. Just as stopped clocks are right twice a day, a piece of fake news might occasionally be more true than a badly produced piece of real news. Yet the untrue news story is still real news, the genuine product of a journalistic process as flawed and compromised as anything else undertaken by humans. We have argued elsewhere (Haigh et  al., 2018), drawing on the literature of science and technology studies, that defining fake news by its production process lets us distinguish between real and fake news without pretending that real news is objectively true. News is always biased in one way or another, whether by the conscious demands of newspaper and television proprietors or the unconscious assumptions of the journalists reporting it. The very idea of ‘news’ itself is structurally biased towards sudden, discrete events and away from analysis of chronic, long term issues. As Lucas Graves (2017: 520) has observed, ‘fact checkers, investigative journalists and scientists [all deal] with controversies in which not just facts but rules for determining them are in question’. Although science studies has been caricatured (Gross and Levitt, 1994) as an anti-science or crudely relativist field, in recent years some of its most prominent scholars have come to the defense of the robustness of knowledge produced by climate science (Kofman, 2018; Edwards, 2010). Something is accepted as scientific when its truth claims have been constructed and tested via specific social processes accepted by respected scientists in the relevant field (Latour, 1987). Likewise, something is real news when it has been produced using the social processes accepted as adequate by respected journalists in the relevant field. The end products produced by applying these rules are different – a newspaper article would

not be publishable in a scientific journal – but both sets of processes create confirmable correspondence to reality. When that correspondence is tested and found to be defective, both communities have ways to evaluate the credibility of publications and mechanisms to correct or recall work that proves defective.

FRAMING FAKE NEWS As the historian Michael S. Mahoney (2011) liked to say, ‘nothing is unprecedented’. When faced with a new and unfamiliar thing we frame it as a special version of an old and familiar thing, stretching or combining existing mental categories. Our minds identify the most suitable precedent. As a putatively new thing of interest to a broad range of commentators, fake news has been framed using many different precedents. To select one of these frames is to commit to an understanding of what fake news is and, therefore, what possible fix might be appropriate for it.

Frame 1: Fake News as a Weapon of War When the term ‘fake news’ began to gain currency in 2014 it was to describe part of a broad Russian offensive against Ukraine. During Russia’s initial military occupation of Crimea, its special forces removed their insignia and its government denied know­ ledge of their identity. Its media and trolls supported this message of uncertainty to discourage international intervention. When Russian military and intelligence officers fomented a rebellion in Eastern Ukraine and took up leadership positions in rebel ‘republics’, its information-warfare specialists supported these efforts by spreading fake news of Nazis in the Ukrainian leadership, the persecution of ethnic Russians, and atrocities by Ukrainian forces. In late summer, when regular Russian forces crossed the border to

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prevent a rout of the separatists and freeze the conflict, Russian disinformation campaigns denied their existence. When separatists shot down a passenger jet using a missile recently driven over the Russian border, fake news blamed everything from a Ukrainian plan to assassinate Vladimir Putin to a false flag operation involving a plane full of bodies harvested from morgues. This tight coupling of conventional forces, paramilitary units, conventional propaganda, hackers, trolls, and fake news spread via social media attracted considerable attention. Russia was said by Jonsson and Seely (2015) to have coupled military, informational, economic, and energy weapons with political influence operations in what was sometimes called ‘postmodern warfare’. Mark Galeotti translated a 2013 speech on the topic by General Valery Gerasimov on the use of pro­ paganda and subversion (which he believed the United States was deploying against Russia). After Russian’s action in Crimea, Galeotti’s headline phrase, ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’, entered common use to describe this coordination of forces (Bartles, 2016). The extent to which Russia’s extensive use of social media trolls and online fake news represented a completely novel or coherent military doctrine has been questioned. Kuzio and D’Anieri (2018) argue for the continuity of current Russian information weapons with Soviet practices to undermine internal challenges and earlier Russian efforts to fragment other postSoviet states such as Moldova and Georgia. Galeotti (2018) himself has apologized for coining the term ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ arguing that there is no ‘single Russian “doctrine”’ but a ‘broad political objective’ pursued in ways that are ‘opportunistic, fragmentary, even sometimes contradictory’.

Frame 2: Fake News as a Form of Online Dishonesty Fake news has been understood primarily as a recent, primarily online phenomenon,

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though isolated uses of the phrase have been found in earlier periods. The idea that people act differently in online and offline interactions is well established, going back to Howard Rheingold’s (1993) early advocacy for the potential of ‘online communities’, Sherry Turkle’s (1995) sociological analysis of online identities and early work on the study of ‘cyberculture’ and ‘cybersociety’ (Jones, 1994). These authors stressed the inclusiveness of online communities and the fluidity of online identity. The message was summed up in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, in which a dog using a computer keyboard tells another dog, ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’. In contrast, Lawrence Lessig (1999) argued that the subtle design decisions embedded in the code used to create these online environments could have profound influences on the way people behave in them. Some of the discussion of fake news has focused on the characteristics of today’s online environments, which make fake news easy to generate, easy to spread, and hard to combat. In traditional communities, people know each other well enough to recognize lying, establishing identities over time. Antisocial actions are more likely to have direct personal consequences. (Keyes, 2004). The same affordances that make flaming (Bukatman et  al., 1994), spam (Brunton, 2013) and trolling (Phillips, 2015) common features of online interaction also help to explain the prevalence of fake news. In this frame, fake news is one of several forms of online dishonesty, and its rise can be explained by looking at the general characteristics of social interaction online and at the specific affordance provided by platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan. Twitter provides a social environment that rewards short, aggressive, decontextualized communication. Facebook’s algorithm, in 2016 at least, promoteed material that was likely to be shared and clicked, which favored fake news stories designed to produce strong and immediate emotional responses. 4chan and

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reddit make it easy for users to self-segregate into micro communities in which behavior that would be usually be stigmatized is normalized. The anonymity they provide further loosens restraint and accountability. This is seen most clearly in the collective work of 4chan users in collectively fabricating the elaborate Pizzagate narrative, in the apparently sincere belief that they were discovering clues to a vast conspiracy (Tuters et al., 2018).

Frame 3: Fake News as a Form of State Propaganda Work that frames fake news as a specifically online form of dishonesty, or as part of a new approach to warfare, typically stresses the novelty of fake news. Fake news looks different if one frames it as a continuation, with new tools, of long-established forms of statesponsored propaganda. In the context of this Handbook, we need not belabor the point that governments have used news reporting to manipulate public opinion for a long time, both among their own populations and abroad. During the Cold War, propaganda and disinformation became still more important. The KGB and its sister intelligence services in Eastern Europe fabricated evidence to put fake stories into circulation in Western media, including an elaborate hoax that AIDS had been developed by the United States as a biological weapon (Selvage and Nehring, 2014). The CIA likewise planted false stories to show the Soviet Union and its allies in a bad light, as part of its campaigns in places like Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Chile. Recent alarm about fake news does not always recognize these deep continuities with historical practice. There are, of course, differences between modern fake news and traditional propaganda. We highlighted one of these differences when we called online fake news (Haigh et  al., 2018) ‘peer to peer propaganda’. Even stories posted by trolls or promoted by bots were still liked and shared by many real humans, who

invested their own social capital to became inadvertent propogandists. Modern fake news, particularly in the intensive campaigns of 2014 and 2016, has tended to be more amateurish than earlier state-sponsored campaigns. Planting stories in foreign media could disguise their origin, but much traditional state propaganda, such as radio broadcasts over borders or pamphlets dropped from planes, was experienced by its targets as a message sponsored by a foreign government. Fringe media outlets, where conspiracy theories were more likely to appear, used production methods and distribution channels that clearly set them aside from mainstream media. Someone who purchased a fuzzily printed newspaper on a street corner from a shabbily dressed stranger shouting about world government could use these contextual clues to distinguish its reporting from that found in a more orthodox publication or in a professionally published book found in a library. Social media had a levelling effect: news stories of all kinds were likely to be encountered by readers as headlines, links, and a small graphic shared in their social media page by friends, groups, or institutional pages that they had ‘liked’. An online news story, particularly when experienced on the small screen of a smartphone, has a similar appearance whether it came from a major news organization or a hastily created fake news site.

Frame 4: Fake News as a Profitable Business Fake news can be understood as a commodity produced to maximize profits in the modern media marketplace: low-cost viral content that will attract large numbers of visitors to maximize advertising revenues. As Pablo Boczkowski (2010) has shown, modern online journalism requires its practitioners to constantly monitor the media environment and rapidly copy the information in new reports or post links and paraphrases of their content.

Fighting and Framing Fake News

The shift online has also hurt the pay, working conditions, and job security of journalists. This makes in-depth verification and fact checking harder. Publications that rely on social media shares, rather than subscribers, for financial viability are more likely to inadvertently spread fake news or heavily biased reporting. From this viewpoint, fake news is no different from top-50 lists, teaser headlines promising dramatic celebrity revelations, or blog posts recycling scraps of information from other blogs. Journalists who went looking for the sources of widely shared political fake news after the 2016 election found stories that originated with Russian statecontrolled media and trolls. They found other sites run by people who claimed to be Internet entrepreneurs with no state affiliations or deeply held political beliefs who were mass producing fabricated stories to bring in advertising revenue via social media shares (Ohlheiser, 2016). One of the most successful of these entrepreneurs, Cyrus Massoumi, built a sizable business on fake news and clickbait (O’Brien, 2018). He began in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings by purchasing Facebook adverts asking those who opposed gun-control legislation to click a ‘like’ button. He directed these users to ‘a series of inflammatory conservative websites, finely turned to produce the most viral and outrageous version of the news’ (Frier, 2017). Thanks to the global nature of the Internet, entrepreneurs based overseas could also profit from the US market for fake news. Beqa Latsabidze, a 22-year-old computerscience student in the post-Soviet nation of Georgia, ran a popular website, departed.co, full of fake news stories celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He claimed (Higgins et al., 2016) to be serving no geopolitical agenda and to have begun with a website posting favorable stories about Clinton only to discover that there was no market for them.

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Frame 5: Fake News as an Extreme Form of Media Bias The social processes of journalism work within broader cultural and institutional contexts that determine which stories are reported and how the new event is framed (Harcup and O’Neill, 2001). Within communication research there is a tradition of exploring how concentrated media ownership, self-interested elites, and political ideology skew news coverage and marginalize certain kinds of reporting. One influential propaganda model by Herman and Chomsky (2010) identifies five sources of biases in corporate mass media: ownership, funding sources, sourcing, flak, and ‘fear ideology’. From this viewpoint, there are differences in degree but not in kind between BBC World and Russia Today as state-sponsored broadcasters, or between cnn. com and departed.co as for-profit online news outlets. The former pair exist to serve the ruling elites of their countries, the latter pair to make money for their owners. Some of the other tactics used in Russian disinformation campaigns also have analogs in established Western practices, such ‘astroturfing’ where corporations establish fake grassroots groups to lobby for their preferred policy positions, on the basis of claimed public interest rather than corporate self-interest (Walker, 2010). In such cases, fake news is spread by fake activists. During the summer of 2018, we interviewed Ukrainian journalists, media literacy specialists, and local news-website operators in Kiev and Lviv. They explained that fake news had evolved since the initial onslaught in 2014 of blatantly fake news produced within Russia. Fake news has become more subtle and harder to debunk, mixing real details with fabricated claims. Several mentioned a wave of domestically produced fake news favoring particular politicians and factions. Ukrainian media has long been dominated by a handful of powerful business interests, so as the fake news crisis of 2014 is replaced with a chronic, ongoing fake news problem,

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the dividing line between old-school biased reporting and newfangled fake news becomes less clear. The mix of fabrication and bias is captured in the humorous fake news bingo

game (Figure 19.2) circulated by StopFake. It mixes the tactics of fake news, such as manipulated images and entirely fabricated stories, with biased reporting that exaggerates Ukraine’s real problems such as poverty,

Figure 19.2  This satirical bingo card, produced by StopFake, summarizes the most common fake news and biased media tropes used against Ukraine around 2017 Source: StopFake (2017).

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weak leadership, and political instability. The central square holds a unifying message of the current fake news campaign: Ukraine is a failed state.

Frame 6: Fake News as a Plot to Delegitimate Alternative Media The fact that all media has structural biases can be used to redefine the category of ‘fake news’. In this view, ‘The term “fake news” (or “misinformation”) has been introduced very deliberately and consciously into the vernacular of American and international politics as the catch-all justification for censorship’ (Damon, 2018). Fringe publications often assert that establishment media is the real fake news (Damon, 2016). When responding to evidence that one of their writers was a plagiarizing Russian troll using a fake identity, the editors of the anti-establishment magazine Counterpunch repeatedly referred to the role The New York Times and Washington Post played in spreading false claims in the run up to the Iraq War (Clair and Frank, 2017). Media scholar Oliver Boyd-Barrett (2017) explored divergent narratives around the 2014 Ukrainian crisis. Denying the ability of ‘an analyst to declare what is “true” or “false”’ he drew conclusions not about the accuracy of specific reports but the structural bias of different types of media. He noted the role of mainstream Western media in serving the ‘propaganda aims of imperial power’, praising ‘the countervailing influence of alternative news sources that have a demonstrable good-faith track record and capability in the provision of information’, such as the World Socialist Web Site (the ‘online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement’). Its publishers have complained that measures against fake news have hurt their ranking in Google’s search engine (Wakabayashi, 2017). They challenge the view that fringe and highly partisan news websites and media ecosystems

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have contributed to the spread of fake news (Benkler et al., 2017). Boyd-Barret (2017) noted that Western media suggested that Russia had helped ‘thugs in the Donbass to establish separatist fiefdoms’ whereas Russian media and some alternative media organizations suggested that Russia ‘maintained a cool distance’. He believed that the resulting narrative ‘clash inevitably tends towards the destabilization of the hegemonic Western discourse’. This analysis echoed many of the motifs included by StopFake in its bingo game (Figure 19.2), referring throughout to Ukraine’s 2014 revolution as a ‘coup’ and asserting that ‘events in Crimea were an inevitable response to the Western meddling that had precipitated’ it. Timothy Snyder (2018), observing the frequency with which Russian propaganda tropes were echoed in news outlets of the kind favored by Boyd-Barret, argued that such journalists ‘were not analysts of, but rather participants in, the Russian campaign to undermine factuality’. One scholar’s fake news is another scholar’s destabilization of hegemonic discourse. Belief that establishment media is the real fake news has recently moved from the political fringes into the White House. Although Donald Trump’s administration has eagerly seized on the occasional retraction or corrections of unfavorable reporting, the president’s assertions of fakeness have rarely focused on specific errors. He has attempted not just to redefine what makes a news story ‘fake’, typically that itmakes him look bad, but to shift the locus of fakeness from specific pieces of reporting to entire publications and media companies. At a rally in August 2018, he called the journalists caged at the rear of the event ‘horrible, horrendous people’ and said ‘they can make anything bad because they are the fake, fake, disgusting news’ (Reuters, 2018). Media organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC are motivated by the animus their reporters hold for him and ordinary Americans.

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Frame 7: Fake News as Part of a Post-Truth Society Discussion of ‘fake news’ is often joined to the idea that political discourse has entered an era of ‘post-truth’, named as the 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries (2016). The phrase ‘post-truth’, which goes back at least as far as the declaration of a ‘Post-Truth Era’ by Keyes (2004), is invoked to explain the ability of politicians to continue to repeat claims that have been widely rejected by experts and fact checking groups. Politicians such as Donald Trump often contradict themselves and show little interest in even pretending to offer evidence to support their assertions, yet they remain popular with many voters. The post-truth frame explains the effectiveness of fake news, not as a result of fake stories being hard to tell apart from real reporting but on a collective lack of interest in attempting any such distinction. This, it is claimed, reflects a broader loss of faith in social institutions and governing elites. For example, a RAND corporation study (Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017) termed the problem ‘truth decay’, and suggeted that it reflects a privileging of opinions and experiences over facts as well as a loss of faith in formerly respected institutions and sources of factual information. Like fake news, ‘post-truth’ echoed a phenomenon familiar to observers of Russia. Peter Pomerantsev (2014) titled his account of Russian media and politics Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible. That itself was a phrase borrowed from a description of totalitarian propaganda by Hanna Arendt (1951: 382): ‘the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… its audience… did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyway’. Some observers see this as part of a broad shift in Western society away from faith in

objective truth and towards an ideology that favors individual belief, often blaming the situation on the influence of postmodern literary theorists (Kakutani, 2018; McIntyre, 2018). Kurt Andersen (2017), for example, has knitted together scholarly enthusiasm for critical theory, science fiction, and new-age religion into an overarching narrative of the United States as a country with a particular fondness for self-delusion. The idea that fake news is part of a broader shift towards post-truth is not incompatible with the other frames presented here, though it does imply that fake news can’t be treated in isolation. Fake news could be both driving and benefitting from a broader breakdown of truth, whether spread as a weapon of war, a tool of state propaganda, or a business opportunity. Timothy Snyder (2018) has argued that Russia’s use of state-sponsored fake news is intended not to replace one coherent understanding of reality with another but to weaken Western countries by undermining public faith in politicians, media, and other democratic instructions. Frankfurt (2005: 56) argues that liars make an effort to appear truthful: ‘a person who lies is responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful to it’. Public tolerance of bullshit, in contrast, weakens the power of truth. This implies that bullshit is more dangerous to democracy than lies.

Frame 8: Fake News as Flaw in Human Nature The post-truth frame explains fake news as the results of broad social and cultural shifts, while the online-dishonesty frame focuses on the particular characteristics of online interaction and the affordances provided by particular platforms. Other work has pushed these ideas in a disturbing direction, suggesting that a preference for fake news is a fundamental feature of human nature rather than the product of a particular historical moment or form of online interaction.

Fighting and Framing Fake News

Because the producers of fake news are indifferent to truth and are not constrained by journalistic practice, the stories they produce can be honed to include whatever claims are most likely to induce an immediate emotional response in the reader. This leads to rapid, ‘viral’ sharing on social media. Disinformation spreads faster on social media than debunking stories and has more impact (Starbird et al., 2014). A major study by Vosoughi et  al. (2018), reported in Science, examined the diffusion of an enormous sample of around 126,000 true and (as ranked by fact checking organizations) false news stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. It found that ‘falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth’, particularly for false political news (Vosoughi et  al., 2018). People are drawn to disseminate novel and unexpected information (being new is the defining characeristic of ‘news’). Because fake news is unconstrained by reporting practices, it is usually more sensational and more surprising than real news and hence more likely to be shared. Quoted in The Atlantic, the study’s lead author, Soroush Vosoughi, said that ‘false information outperforms true information…. That is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature’ (Meyer, 2018). This is a question for the field of evolutionary psychology, but it certainly seems plausible that humans evolved to favor emotional stories over rational ones and to pay more attention to shocking information than unsurprising information. This compounds the well known phemomena of confirmation bias and congnitative dissonance: the well documented preference of humans for information that confirms our existing beliefs and the tendency to avoid evidence that might challenge them. The rise of political polarization and partisan news outlets makes this easier than ever, facilitating the spread of fake news (Beck, 2017). We might expect information that is both sensational and aligned with our prejudices is particularly likely to be shared.

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FIGHTING FAKE NEWS Given these many ways of framing fake news, we should not be surprised that efforts to fight it have been similarly diverse. The Yale workshop ‘Fighting Fake News’ discussed actions by actors including legislators, regulators, and technology and media companies (Baron and Crootof, 2017). No method has so far proven to be a ‘magic bullet’ able to vanquish the problem.

Weapon 1: Fact Checking and Rebuttals The most direct response to fake news is to reveal a specific fake story as ersatz by debunking it. This was the approach taken by the Ukrainian group StopFake, which we have studied previously (Haigh et al., 2018). Within 16 months of its foundation in May 2014, StopFake had posted 539 pieces online. Each debunked at least one fake story, usually from fake social media accounts, Russian websites, or Russian media. StopFake was influenced by Western fact checking groups like PolitiFact. Its founders described the group to us as an attempt to promote the journalistic standards they had been taught at university in Kiev. They insisted that they were not enlisted on the Ukrainian side of the conflict, pointing with pride to their occasional debunking of proUkrainian fake news. This suggested a determination to adopt the frame of fake news as a kind of biased reporting. Like traditional fact checkers (Graves, 2016), StopFake fully documented its work, describing not just its conclusion that a news story was fake but the trail of evidence that supported the conclusion. In other respects, however, it was doing something quite different. Traditional political fact checkers evaluate the claims of politicians. They assume the politician’s words were accurately reported and then adjudicate their honesty, typically using a scale offering options such as ‘partly true’ or ‘mostly

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false’ as well as complete truth or absolute falsity. They rely heavily on experts and sources of trusted facts, such as government statistics, to reveal subtle distortions or identify facts taken out of context. In contrast, StopFake was investigating the trustworthiness of the reporter. The closest established parallel for StopFake, therefore, was services like Snopes.com that attempt to evaluate the truthfulness of online folklore. Unlike most fact checking groups, every published StopFake evaluation declared a story fake. Those that could not be definitively debunked were not posted. These methods were adapted to the flood of shoddily produced fake news inundating Ukraine at the time. For example, 35% of the 539 StopFake rebuttals posted between May 2014 and August 2015 showed that an image in the story had been misidentified, and 10% proved an image had been manipulated. This highlights the frame of fake news as online disinformation. The same model has been adopted by other organizations fighting fake news. Since September 2015 the European Union has produced a weekly digest of disinformation. Debunked stories are logged in an online database (EU vs Disinfo, 2018). Its website mentions that 14 full-time staff members are working on fact checking. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, the political news organization Politico.com launched its own service (Lima and Briz, 2018) tagging known fake news stories as ‘hoax’, ‘imposter’, or ‘doctored’. The impact of StopFake is hard to mea­ sure. Fake news has not been stopped, but over its first 18 months the group achieved impressive things given its almost nonexistent budget. Its website received more than five million visits. Its posts were spread widely by its 120,000 social media followers, though not as widely as the fake news stories they were disputing. As we mentioned above, real news is typically shared less widely and less rapidly than fake news. Selecting fake stories to evaluate, researching them, writing

up a careful analysis, and translating it into several languages took several days, giving the fake stories time to spread unchallenged. The frames of fake news as the product of a post-truth society or a flaw in human nature suggest that its consumers may not be swayed by debunking pieces and will certainly not seek them out. Analyses of the 2016 US elections suggest that the impact of fact checking is in decline (Vargo et al., 2018). People whose attachment to an unreliable source like Infowars or Russia Today can be shaken by fact checking will likely be convinced after reading a dozen careful takedowns of fake reporting. Posting rebuttals of another hundred stories from each will not change many more minds. Treating fake news only as a form of media bias is an inadequate response to its deployment as a weapon of war or as part of a state-sponsored propaganda campaign, since its producers will not be deterred by appeals to journalistic standards. Neither will for-profit producers of fake news. The group’s biggest success may have been in drawing the attention of journalists outside Ukraine to the fake news phenomenon. This made journalists cautious about echoing its tropes and claims, for example that Ukraine was run by Nazis, in their own reporting.

Weapon 2: Policing Online Platforms Facebook and Twitter have received several waves of bad publicity since the 2016 elections, for business models that promoted whichever stories were most likely to maximize user engagement. In response, Facebook used a combination of data mining and human investigation to flag, evaluate, and eventually delete hundreds of accounts used by Russians to spread fake news (Glaser, 2017). Some of these accounts had been used to organize marches or stage other events. Pages held messages targeted at different groups, including conservatives, African-American activists, gun enthusiasts, and Hispanics. These efforts

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are continuing: a criminal complaint against a worker at the Internet Research Agency filed in October 2018 documented the use of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to skew political discourse ahead of the 2018 midterm elections (Glaser, 2018). While the amount of human labor needed to police a platform like Facebook for signs of fake news, extremist propaganda, or state-sponsored political disinformation might seem prohibitive, platform companies already employ a mixture of automated tools and human moderators to screen content for nudity, obscenity, and hate speech (Roberts, 2016). The companies routinely flag and delete accounts identified as vehicles for commercial spam or the products of bots programmed to create accounts in bulk. During the first quarter of 2018, Facebook deleted more than 500 million such accounts (Romm and Harwell, 2018). Expanding these systems to police fake news and hate speech is a shift of emphasis within an existing regulatory regime, not the imposition of censorship on a formerly open platform. One reason Facebook regulated nudity much more aggressively than fake news or extremist politics was the profitable customer engagement produced by fake news. Since 2016, tweaks to algorithms used to prioritize the personal newsfeeds of Facebook users have reduced the number of clicks received by fake new sites and by news organizations in general (Oremus, 2018). This has changed the economics of the news business. In August 2017, fake news entrepreneur Cyrus Massoumi closed the most successful of his disinformation sites, MrConservative.com, complaining that changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm meant that what he himself called a ‘garbage website’ was left ‘barely profitable after the fake news crisis’. Instead, he poured his resources into a liberal clickbait website, TruthExaminer, which he hoped would stand more chance under the new measures. He aimed to ‘offload’ this for an ‘eight-figure deal’ during the next election cycle (Frier, 2017).

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Companies would like to find ways to limit the proliferation of fake news without sacrificing other forms of profitable user engagement. One high-profile experiment at Facebook was to partner with fact checking and fake news debunking organizations to flag disputed stories with a red warning banner. This proved counterproductive – users were more likely to click on flagged items (Constine, 2018). Instead, Facebook announced a new tactic, giving fake stories smaller displays further down a user’s personal feed and placing them next to links to reports debunking them. Its fact checking partners told Facebook that ‘they felt taken for granted, used as public relations cover, and ignored’ (Ananny, 2018). Like StopFake, they struggled to produce debunking stories fast enough to significantly impact the rapid spread of viral fake news. One solution would be an algorithm able to successfully identify fake news before it spreads far enough to attract attention from human fact checkers. Lucas Graves (2018) suggested that the ultimate goal of ‘automated fact checking’ is to build a system able to automatically evaluate stories and instantly deliver corrections. He cautioned that ‘much of the terrain covered by human fact-checkers requires a kind of judgement and sensitivity to context that remains far out of reach for fully automated verification’ (2018: 1). So far, Facebook has been more cautious, using an algorithm to flag items that fit the profile of fake news for attention by its fact checking partners.

Weapon 3: Counterpropaganda Campaigns Another response, driven by the frame of fake news as a weapon of war, is the idea that Western countries should counter like with like. This might take the form of retaliatory propaganda designed to favor their national interests, or the international dissemination of accurately reported news to demonstrate

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the power of the values of the ‘open society’ in the clash of free and unfree systems, as promoted during the Cold War by philosopher Karl Popper and in recent decades by the Open Society Foundations set up by philanthropist George Soros. During the Cold War, the United States used both approaches. After it ended, international broadcasting efforts such as Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America were closed or reduced in scope, as were efforts to build ‘soft power’ through cultural programming and exchanges. NATO made efforts in recent years (Fredheim, 2018) to evaluate and publicize the threat posed by fake news as a weapon of war or tool of state propaganda, and to coordinate efforts to fight it (Guerrini, 2018). The United States retains programs to promote democracy and press freedom, though these are viewed with suspicion by some on the left who see them as ways of dressing up the pursuit of US self-interest. It is hard to imagine the Trump administration adopting a strategy to build international respect for professional journalism, still less pursing it with any credibility. In 2018, for example, Radio and Television Martí, a group sponsored by the US government to broadcast to Cuban audiences, ran an anti-Semitic piece calling Soros a ‘nonpracticing Jew of flexible morals’ and blaming him for the global financial crisis of 2008 (Sonmez, 2018). This echoed conspiracy theories that have long been common in Russian-sponsored fake news, subsequently adopted by far-right wing groups in the United States, and most recently endorsed by Trump and other Republicans (Vogel et al., 2018).

Weapon 4: Censorship or Regulation of Media The trend in democratic countries has been away from media regulation, following the idea that reducing government interference makes for a more open and vibrant media

market. Rules to prevent concentration of ownership of print and broadcast media have been relaxed. Cable, satellite, and Internet news is not subject to the same regulation as broadcast television. Russia Today was treated as a television channel like any other, broadcast digitally in some US cities, including Washington DC, and widely available on cable-television providers. The Ukrainian experts we talked to, echoing the framing of fake news as a weapon of war, suggested that one-sided openness to state-sponsored propaganda was not sustainable during a military conflict. Ukraine had curtailed the dissemination within Ukraine of many Russian television channels, which were owned by the state or by oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin. In 2017, it blocked access to the Russian social network VKontakte, used extensively by trolls. Since the expulsion in 2014 of its founder, Pavel Durov, reportedly following his unwillingness to disclose information on Ukrainian protestors, it has been owned and controlled by forces closely aligned with the Kremlin. These moves were controversial, criticized by some international groups such as Human Rights Watch (2017) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (2017) as infringements on freedom of expression. Such dramatic restrictions seem unlikely in the United States, not least because of the constitutional protections for press freedom and the strength of domestic media organizations such as Fox News operating on the borderline of biased reporting and fake news. The most dramatic effort so far was a private business decision targeted at conspiracy theorist and fake news entrepreneur Alex Jones. In 2018, Apple, Google’s YouTube service, Facebook, and Twitter all terminated distribution of his Internet television show InfoWars. Shifts in public opinion and the threat of legal liabi­lity pushed online media gatekeepers to apply clauses against hate speech in their terms of service. Such action responds to the frames of fake news as a business and as a form of online dishonesty, by making that business

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less profitable and the online environment less rewarding for fake news producers. Government actions in Western countries have so far focused on political fake news designed to sway elections. Robert Mueller’s ongoing FBI investigation of Russian election tampering has, as of October 2018, issued criminal indictments against 26 Russian individuals and three Russian companies involved in conspiring to influence the outcome of the election by spreading fake news, hacking and leaking Democratic party documents, and organizing political rallies within the United States. In 2018, the European Union persuaded Facebook, Google, and Twitter to sign up to a voluntary code of practice designed to fight political fake news, including monthly progress reports on implementation. According to two European commissioners (King and Gabriel, 2019), their initial compliance has been disappointing.

Weapon 5: Media Literacy Training Studies testing the ability of citizens to distinguish between real and fake news have produced worrying results. A widely reported study suggested that even Stanford undergraduate students, so-called ‘digital natives’, could not evaluate the credibility of online reports (Stanford History Education Group, 2016). News consumers are not in the habit of performing searches to validate claims and details, or of looking closely at domain names or the presence of links for clues that might reveal a story as fake news. Training them to do these things, becoming ‘media literate’, might inoculate them against infection with fake news. By the summer of 2018, even our Ukrainian informants still associated with StopFake had accepted that media literacy, rather than expert debunking of fake news, would be their primary long-term weapon. Media literacy addresses several frames for fake news: weapon of war, form of state propaganda, and extreme form of media bias.

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We have written in detail elsewhere (Haigh, Haigh & Matychak) about the Ukrainian ‘Learn to Discern’ media literacy program run by the US-headquartered nonprofit group IREX, the International Research & Exchanges Board. The program covered traditional print and television reporting, from which most Ukrainians get their news, as well as online reporting. It encouraged news consumers to evaluate news messages in the context of the ownership and credibility of the news outlet providing it. Its centerpiece was an elaborate 193-page training manual with real examples of fake and biased news and information on Ukrainian media ownership. Over a nine-month period, around 15,000 members of the public were trained to evaluate the credibility of media reporting, identify manipulative techniques, and check startling claims against other sources. The study (Murrock et  al., 2018) concluded that 18 months after being trained, participants were better than a control group at evaluating the credibility of news stories. They also felt more confident in their ability to distinguish fake news from genuine reporting, which made them more inclined to trust news media. This suggests that training can increase awareness of fake news without reinforcing belief in a ‘post-truth’ world. Media literacy expert Renee Hobbs called this a new model for how to ‘measure media literacy competencies acquired by adults though formal media education programs’ (Guernsey, 2018). At the time of writing, IREX is attempting to integrate similar skills into education for eighth- and ninth-grade school students in Ukraine, and extending the Learn to Discern program to other countries including the United States, where pilot programs were planned in Arizona and New Jersey.

Weapon 6: Political Reform The Ukrainians we spoke to pointed to government corruption and cynicism about the likelihood of politicians enacting fundamental

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reform as an underlying cause for people’s openness to disinformation. More than two centuries ago, with the chaos of the French Revolution in mind, Joseph de Maistre quipped that all nations get the governments they deserve; perhaps they also get the news media they deserve. If the post-truth political environment is real and reflects a loss of faith in democratic institutions, then fake news is the product of gradual but profound cultural changes. Reforms that rebuild faith in the authority of expert knowledge, the practices of professional journalism, and politicians whose claims are constrained by reality might reduce the reach of fake news. Whether they fill us with gloom or with hope, we tend to assume that current trends will continue forever. As communications historian Michael Schudson (1981) has shown, veneration for objective reporting is not an inherent characteristic of US society but a product of the historical conditions under which US journalism evolved. Its stress on journalistic objectivity and separation of news and opinion writing was only fully institutionalized in the Progressive Era, a period of dramatic reform in US society during which expertise of all kinds was venerated (Kaplan, 2002). During the Cold War, competition from unfree socialist countries pushed the United States to demonstrate its commitment to the institutions and practices of open democracy, including free and putatively disinterested reporting. Although these specific economic, technological, and political circumstances are unlikely to recur, our own historical moment will prove equally impermanent.

CONCLUSION Fake news, as it appeared in Ukraine in 2014 and in the United States in 2016, has many similarities with other forms of propaganda, dishonesty, and disinformation, but it was distinct enough to be usefully treated as a new phenomenon. Our discussion of the

many frames that can be applied to fake news, each invoking a different set of precedents, shows that it combines aspects of previously understood phenomena as something distinctively new. We see fake news as a metastasis of everything toxic in the modern media environment and contemporary political discourse, ruthlessly exploited by state and commercial interests. The epistemological threat posed by politicians undermining the very concept of fake news by redefining it as professional reporting unfavorable to them is particularly grave. We resist it here by using the term precisely and urge others to do so also. The methods appropriate to fighting fake news vary according to which frames one chooses to favor. None of the methods we discussed could address every frame. Platform policing, debunking, counter propaganda, legal enforcement, media literacy training, and political reform all have potential. Political reforms and cultural shifts to roll back acceptance of bullshit and post-truth politics would provide the strongest defenses against fake news. Fake news will never be beaten, but it may be contained.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our understanding of fake news has been deepened by interactions with scholars and informants including Lucas Graves, JoAnne Yates, Maryna Dorosh, Roman Shutov, Ruslan Deynychenko, Tetyana Matychak, Olga Yurkova, Natali Ulynets, Taras Yatsenko, and Vsevolod Polishchuk. We are grateful to Nadine Kozak for her contributions to an earlier article from which we draw here.

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20 Measuring the Unmeasurable: Evaluating the Effectiveness of US Strategic Counterterrorism Communications Alberto M. Fernandez

INTRODUCTION This chapter documents for the first time, in a comprehensive fashion, a case study of US counter-propaganda efforts against the most notorious, and arguably, most successful terrorist media operation in recent history. Organized in chronological fashion as events unfolded, it looks at the challenges in measuring these US efforts through the lens of the anti-Jihadist Arabic language video-messaging efforts of one small operation housed in the US Department of State from 2011 to 2018 and the nascent efforts of its successors. Selecting this specific part of a much larger (often covert) effort, this case study narrates the rise and transformation of a littleunderstood part of counterterrorism communications during the height of the highprofile media campaign by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group. An evaluation of the effectiveness of US strategic counterterrorism communications seems like an idea that has had its time.

The overwhelming majority of US activity in this field is either covert or discretely organized. To be sure, internal evaluations are constant in government and US government agencies who may work in the field of influence operations or information operations, and they have robust performance metrics. Often, they may be connected with performance indicators used to evaluate success achieved by government contractors providing services in this field. This process is usually opaque, although it occasionally surfaces in the media.1 Details usually surface when there is some sort of scandal involving money or performance issues.2 Another occasional source of insight is when a government agency selectively leaks material to get good press.3 This sort of selective leaking of your best is, of course, rather easy to do when most counterterrorism material is not branded.4 As the process of strategic counterterrorism communications has migrated and grown from public diplomacy to the more hermetic worlds of the military and the

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intelligence community, it has become more difficult, indeed impossible, to track. Public diplomacy efforts, especially if they are branded, can still be tracked if you know where to look. There is a rich and complex historical record of efforts to evaluate US public diplomacy programs aimed at influencing foreign audiences. Such attempts preceded the establishment of the United States Information Agency in August 1953 and have only intensified since USIA’s incorporation into the Department of State in October 1999. The issue of measuring the effectiveness of official efforts against extremism and antiAmericanism in the Middle East became even more salient in the 1990s, after the 1991 US War with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and particularly after al-Qa’ida’s spectacularly successful attack on the US homeland in September 2001. Some policymakers assumed that anti-American hatred and extremism were constants in the region.5 But after 9/11, counterterrorism communications efforts entered crisis mode with enhanced resources but also a highly politicized domestic and international political discourse not very conducive to solid evaluation. Even seemingly straightforward academic evaluation in this field has been tarred with controversy. In 2004, a widely derided State Department media campaign, the Shared Values Initiative (dubbed by some skeptics as the ‘Happy Muslims’ campaign) was surprisingly deemed effective in a study done by two advertising professors.6 Middle East experts noted that the study was flawed by failing to focus on the fact that the intended audience for the campaign were Muslims, not generic foreigners.7 With US government efforts in this field scattered, not just in the Department of State but also across the interagency in the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community and even White House Public Affairs, the problem of metrics became an even more complex one.

A ONE-STOP SHOP IN COUNTERTERRORISM COMMUNICATIONS The informal establishing of the interagency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) in late 2010, subsequently formalized in September 2011, seemed to offer an opportunity for greater clarity, but this entity lasted for less than five years, with CSCC replaced by the much larger Global Engagement Center (GEC) in April 2016. This was a step in the right direction, as for the first time, strategic counterterrorism communications efforts were seemingly centralized in one governmentwide clearinghouse. However, when it comes to government information, nothing is as easy as it seems. A data-driven evaluation of CSCC’s efforts seemed to focus on one key but short-term part of its overall work, the overt communications initiatives of the Digital Outreach Team (DOT), which can still be tracked online to this day and which will be a major focus of this study, as one activity that can definitely be measured and evaluated because it can be seen. Much more ignored, and much more difficult to quantify, were CSCC’s and the GEC’s coordination efforts and long-term investments channeled through proxies. After all, the biggest contribution that strategic counterterrorism communications make is often not what they produce themselves but rather what, through the convening process, agencies get others (proxies, non-governmental organizations, other government agencies, foreign governments) to produce for them. An early example of this type of indirect work, albeit in the form of traditional public diplomacy, from CSCC was the creation in 2011–2012 of the Resilient Communities Fund program, funded by the State Department, who are working through US embassies worldwide ‘to amplify the voices of survivors and victims of terrorism’. Small grants to local partners in order to achieve

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a common goal is a long-standing staple of the work of public diplomacy sections at US embassies around the world. Much of the principal ‘work of government’, which is mostly embodied in the bureaucratic ability to convene and to write policy, is largely impervious to outside evaluation. The mandate of the much larger and better-funded GEC has now been expanded to include counter-propaganda efforts against state actors like Russia, China and Iran, not just counterterrorism communications.8 The GEC’s work against Jihadism is now mostly unattributable and therefore unmeasurable, at least to the general public, if we judge by the office’s lack of precision in testimony before the US Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs’ Sub-Committee on Investigations in July 2016 with the GEC’s then Chief of Staff Meagan LaGraffe, formerly from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.9 One constant of CSCC’s work and the GEC’s efforts that has a track record and can be readily accessed (as of July 2018 anyway) and evaluated are the efforts of the DOT, an online effort of the State Department dating back to 2006, in Arabic and other languages. Initially part of the Department’s International Information Programs (IIP) Bureau, the team has always been controversial and attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention.10 It was an outgrowth of a 2002 Arabic language mediaoutreach center first established by the State Department in London, then a major hub of pan-Arab media. A careful study evaluating the DOT’s participation in Arabic internet discussions of Barack Obama’s Cairo speech of June 4, 2009 was mostly negative.11 That study noted ‘there may be covert US approaches that proceed in parallel with the DOT, but the DOT’s policy to genuinely identify their posts is a key strategic choice in their efforts to gain credibility’.12 The Arabic portion of the team was transferred from IIP to CSCC in late 2010 and given a new strategic

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counterterrorism communications message beginning in February 2011.13 With the transfer to CSCC, the mission morphed into one much more closely focused on counterterrorism, rather than the previous one of generally defending US policy in the Middle Eastern social-media space. The work still consisted of attributed interventions in online forums and of the production of graphic and video material. But in conforming to the new ethos of CSCC’s mandate, the material was to be intentionally aggressive and provocative, challenging the space previously ceded to the propagandists of Jihadism. The change from the old DOT to the new DOT was made manifest on February 16, 2011 with the release of the first two ‘attack videos’ using the words of the Al-Qa’ida deputy leader, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, on the impossibility of peaceful change in the Arab world against him.14 The work of this team from 2011 on would increase in both volume and impact, reaching its highest volume of production in 2016 (Table 20.1). In terms of audience views on YouTube, the DOT Arabic language videos would peak in 2014 (Table 20.2). A review of DOT videos produced under IIP and still available on YouTube place in stark relief the change that was occurring in February 2011. From 2007 to January 2011, DOT Arabic language videos were mostly translated, antiseptic clips of talking heads, mostly senior US officials like President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or, less frequently, more ‘Happy Muslim’ talk. One popular example of the latter is from 2008 and featured Brooke Samad, an American Muslim convert developing her own line of ‘modest clothing’.15 Still others covered the 2009 President Obama Cairo speech, entrepreneurship, US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs helping Muslims, Ramadan events such as Eid al-Fitr in the United States or official White House or State Department Iftars.

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Table 20.1  Growth of DOT Arabic language YouTube videos Number of videos

160

Number of videos

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

2011

2012

2013

2014 Year

2015

2016

2017

Table 20.2  Total views of DOT Arabic language YouTube videos Total views 1800000 1600000

Total views

1400000 1200000 1000000 800000 600000 400000 200000 0

2011

2012

2013

THE BIRTH OF US GOVERNMENT OVERT ATTACK VIDEOS IN ARABIC The two new-style videos of February 16, 2011 juxtaposed al-Zawahiri’s views on the need for a violent jihad with scenes of happy Tunisians and Egyptians celebrating in the streets during the first, seemingly optimistic, flush of the Arab Spring. These cheaplooking inartful ‘mashups’ were essentially calling al-Zawahiri a hypocrite and someone who was out of touch with the Arab Muslim masses he hoped to lead, and they did so by using his own words against him. The two

2014 Year

2015

2016

2017

videos had about 85,000 views.16 As technically crude as these initial videos seemed, they were in a sense revolutionary. While very much in the tradition of the US political attack ad –attacking your opponent rather than defending yourself, changing the subject and using your adversary’s words against him in an act of political jujitsu – this is not something that had been attempted before in counterterrorism communications.17 Not surprisingly, there is a considerable body of research on attack ads and negative advertising, a subject of great interest to both politicians and big business. While there is

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considerable debate about their effectiveness, there seems to be none on whether such campaigns hurt those who launch them.18 Negative advertising tends to be more memorable.19 Given that the image of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world is generally poor and has been so for decades, there seemed little risk that it could make a bad situation any worse than it already was. That, at least, was the motivation at the time, behind such an approach. It was less about improving one’s own image than blackening that of the adversary. CSCC did use analytical tools to evaluate its video materials. Certainly, Google Analytics and Topsy were employed on a regular basis to provide some basic insight for operators on a day-to-day basis. One can surmise that the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), part of whose mandate is evaluation, would have at some point measured the effectiveness of CSCC’s online engagement at least. While CSCC’s Digital Outreach Team in 2011 worked mostly in Arabic, it would add an Urdu and eventually a Somali component. A small but controversial English-language effort would start in December 2013. That first year, 2011, the Arabic team would release 21 videos with 599,561 views, for a healthy average of 28,545 views per video. These numbers are skewed, however, by a May 2011 video mocking Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, with 175,000 views. The video was released while the popular struggle that overthrew al-Qaddafi was in full swing.20 In March 2012, I replaced Ambassador Richard LeBaron, who was the founder and first Coordinator of CSCC. I held this position from March 2012 to February 2015. Rashad Hussain held that position from February 2015 to December 2015. Michael Lumpkin headed CSCC/GEC from 2016 until the end of the Obama Administration in January 2017. Lumpkin formerly served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/ Low-Intensity Conflict from 2013.21 From

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January 2017 and into 2019, the Center has only had an acting coordinator in place. In 2012, the DOT would release 27 Arabic language videos with 564,596 YouTube views, for an average of 20,910 views per video. It should be noted that these numbers are always conservative as videos were also placed on other platforms, such as Vimeo; but generally those numbers were always far below the total views achieved on YouTube. The top video in 2012 marked in May 2012 the one-year anniversary of the death of the al-Qa’ida leader, Osama Bin Ladin, with 155,000 views.22 It used clips of a range of media voices from the Arab world – not Westerners or Americans – decrying what a calamity Bin Ladin had been for the Muslims. As with almost all of the ‘attack videos’, it had more ‘dislikes’ than ‘likes’ on YouTube. The next year saw a quantitative jump in production, with 65 Arabic videos produced with 577,575 views, for an average of 8,885 per video. The major success that year, in terms of views, was a September 2013 video targeting the newly prominent ISIS, with over 147,000 views.23 This video relied on Arab media and civil-society voices, noting how ISIS was targeting, jailing and killing anti-Assad activists and fighters. Footage included veiled women and children demonstrating in Raqqa, which was newly fallen into the hands of the Islamic State, calling for their (anti-Assad male) relatives to be released from ISIS prison. This was, of course, the heyday of the Syrian revolution, when drawing a link between the innocent victims of ISIS and the innocent victims of Assad would be one way to try to appeal to a Sunni Arab Muslim demographic. 2013 was also the year in which the outside world first took note, in an informed way and by an actual expert, of the nature of the online struggle between the DOT and ISIS supporters.24 Will McCants of Brookings noted ‘that it’s difficult to quantify the team’s progress (and easy to laugh at its failures), but there’s one thing it is doing successfully: Making the right enemies’.25 This July 2013

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piece in Foreign Policy magazine appeared at a time when the Islamic State was less well known, much less of a spectacular Westernmedia phenomenon than it would be a year later, after the fall of Mosul and the declaration of the ISIS caliphate. The year 2014 would see the Arabic language video production of the DOT reach its peak in terms of viewership. The number of videos increased from 65 to 86, but the number of views more than tripled from 577,575 to 1,709,110. The average view per video soared to 19,873. Three videos topped over 100,000 views. The first, on January 22, 2014 (102,000 views) contrasted laughing, dancing ISIS members enjoying life, using their own words and images, with those of Syrians suffering at their hands.26 The fact that many of the ISIS fighters featured, such as Abu Talha al-Almani (the former German rap singer Denis Cuspert), were foreigners and that some of the suffering and complaining Syrians were children only increased the contrast. The second-most popular video (153,000 views) was released on July 8, 2014, in the full flood of ISIS fervor after Mosul and the caliphate declaration. The theme here was that ISIS was targeting Sunni Arab Muslims, and images and videos were used that graphically demonstrated this point.27 Among them was a clip from the 2011 bombing by the Islamic State of the Umm al-Qura Mosque during Ramadan. Another showed the homes of Sunni-Arab tribesmen opposed to ISIS, being blown up by the group. Still another showed ISIS youth threatening to slaughter the rulers of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The top-rated video for 2014 appeared on November 4 (181,000 views) and consisted entirely of smartphone footage of excited ISIS fighters laughing and joking, awaiting the distribution and sale of slave girls.28 The headline used on YouTube was ‘Very Very Dangerous: Video Taken From Daesh Slave Girl Market’. This video was first posted online by Dubai’s Al-Aan Television and widely circulated in the mainstream media, including in the West.29

Not counted in the Arabic total for the year but worth mentioning is the production in July 2014 of the most notorious of all DOT videos, one that has been written about extensively: the English-language ‘Welcome to ISIS Land’, with close to one million views online. One of only a handful of Englishlanguage videos produced by the team in 2014, it was mostly mocked but was certainly widely seen. Depending on one’s definition,30 the DOT had at least four videos ‘go viral’ that year. It should be noted that either YouTube or the State Department seems to have deleted the Arabic version of ‘Welcome to ISIS Land’ from the DOT playlist. A frequent staple of DOT videos, but particularly those produced in 2014, was the ‘fitna’ narrative. Fitna is an Arabic word meaning strife, temptation or sedition but has a heavy politico-religious context based on its use in the Qur’an and Islamic history. Promoters of ‘fitna’ among Muslims are evil-doers by definition. In several of its p­ roductions, the DOT was able to mine the rich vein of material produced as a result of the contention between a seemingly ­triumphant ISIS and its rivals and former masters at al-Qa’ida.31 The Jihadist ‘civil war’ between ISIS and ­al-Qa’ida began after the open break between the two in February 2014 and continues to this day. The number of videos produced in 2015 clearly demonstrates the beginning of a decline that would accelerate and deepen over time. That year, 87 videos were released, with 1,024,566 views. The average view per video declined to 11,776. The top video (139,000) was released on January 26, 2015 and combined ISIS footage with US military and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units’ (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) footage to tell the story of the bloody defeat that ISIS suffered at Kobane in Northern Syria in late 2014. First, you see ISIS captive John Cantile in an official ISIS video, ‘Inside Ayn al-Islam’, saying ‘the battle for Kobane is coming to an end, the Mujahideen are just mopping up’

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and ‘contrary to media reports, the fighting for Kobane is nearly over’. ‘Ayn al-Islam’ (Spring of Islam) was the new name that the Islamic State intended to give to this historically Kurdish town (Kobane’s traditional Arabic name is Ayn al-Arab). The video then notes ‘but the battle for Kobane was not over as ISIS claimed’ and shows combat footage of repeated Coalition airstrikes, before switching to another ISIS video featuring Abd al-Halim al-Checheni, his voice breaking, mentioning the ‘martyrdom and loss of many of our brothers’ and that most of their fighters in Kobane had been killed. This is followed by footage of wounded ISIS fighters buried in the rubble, being mocked by the anti-ISIS fighters who rescued them. Another captured ISIS fighter weeps in the back of a pickup truck.32

A RADICAL CHANGE IN TACTICS AND VENUE As 2015 rolled on, the nature of the DOT videos seemed to change. There was a discernible return to the type of material the team produced at IIP before its incorporation

into CSCC in 2011: more use of official statements, more talking by senior officials, less attempts at storytelling and less attacking. One might say that the choices were safer, less adventurous or risky and less likely to be embarrassing to the government if they backfired. Rather than seeing this as some sort of an anomaly, this change seems to have been part of an intentional policy decision to play down branded overt strategic counterterrorism communications and to focus on proxies. CSCC’s leadership at the time noted that a priority would be to have others ‘support the creation and dissemination of credible content and positive alternatives to extremist narratives’.33 An early example of such an effort was the much heralded July 2015 launch of the Sawab Center in Abu Dhabi, a joint effort at counter-messaging by the United States and United Arab Emirates governments.34 Two seemingly paradoxical DOT trends from 2016 are clear: great output and decreased impact. That year, 137 videos were produced, with 574,109 views. This is more than twice the number of videos produced in 2013 but with slightly fewer views. Average views per video declined to 4,190. The top video of the year, released in June 2016, had

Table 20.3  DOT Arabic video production/views on YouTube, 2011–2017 160

1600000

140

1400000

120

1200000

100

1000000

80

800000

60

600000 400000

40

200000

20

0 2011

2012

2013 Total views

2014 Year

2015 Number of videos

2016

0 2017

Number of videos

Total views

Total views/number of videos 2011–2017 1800000

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70,000 views and was a short, simple piece taken from an ISIS video of a member executing his own brother.35 This is another story that circulated in the Western media.36 By 2017, the number of individual items released remained very high – in terms of DOT’s historic production – at 130 videos. Nevertheless, views declined precipitously to 160,519 total views, for an average of 1,234 per video. Many videos had less than 100 total views. The top video released that year had 20,000 views. Another simple video consisted of a short 40-second clip of a testimony from captured ISIS wives and widows describing poor treatment and disillusionment at the hands of ‘the State of the Idols’ rather than the ‘Islamic State’.37 This trend of numerous short, simple videos – with very few views –continued well into 2018. Particularly noteworthy has been the reliance on clips of government officials speaking, something which hearkened back to the work of the DOT a decade before when it was part of the IIP Bureau, and which is more often associated with public-affairs or press work. As of July 2018, the top video (3,243 views) released for the year was titled ‘Who is Khalid al-Batarfi?’, which consisted of biographic information on the Saudi al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader and not much else.38 Launched on January 29, 2018, it was coordinated with the announcement by the State Department of al-Batarfi’s identification as a special designated global terrorist.39 It is unclear why biographical information on this individual would be of particular interest to an Arabic language audience; indeed, an AQAP supporter might find the video relatively positive. However, for the first seven months of 2018, that was the best there was. This short history of attributed US government counterterrorism video production in Arabic from 2011 to 2018 teaches us much. We can see broad growth and decline in viewership at the same time that production, at least in terms of sheer numbers, remains high. We can, of course, discern the topics

discussed and the style used. Often, the origin of the reused material is obvious, whether these are news organizations or terrorist propaganda. For example, there has always been the short, factual clip featuring senior officials or public events that typifies the daily work of a public-affairs or press office. From 2011 to 2015, the DOT was more ambitious and frequently produced material that was more polemical and pointed. These productions made more frequent use of terroristproduced content and sought to use their words and images against them to make a point. These are the ‘attack ad’ type of DOT videos that are no longer produced. It would be easy to make the point that as DOT videos became less polemical (one could say they became less original and less interesting), overall numbers declined, as indeed they have declined since late 2015. But there is no clear causal link. The top Arabic language video in 2014, a year of seemingly many successful videos, was a completely unoriginal reuse of a video taken from pan-Arab media. If the reason for this particular clip’s success was its crudeness and authenticity, those were qualities entirely accredited to the ISIS supporter who taped his friends on his phone. In addition to the content and style of the videos, are there any external factors that could explain the decline in DOT video viewership? There seems to be an obvious one: the growth in DOT video viewership seems to roughly mirror the growth in ISIS videos themselves, and the heyday of 2013 to 2015 matches the peak period for ISIS’s own official production. Indeed, ISIS video production peaked in August 2015 and then declined by 94% in three years.40 If we compare views rather than number of videos, DOT’s Arabic language videos also declined by about 90% from a high in calendar years 2014 to 2017. In discussing how to evaluate and contextualize this material, the ISIS figures are also both instructive and sobering. According to the July 2018 West Point CTC study by Daniel Milton, ISIS official visual-propaganda

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production peaked in August 2015, with 754 releases in that month. This means that ISIS video production in that one month was roughly equal to the video production of the DOT in its entire ten-year history. This is not to denigrate the work of the DOT; ISIS prioritized media production in a way that no terrorist group has (even few governments have), with hundreds of people producing high-quality, original content from Africa to Southeast Asia. All of this was amplified by a massive and diffuse dissemination network that was revolutionary in its scope. Still, it underscores that when we study attributed US counterterrorism communications efforts that are visible to the naked eye, we are examining a very small response to a much larger phenomenon. And even these numbers connected with DOT videos can be misleading. Large numbers of views do not necessarily translate into influence: it depends who is watching this material. Indeed, a video with fewer views but more of the right viewers, say potential extremists, would be more successful. The question of how propaganda is consumed is an underexplored one.41 Just like the radicalization process is not readily observable by researchers, the process of not being radicalized is even more opaque. While some measures of performance (number of views especially) are in place for DOT Arabic language material, what is clearly lacking are additional measures of effectiveness that would enable us to truly evaluate a piece of material in time. One could subject existing material to various evaluation tools such as sentiment analysis or focus groups, but that would not provide an accurate assessment of how material was viewed in the moment. Much of the content of such media operations (this is true of ISIS and of its adversaries) is time-sensitive and tied to breaking events or controversy that not only drive up numbers but provoke specific responses in time. For example, the very successful February 2011 DOT videos using al-Zawahiri’s words,

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about the impossibility of peaceful revolution in the Arab world, against him would probably have a very different and less positive response today. Popular responses to the Arab Spring in 2011 were very different to what they would be today, including in the two countries portrayed in the video – Tunisia and Egypt. The work of the DOT in countering ISIS and al-Qa’ida propaganda, viewed objectively can be seen as a failure. Although, given how small an effort it was, especially during the peak years of the Islamic State, they probably outperformed, based on the resources at hand and the fact that this was an overt platform attributed to the US government. The overt government connection is part of a process described as ‘the outcome of extreme caution compounded by bureaucratic bargaining on a mind-boggling scale’, so perhaps it was the best possible outcome, given the circumstances.42 Subject to a great deal of sensationalist media coverage, there was very little evaluation occurring in real time of this material, certainly nothing like the case study of the DOT in June 2009 at the time of President Obama’s Cairo speech. What studies there have been have attempted to focus on the small subset of English-language visual material produced by the DOT (under the ‘Think Again Turn Away’ slogan in 2014) and confused that small, if high-profile, subset of content with the much more extensive Arabic language material available.43

CONCLUSION There has to be a better way forward. Given that there are no good extant open-source models to evaluate overt US strategic counterterrorism communications, what would a possible future model look like, at least when it comes to visual productions? Such a model would combine measuring a selection of high-performing and failing videos – in terms

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of measures of performance – with Arabic language focus groups conducted by proxies in the region in roughly the same timeframe that the videos are disseminated online. These focus groups can, of course, be configured to examine the views of key demographics such as youth or inhabitants from certain ethnic or socio-economic backgrounds. At the very least, such a combination would provide some desperately needed timely context and insight into best practices. It could try to avoid that perennial bane of government evaluations – an emphasis on process rather than on impact – and produce data that are actionable. It would help to illuminate with greater granularity why a particular video was successful or even reveal important insight into what particular elements in a ‘failed’ video may contrastingly have value for a target audience. Most importantly, such an effort could be tangible progress in the direction of ‘greater attention by academia and more collaboration between practitioners and scholars’.44 There are many easily available diagnostic tools, such as Socialbakers, which would enrich this research further. Also ripe for further research and evaluation are various official Arabic language online accounts that contain counterterrorism content. The DOT’s Twitter account (@ DigitalOutreach), established in February 2009, is still up, with more than 8,000 tweets and more than 14,000 followers. It is worthy of a comprehensive examination. But, the regular State Department in Arabic Twitter presence (@USAbilaraby) which was established in February 2011 and has more than 737,000 followers, is also available. Even more pertinent to this study is the Twitter account of the Sawab Center (@ sawabcenter), which was established in May 2015 and intended to be a replacement for the Arabic DOT. Sawab Center has almost 16,000 tweets as of July 2018 and 688,000 followers. Sawab has more than 3 million followers on Facebook.45 These are numbers that the (admittedly much smaller) DOT never achieved, even in the peak year of 2014.

The obvious question here is would a joint project by the US Government and an Arab government in counter-propaganda was more credible or effective than what was produced in the past solely by the State Department. This is still ‘overt’ counter-messaging, albeit one-step removed from the US Government. Sawab Center material has no government labels on it. Certainly, Sawab Center’s considerable video production is worth evaluating. As of July 2018, it has produced more than 250 videos since its 2015 launch.46 They seem to have begun poorly and improved over time, in both quality and viewership. Like the DOT, Sawab Center’s video production is dwarfed by that of ISIS. Sawab’s videos certainly look much better than the previous State Department videos, and some of the material is clearly geared towards children. State Department public diplomacy programs are generally not focused on children. Given that Sawab Center in a sense ‘replaced’ the pre2015 DOT, a study of both efforts and of the continuity and differences between the two would be illuminating for scholars. Given the fact that Jihadist propaganda is still radicalizing people who are far removed from the Middle East47 and that a new iteration of al-Qa’ida or the Islamic State could well return with renewed strength, the time for such a renewed effort in evaluating strategic counterterrorism communications is now. An innovative and revolutionary organization like ISIS that pioneered the use of terrorist propaganda will certainly match a resurgence on the ground with a reemergence in social media. And beyond ISIS, there is still a broad constellation of other terrorist groups seeking to catch lightning in a bottle and imitate the Islamic State’s meteoric propaganda success. Terrorist propaganda has not disappeared, despite technical efforts by companies and governments to decrease its availability and attempts by militaries to crush the actual terrorists in the field. It will always have to be answered, by somebody, in some way. This study has shown that even overt government

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messaging (CSCC’s DOT) or overt messaging by proxies (Sawab Center) can play a positive role. But overt government messaging comes at a price in terms of public criticism or questions of credibility. Outside the scope of this study is counter-propaganda that is carried out by covert means through military or intelligence organizations or messaging campaigns by the private sectors or private institutions receiving government money. The point is that governments have a wide variety of potential tools at hand in counterpropaganda and need to arrive at an effective combination of approaches, strategies and messengers. The question of measuring results will always be a difficult one. Governments will almost always find themselves in an urgent situation of needing to both launch counter-propaganda campaigns and somehow measure their effectiveness at the same time. This case study of one aspect of the US government’s media efforts against the Islamic State also graphically underscores a grim reality in our understanding of counterpropaganda. Governments, with their sometimes elephantine decision-making processes, public oversight and multiple s­takeholders, are often at a disadvantage compared to nimble, streamlined terrorist or insurgent forces in the field of propaganda. This may be especially true when there is a reformist or ­utopian ideological or religious component. A lesson learned in the story of CSCC’s DOT reveals that, sometimes, counter-propaganda can succeed, at least temporarily and in limited circumstances, in landing blows against their adversary. Nevertheless, those limited tactical successes can amount to naught in the absence of a broader strategic perspective.

Notes 1 Altman, Howard. Socom web initiative on Senate chopping block. Tampa Bay Times, ­ December 8, 2013, http://www.tbo.com/list/ military-news/socom-web-initiative-on-senatechopping-block-20131208/

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2 Butler, Desmond and Lardner, Richard. U.S. military botches online fight against Islamic ­ State. Chicago Tribune, January 31, 2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-islamic-state-propaganda-war-military20170130-story.html# 3 Cooper, Helene. U.S. drops snark in favor of emotion to undercut extremists. New York ­ Times, July 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/07/29/world/middleeast/isis-recruiting. html 4 Ibid. 5 Makdisi, Ussama. ‘Anti-Americanism’ in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History. The Journal of American History, vol. 89, no. 2, 2002, pp. 538–557, www.jstor.org/stable/3092172. 6 Kendrick, Alice and Fullerton, Jami A. Advertising as Public Diplomacy: Attitude Change among International Audiences. Journal of Advertising Research, vol. 43, no. 3, 2004, http://www.journalofadvertisingresearch.com/ content/44/3/297 7 Pintak, Lawrence. Dangerous delusions: Advertising nonsense about advertising America. Public Diplomacy.Org, August 27, 2004, http://www. publicdiplomacy.org/32.htm 8 Tracy, Abigail. A different kind of propaganda: Has America lost the information war? V ­anity Fair, April 23, 2018, https://www.vanityfair. com/news/2018/04/russia-propaganda-americainformation-war 9 https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/ investigations/hearings/isis-online-counteringterrorist-radicalization-and-recruitment-on-theinternet_social-media 10 Bean, Cameron. State’s digital outreach team may do more harm than good. Arizona State University Center for Strategic ­Communications, ­November 11, 2010, https://csc.asu.edu/2010/11/ 11/states-digital-outreach-team-may-do-moreharm-than-good/ 11 Khatib, Lina, Dutton, William H and Thelwall, Michael. Public Diplomacy 2.0: A Case Study of The Us Digital Outreach Team. Middle East Journal, vol. 66, no. 3, 2012, pp. 453–472, https:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=1734850 12 Ibid. 13 Fernandez, Alberto. ‘Contesting the Space’: Adversarial Online Engagement as a Tool For Combating Violent Extremism. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 98 no. 4, 2015, pp. 488–500, muse.jhu.edu/article/601430 14 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Thawrata Tunis wa Misr al-Salmatan Tadahatan Hujat al-Zawahiri. YouTube, February 16, 2011, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=2uL6SXE8w4w

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15 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Shabba Muslima Musamat Azya wa Sida Amal – Mudablaj. YouTube, July 18, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_9Qh3uDUux8 16 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Al-Zawahiri wa ­Itruatihi al-Ma’adiya lil-Thawra al-Silmiya bi-Misr was Tunis. YouTube, February 16, 2011, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hKqFUaPk4c 17 Dan, Avi. How the first political attack ad changed politics. Forbes, July 24, 2016, https:// www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2016/07/24/howthe-first-political-attack-ad-changed-politics/ #17f33aa86b32 18 Lau, Richard R, Sigelman, Lee, Heldman, Caroline and Babbitt, Paul. The Effects Of Negative Political Advertisements: A Meta-Analytic Assessment. The American Political Science Review, vol. 93, no. 4, 1999, pp. 851–865. 19 Dresden, B. The pros and cons of negative and comparative advertising. Intellectual Property, 2011, http://studylib.net/doc/8732276/the-pros-andcons-of-negative-and-comparative-advertising 20 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Al-Qaddafi wa ma Yaqsiduhu bi-Zinga Zinga. YouTube, May 4, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl1BBgpxmuU 21 Spero, Domani. @StateDept announces Michael D. Lumpkin as head of new Global Engagement Center. Diplopundit, January 11, 2016, https://diplopundit.net/2016/01/11/statedeptannounces-michael-d-lumpkin-as-head-of-newglobal-engagement-center/ 22 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Tasreeb Video Maqtal Osama bin Ladin. YouTube, May 3, 2012, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6crlOxgiDg 23 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Al-Dawla al-Islamiyya Tuqadam Lakum. YouTube, September 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN0l4tx59FU 24 McCants, Will. Cyber jihadists, State Department now in full-blown Twitter war. Foreign Policy, July 30, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/ 30/cyber-jihadists-state-department-now-in-fullblown-twitter-war/ 25 Ibid. 26 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Murtazaqa Daesh Yuraqisun fi Haflat al-Qatal al-Jima’i. YouTube, January 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zS-pnEL3d04 27 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Daesh tuhadid Ahl alSunna fil-Saudia wal-Urdun. YouTube, July 8, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcQxGG6y-MY 28 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Khateer Jiddan Jiddan: Video Musarrab an Suq Sabaya Daesh. YouTube, November 4, 2014, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=w92_qxwlT9g 29 Steinbuch, Yaron. ISIS fighters laugh about buying and selling female Yazidi slaves. New York

Post, November 3, 2014, https://nypost.com/ 2014/11/03/isis-fighters-laugh-about-buyingand-selling-female-yazidi-slaves/ 30 Rockett, Aaron. Goingviral: Three definitions of viral video. 31 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Umara’ al-Fitna. YouTube, May 23, 2014, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=vJSt84LPbSM 32 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Haqiqat al-Dawa’ish baeeda ‘an al-Kamera’. YouTube, January 26, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O9YgiSuwc4 33 Hussain, Rashad. Countering violent extremism and terrorist recruiting in the digital age. US Department of State, December 9, 2014, https:// 2009-2017.state.gov/p/io/rm/2014/234988.htm 34 Khan, Taimur. Abu Dhabi counter-terrorism ­centre to battle ISIL’s online lies. The National, July 7, 2015, https://www.thenational.ae/world/ abu-dhabi-counter-terrorism-centre-to-battle-isils-online-lies-1.45777 35 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Daeshi Yaqtal Akhuhu. YouTube, June 21, 2016, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=YfBCOp9KX0E 36 Samuels, Gabriel. Isis militant shoots own brother in the head after accusing him of spying. The Independent, June 13, 2016, https://www. independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ isis-militant-shoots-own-brother-head-afteraccusing-him-spying-a7079136.html 37 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Shihadat Zawjat Daesh: La Tanghrau fihum. YouTube, July 24, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY7isk1jHD8 38 Fariq al-Tawasul al-Electroni. Man hua al-Irhabi Khalid Batarfi. YouTube, January 29, 2018, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CN7nGArz1g 39 Joscelyn, Thomas. Senior AQAP leader added to US terror list by State Department. Long War Journal, January 23, 2018. https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/01/senior-aqap-leaderadded-to-us-terror-list-by-state-department.php 40 Milton, Daniel. Down but not out: An updated examination of the Islamic State’s visual propaganda. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, July 24, 2018, https://ctc.usma.edu/downbut-not-out-an-updated-examination-of-theislamic-states-visual-propaganda/ 41 Cottee, Simon and Cunliffe, Jack. Watching ISIS: How Young Adults Engage with Official English-Language ISIS Videos. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2018 DOI: 10.1080/ 1057610X.2018.1444955 42 McCants, Will and Watts, Clint. Why the United States can’t make a magazine like ISIS. Brookings, January 13, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/ blog/markaz/2016/01/13/why-the-united-statescant-make-a-magazine-like-isis/

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43 Allendorfer, W. and Herring, S. ISIS Vs. The U.S. Government: A War Of Online Video Propaganda. Paper presented at Internet Research 16: The 16th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, October 21–24, 2015. Phoenix, AZ: AoIR, http://spir.aoir.org. 44 Banks, Robert. A Resource Guide to Public ­Diplomacy Evaluation. CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy, Paper 9, Los Angeles, CA: Figueroa Press, 2011, p. 51.

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45 https://www.facebook.com/sawabcenter/ 46 Sawab Center. Swab Center YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Qpvb2iP6NnsDuxuGT7_w/featured 47 Pefley, Al. Police say alleged killer wanted to join ISIS, had terrorist ideologies. CBS12, March 13, 2018, https://cbs12.com/news/local/police-sayalleged-killer-wanted-to-join-isis-had-terroristideologies

21 Countering the Fear in Propaganda Paul Baines and Nigel Jones

INTRODUCTION In 1952, a top-secret US Government memorandum was sent to General Walter Bedell Smith, then the Director of the CIA, and other senior government security and defence officials, entitled ‘Staff Study – Preliminary analysis of the communist BW [biological warfare] propaganda campaign, with recommendations’ (USG PSB, 1952). It describes a campaign conducted by North Korea, accusing the United States of using ‘germ warfare’, with a view to implicating the United States in atrocities. The memorandum describes the historical and political context of the campaign, its conduct, likely impact on audiences and motivation for the propaganda. It makes a number of recommendations on how to respond, taking into account the inherent fear of biological weapons and the possibility that people in Asia might be subject to weapons created by the ‘perversion of science’. It exemplifies the strategic, campaign level of a government conducting counter-propaganda

analysis with a view to responding effectively. In this chapter, we explore this and other examples of counter-propaganda designed to reduce the exploitation of fear, in order to understand how fear appeals work and how they might be countered. In doing this, we illustrate how a theoretical grounding can cast light on the practice of propaganda and open options for responding to it. Our 1952 case study pre-dates the development of the theory on fear appeals examined in this chapter. We will briefly assess its implications in retrospect, whilst examining its applicability in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations today and the rise of the strongman in the rerun of great power confrontation. In this context, we can justifiably use Robin Corey’s (2004: 2) definition of ‘political fear’ because of its exploitation in propaganda in conflict for political and societal ends: a people’s felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being—the fear of terrorism, panic over crime, anxiety about moral decay—or the intimidation wielded over men and women by

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governments or groups. What makes both types of fears political rather than personal is that they emanate from society or have consequences for society. Private fears like my fear of flying or your fear of spiders are artifacts of our own psychologies and experiences, and have little impact beyond ourselves. Political fear, by contrast, arises from conflicts within and between societies.

A GERM OF FEAR – GREAT POWER BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROPAGANDA IN THE COLD WAR The 1952 memorandum was published on 7th August and written by the US ‘Psychological Strategy Board’. It describes the anti-US biological warfare propaganda as ‘communist’ indicating how the bi-polar ideological divide was drawn between the communist and the free worlds. This is despite the historical context described in the memorandum, discussing Russian, Chinese and North Korean dimensions to the campaign. The relevant historical context is assessed to have begun on 21st January 1951. This was seen as the start of the ‘Soviet hate campaign’ against the United States, marked by a speech to the Politburo by Pyotr Pospelov, who had previously been Chief Editor of Pravda (Saxon, 1979). His speech was entitled ‘The hands of the American imperialists are steeped in the blood of the Russian people’. The memorandum assesses that this speech was followed by a campaign that sought to document US atrocities with ‘corroborative evidence’ in newspapers. The campaign targeted ‘Russian consciousness’ with a ‘never forget and never forgive’ theme and was carried beyond the USSR to satellite states in Europe and Asia. The memorandum states that the Communist Party in Romania issued directions on how to run the campaign. In 1951, the Chinese communists made allegations that the United States was engaged in germ and ‘poison gas warfare’. It continued on 22 February 1952, with charges made by North

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Korea that biological warfare was being conducted by the United States in North Korea. This was followed in March by North Korean announcements that 448 US planes had conducted a biological warfare mission over North Korea and that any pilots captured would be treated as war criminals. North Korea stated that the aims of the United States were to ‘wreck the armistice talks in Korea, prolonging and expanding the aggressive war in Korea, and instigating new wars’ (USG PSB, 1952: 2). According to the memorandum (USG PSB, 1952), the CIA concluded that the campaign was directed exclusively at the United States. It notes the attempt by its adversaries to bring the allegations to the United Nations and that alleged evidence appeared in Chinese and Soviet publications, which included photographs of ‘insects, germs and germ bombs’ (USG PSB, 1952: 2). The primary assessment was that the campaign presented a political risk for the United States, exploiting legal protocols in what we might describe today as ‘lawfare’. A number of potential effects of the campaign were outlined in the document, which indicated that other audiences were relevant to the campaign and that fear was seen as a lever of influence. It was, however, assessed by the Department of State missions in a variety of locations that the campaign had ‘not been effective in most countries’ (USG PSB, 1952: 3). It was thought that attempts to denounce the propaganda would simply prolong it. Nevertheless, several concerns were noted by the British Foreign Office, who assessed that the campaign could grow to become effective for five reasons: • • • •

Anti-US feeling in certain areas Ignorance of realities of war Fear of plague Resentment of any Western warfare against Asiatics [Asian people] and • Pacifism and lassitude in Burma. (USG PSB, 1952: 3)

Several motivations for the propaganda campaign are listed in the memo, though it is

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admitted that there is uncertainty about the ‘real’ reasons. The motivations given include: • It discredits the US in the eyes of Asiatics. • It provides an alibi for current (and future) epidemics. • It makes Communist troops more fearful of picking up UN propaganda leaflets and less willing to be captured. • It creates a moral climate in which it might be difficult for the U.S. to employ BW [Biological Weapons], CW [Chemical Weapons], or AW [Atomic Weapons] in the event of global war. (The Stockholm Peace Petition of 1950 combined all three in the category of weapons to be “outlawed”) • It provides a justification for possible Communist use of BW. • It provides as justification and a psychological preparation for all out global war if the USSR decides if such a move is expedient. (USG PSB, 1952: 3–4)

Once again, despite the primary target of the campaign being determined as the United States, the motivations listed point toward other audiences such as domestic audiences in Russia and Asia. This apparent disconnect between the United States as the primary target and the other audiences that are implied in the list of the motivations can perhaps be explained by the ultimate impact being aimed at sabotaging the United States’ ability to prosecute its own operations and interventions. The memorandum draws a series of conclusions. It argues that the campaign is a continuation of the ‘hate-America campaign’ but also represents a move towards a greater emphasis on the role of the campaign in ‘Soviet psychological strategy’. It assesses that the selection of germ warfare for the campaign aligns with a narrative of the US ‘perversion of science’ by its military. It also expresses that the ‘atrocity type of propaganda’ is particularly significant for the United States, and it indicates that the United States is further concerned about the impact of allegations in Korea regarding use of poison gas and ‘scientific extermination and torture methods in Korean prison

camps’ (USG PSB, 1952: 5). This leads the Psychological Strategy Board to conclude that the campaign may compromise the US psychological warfare position in terms of the future use of such weapons in the event of general war. Nevertheless, the Board detects a Soviet psychological vulnerability, given the ‘shrill pitch of this type of communist propaganda’ (USG PSB, 1952: 6), presumably from the fear of the use of such weapons. It is concluded that any response needs to be through a multi-stranded approach involving wider governmental actions, not simply propaganda alone. A series of recommendations in keeping with this last conclusion is made. These include coordinated statements with the UN, inspections by neutral parties regarding US weapons systems and potential legal action against the USSR for libel. The Board recommends the following action: Additional steps to secure due credit – not gratitude – to the U.S. for its positive assistance in disease and pest control, indicating that the responsibility for putting such efforts in the proper perspective rests principally on the governments concerned. (Purpose – to anticipate Soviet attempts to make the U.S. the scapegoat for epidemics and insect plague). (USG PSB, 1952: 6)

The distinction between credit and gratitude is of interest. It may be interpreted as an acknowledgement that the United States does not expect people to be grateful, or it may be to ensure that local populations are clear about who is ultimately responsible for disease control; i.e. local authorities. Either way, a risk is identified, based on making claims of responsibility for prevention, which might also be taken to mean some culpability when diseases are not prevented. ‘Due credit’ can be taken to mean some reassurance that the United States is not involved in actively trying to engender sickness in people. This US–communist case, based on this memorandum alone, illustrates a number of additional points of interest regarding counter-propaganda research in general and countering fear in particular. Firstly, the

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assessment takes place within the frames of reference and historical context perceived by the defending party. Therefore, Communist propaganda is seen as being a coordinated, or at least a related, set of actions concerning a singular threat to the United States in a bipolar world. Secondly, analysis is undertaken with a view to understanding the extent to which propaganda presents a problem for the defending party, and therefore the extent to which action needs to be taken. The assessment aims to inform decision-making concerning the choice of actions to be taken in response. Thirdly, the impact on audiences and the motivations of the adversary are essential elements of the assessment and are used to understand adversary future intentions and the impact on the defending party’s strategic and tactical freedom of action. Finally, the assessment throws light on the perceptions of all parties’ vulnerabilities and strengths. Consequently, the US moral high-ground and technological and scientific prowess as virtues are attacked as immoral and perverse, through atrocity propaganda. Fear of disease is seen as a vulnerability of the population, cases for which the United States will get the blame. When this is combined with the ‘perversion of science’ trope, it frames Asian populations as people upon whom experiments are conducted and in which their selfefficacy is reduced against a technologically dominant and immoral United States.

FEAR, TERRORISM AND INSURGENCY: TACTICS TO PROTECT AND TO HARM Since the Cold War, strategic thought has largely been focussed on the rise of militant Islam and terrorism in parallel with the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Given the strategy and tactics of Islamist terrorists, by definition, generating fear has been a prominent characteristic of their propaganda. This has renewed an interest in how

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fear is used, its effectiveness and how it might be countered. Note that these questions are largely the same as those in the US counterpropaganda assessment above. At the time of writing, there has been a resurgence in great power confrontation, and we will return to this later in the chapter, as work on fear in terrorism and insurgency might have informed the approaches that the United States utilised in responding to North Korean and communist propaganda. However, we will first examine the development of fear-appeal theory in relation to our more recent understanding of terrorism and insurgency. Using psychological techniques, specifically persuasion, to recruit new members has long been a key tactic of terrorist and insurgency groups, e.g. Boko Haram. This Islamic extremist group, based in north-east Nigeria, has used cash loans as a mechanism to recruit members to spy on security-agency operations for them, as it has sought to maintain its numbers after Nigerian government forces cracked down on some of their criminal activities. Their cash-loan tactic follows previous Boko Haram approaches, including attacks on schools and the kidnapping of schoolgirls. The question arises: why do these cash loans work? Why don’t the victims recognise the group’s tactics? In psychology, reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for persuasion (Cialdini, 2001). Most of us can relate to the idea that if we receive something from someone, we feel a need to ‘return the favour’ and are likely to do so. In this case, things are more serious. Refusing a cash loan from Boko Haram can result in death. Ergo, the group is using a fear appeal as a means of persuasion. Here, the fear appeal expresses that the alternative to accepting the loan offer is serious danger. Such an offer is akin to the Italian mafia making ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. In fact, most terrorist groups maximise their publicity by generating a fear of crime and causing disruption to lives, often causing mass casualties. In Boko Haram’s case, the way to avoid the threat of death and potentially even long-term

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abuse against the victim’s family is to accept the loan. In psychology, this is called adaptive behaviour to mitigate the threat, or danger control; rejection of the offer requires fear control (Witte, 1992; see next section). In Afghanistan, fear was an important part of the Taliban information campaign, particularly aimed at deterring local collaboration with NATO security forces. One activity undertaken by the Taliban was the pinning of ‘night letters’, defined by Foxley (2007: 9) as ‘leaflets or letters posted to doors or walls to inform, threaten or advise’. He lists this alongside other means of dissemination, including fax, telephone, mobile phone and satellite telephone; radio and TV; newspapers; direct contact with the population; CDs/DVDs/videotapes; and websites and the Internet. The following is an example of text from a night letter translated into English: We inform those people of Maroof district that serve Americans day and night and show the places of the Mujahedeen to them or those who dishonour sincere Muslims of the country that American guards will not always be there and we can catch you any time. We know the name and place of every person; learn a lesson from those who were loyal to Russians; (if God wills) soon you will come under the knife or bullet of Mujahedeen. (Johnson, 2007: 327)

The following threatening letter, which also displays the fear appeal, is directed towards a named woman: [Name], you are working with the government. We Taliban warn you to stop working for the government otherwise we will take your life away. We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner. This will be a good lesson for those women like you who are working. The money you receive is haram (forbidden under Islam) and coming from the infidels. The choice is now with you. (Human Rights Watch, 2010: 8)

A MECHANISM FOR FEAR APPEALS The above examples of fear appeals illustrate their powerful psychological nature. Most people would think carefully about whether

or not to comply with such a message. Campaigns that use fear appeals, for example those in commerce and marketing, have been well studied over the years and provide us with a good understanding of how these forms of advertising appeal work. Such campaigns tend to adopt a three-step process that incorporates the following: • Creation of a message containing an appeal designed to activate a person’s feeling of risk and vulnerability. • Danger serious enough to capture the subject’s attention and; • A suggested means of resolution of that fear. (LaTour and Zahra, 1989)

Fear-appeal studies have focused on experimental methods; few field-research evaluations of this form of advertising campaign exist. For many years, fear-appeal research considered whether or not a high- or lowintensity fear appeal persuaded the most. The first theory of fear appeal, the FearDrive Theory (Janis and Feshbach, 1953), proposed that a subject’s attitudes might accept the line of persuasion suggested by the message contained in the fear appeal, so as to decrease fear levels (Dillard and Anderson, 2004). This theory indicated that moderate fear appeals were the most persuasive because high-intensity appeals would create an avoidance reaction and low-intensity appeals would be ineffective. Other evidence contradicted this view. One study found that mild fear-arousal messages created greater resistance to counter-propaganda (Chu, 1966). Another study suggested that high-intensity fear appeals reduce persuasion only where the person has a tendency towards neuroticism (Leventhal, 1967). There is evidence for a positive straight-line relationship between fear intensity and its resultant persuasiveness (LaTour and Rotfeld, 1997), as confirmed in a meta-analysis (Witte and Allen, 2000). Thus, high-intensity fear appeals persuade more. Factors mitigating this persuasion include how important the advocated issue is to the subject, whether or not a fear-reduction

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route is offered in the message and whether or not the subjects believe themselves able (self-efficacious) to do what the messages bid them to do. Individual personality and other characteristics also impact on how the message is received.

EXTANT FEAR PROCESSING MODELS There are various extant theories/models regarding how fear appeals work and their effects on audiences. None of these theories pre-date the 1952 biological weapons propaganda. They include the fear-drive model (Janis, 1967) the parallel response model (Leventhal, 1970), the protection motivation model (Rogers, 1975), the ordered protection motivation model (Tanner, Hunt and Eppright, 1991) and the extended parallel processing model (Witte, 1992), each of which is described below.

The Fear Drive Model This model, proposed by Janis (1967), suggested that when a subject receives a danger stimulus an emotional response occurs, initiating fear, and that persuadability was related to fear intensity in an inverted U relationship; i.e. fear persuaded more as intensity increased but only up until a certain point, then it reduced. When feeling fear, the subject consequently determines how best to respond to reduce the danger. If, in this mental rehearsal process, a form of action is recommended and adopted that might reduce the sense of fear, then relief is felt. This action can either be adaptive (e.g. behavioural to reduce the danger) or maladaptive (e.g. attitudinal to deny the fear). The Parallel Response Model (PRM) – This model (also known as the Parallel Process Model), developed by Leventhal (1970), postulated that subjects activate two processes simultaneously when perceiving threats based

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on fear appeals – a danger-control process and a fear-control process – and that these processes are related to threat cognitions as opposed to affective responses (Witte, 1992). Danger control causes an individual to identify a solution to the problem that they fear. As fear increases, danger control increases message acceptance until the medium level of fear arousal and reduces thereafter. Fear control, by contrast, inhibits message acceptance by removing fear. Both processes can co-occur, so acceptance depends on their relative strengths and interaction (LaTour and Zahra, 1989). The Protection Motivation Model (PMM) – This model, proposed by Rogers (1975), suggested that protection motivation arises from a fear-appeal message. The message must contain a significant threat and be likely to occur, and the message must contained a recommended coping response that can appropriately respond to reduce the threat contained in the message. If the threat is deemed not to be serious (i.e. magnitude of noxiousness), unlikely to occur (i.e. its probability of occurrence) or unstoppable (i.e. the efficacy of the response is unlikely to reduce the threat), then protection motivation fails to occur. The model is therefore multiplicative because no motivation is present if any one of the conditions arises. The Protection Motivation Model (PMM) is considered superior to the feardrive model because it prescribes the message development process most likely to influence adaptive behaviour (Tanner et al., 1991). The Ordered Protection Motivation Model (OPM) – Tanner et al. (1991) argued for an ordered version of the PMM, indicating that four dimensions, rather than three, needed to be considered when processing fear appeals. These included self-efficacy as well as response efficacy, as follows: 1) severity of threat, 2) probability of occurrence, 3) coping response efficacy, and 4) self-efficacy. Based on this model, fear elicits leads to the processing of the coping response and self-efficacy information (i.e. a consideration of whether a subject can undertake the action necessary to cope with the fear and the threat). The model

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recognised that coping responses based on behavioural repertory appraisal were subject to social norms and values. This theory highlighted that when fear-appeal messages fail to provide coping response information, maladaptive responses are more likely to occur. In addition, if coping response information is provided after the threat information, it is likely to be ineffective. The Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) – This recent model (Witte, 1992) was developed as previous models exaggerated the role of cognitions over emotions (Witte, 1992). The EPPM states that two key processes result from threat evaluation (as per Leventhal’s 1970 Parallel Response Model). These are danger control and fear control. The model explains that when a subject receives a fear-appeal message that contains threat-severity information, subject-susceptibility information, information on an effective course of action to respond to the threat and it empowers the subject to believe they can take that course of action (self-efficacy), then they read each of these components and determine what the ‘actual’ severity of the message is, how susceptible they really are to the threat, how efficient the response suggested actually is as far as they are concerned and whether or not they are able to enact the proposed course of action. If a threat is perceived to be low, they fail to act on the message. If the perceived threat and the perceived efficacy of the advocated message are both high, subjects control the danger by accepting the message and acting accordingly. Where subjects are low on self-efficacy, considering themselves unable to enact the advocated course of action, or feel that they cannot avoid the threat, they are motivated to initiate fear control and reject the message. This process could also occur through psychological reactance. High levels of perceived threat with low levels of perceived efficacy can lead to a ‘boomerang effect’, whereby subjects act in an opposite manner to that advocated in the message (Witte, 2008). The EPPM incorporates elements of the Ordered Protection Motivation Model (OPM), is comprehensive,

aids in the design of fear-appeal (counter-) messages, explains defensive avoidance and distinguishes fear arousal as a separate element from a motivation to respond. Terror Management Theory (TMT) – Although the EPPM explains how some subjects can do the opposite of what is advocated in the message, it only explains certain circumstances (i.e. high perceived threat/low self-efficacy). However, TMT explains this phenomenon explicitly. The theory operates under circumstances in which fear appeals are proffered under mortality salient conditions (i.e. where subjects are informed that they are in mortal danger). It postulates that following the receipt of a mortality salient message, if that message comes from an author with a ‘worldview’ (i.e. a perspective that helps us conceive death in a comforting way; Pyszczynski, 2004: 830) that contrasts with the subject’s, then that subject will reject the message’s new worldview and consolidate the pre-existing worldview. An example might include a young smoker who is actually smoking more despite seeing adverts advocating smoking cessation, using fear appeals. Two kinds of defensive response to mortality salient messages can occur, including a proximal defence (similar to the fear control processes of the PRM and EPPM) and a distal defence (occurring only in mortality salient situations), which causes subjects to reject a message inconsistent with their own worldview, in order to boost their own self-esteem (Maheswaran and Agrawal, 2004). However, it is not currently known under what conditions subjects undertake worldview defence and/or a desire to increase their selfesteem and how the two interact (Maheswaran and Agrawal, 2004: 213).

FEAR-APPEAL EFFECTS BY AUDIENCE SEGMENT AND CULTURAL GROUP Market segmentation is where heterogeneous markets of people with different needs are broken up into like-minded homogeneous

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segments. This process allows marketers to make better use of scarce resources by targeting customers more likely to respond to their marketing campaigns. Various studies have indicated that audience members respond differently to fear-appeal messages (Burnett and Oliver, 1979; LaTour and Rotfeld, 1997), based on age (teenagers are less susceptible than older groups according to LaTour and Rotfeld, 1997), gender (females are more susceptible than males according to Samu and Bhatnagar, 2008), self-esteem, coping style and feelings of vulnerability to danger (Higbee, 1969), level of education (Brooker, 1981), need for cognition (Ruiter et al., 2004) and attention paid to the message and audience perceptions of source credibility (O’Cass and Griffin, 2006). Some audience segments may be more susceptible to social threats as opposed to physical threats (Dickinson and Holmes, 2008). Physicalthreat ads have been found to be more effective on Canadians than on Chinese in changing attitudes (Laroche et  al., 2001). Another study found no significant difference in reactions between French and US students in how they react to fear appeals (Vincent and Dubinsky, 2004). Islamic beliefs may inculcate in children the desire to report less fear when seeing fear appeals, in comparison with Christian children, according to a study conducted in Kenya and Nigeria (see Ingman et al., 1999).

MEET THE RESISTANCE: COUNTERING FEAR APPEALS One standard approach to determining how to counter propaganda is to use SCAME analysis. This method suggests analysing adversary propaganda based on the source of propaganda, the content of propaganda, an analysis of the audiences and media type used and the effects and impact created (Paul, 2008). Military field manuals give extensive descriptions of what these approaches entail and ways

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to conduct the assessment. There are therefore a variety of message strategies that can be used, including, but not limited to, creating new messages, modifying existing messages, changing the level of attention to messages, co-opting existing messages, subverting messages, staying silent (perhaps an overused approach) or restricting access to messages (Allen, 2007). Countering the fear in propaganda does often require a rebuttal of the propagandist message. However, to this we would add that much more attention to the psychology of the message needs to be facilitated in the analyst’s toolkit; that is, the mechanisms by which fear acts, or is controlled, beyond messages and rebuttals concerning the facts of the matter or situation at hand. This is because the notion of propagandists and communicators gleefully injecting ideas into people’s heads without any resistance from the audience whatsoever has long been debunked. Termed ‘the hypodermic needle model of communication’ (and ‘magic bullet theory’), it was first proposed by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955). This model required a quiescent audience, and various studies have identified that audiences undertake counter-arguing when perceiving fear appeals. For example, in experiments, subjects reject persuasive health messages when those messages threaten their perception of freedom, even when the message aligns with the subject’s attitudes, except when self-preservation is necessary (Dillard and Shen, 2005). Such psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966), where people respond in the opposite manner to that suggested in the message, also occurs when a fear appeal ‘backfires’, creating audience anxiety and negativity towards the source. The contrariness discussed in the Terror Management Theory is acting in a similar way. Persuading the public to act is therefore not a trivial undertaking, particularly when it comes to terrorism. The normalisation of the risk posed by terrorism in some societies can persuade people simply to carry on, on the basis that there is little they can do about it, and the likelihood of them being directly and

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harmfully affected by an incident remains low. This is a problem for the police, who need the public to remain vigilant. This is also a problem for the terrorist, who wants a reaction from the population and an over-reaction from the government in pursuing a security agenda or change in policy. Communicating what needs to be done to remove/control the risk, combined with enhancing the perception of likelihood and severity of the threat, is in part something that both the defender and attacker share. These, of course, are the variables discussed in fear-appeal theory. Therefore, we propose that the following variables, primarily taken from The Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), are included as factors in analysis and propaganda-response design: • Self-Efficacy – The perception that an individual has that they are personally able to manage the risk. • Response Efficacy – The perception that if a person actually responded as required the risk would be managed effectively. • Susceptibility – The perception of the likelihood of a threat materialising. • Severity – The perception of the level of impact of the threat were it to materialise.

To this, we add audience segmentation (demographics, psychographics, cultures etc.), context and an understanding of contrarian or unintended response from the audience. So how might we use fear-appeal theory to assist the analyst in thinking about the construction and psychological impact of a message – and a suitable response? As was pointed out earlier, theory in this area has largely been developed through experimentation rather than in the field. This naturally poses a problem for the analyst, whose work is so contextual. Nevertheless, armed with some robust understanding of the mechanisms by which fear appeals are accepted or rejected, one can support the analyst and indeed, the communicator’s ability to ethically, and constructively, use fear appeal to help people keep themselves safe. For

example, we can observe the ethical and constructive adoption of fear appeals by UK police forces to encourage the public to report suspicious activity in relation to terrorism/criminality – itself a form of counter to the terrorist’s propaganda. The police play a key role in delivering public security communications to inform the public that they are working to disrupt both individuals and groups of criminals. These campaigns require the crafting of a very subtle message that raises the audience’s vigilance by suggesting a security risk but also offers to reduce their fear as consequence of their heightened perceptions of risk, by explaining how the public can report suspicious activities and security threats more generally. In doing so, perception of susceptibility and severity are slightly heightened, whilst offering the means by which self-efficacy and response efficacy can be effectively exercised. Campaigns of this type have been delivered by the City of London Police, Police Scotland during the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, British Transport Police, North Yorkshire Police and the Royal Gibraltar Police, amongst other UK police forces. These forces have all implemented ‘Project Servator’ (Latin for ‘watcher/observer’), as the campaign is formally known. Project Servator involves deploying uniformed and non-uniformed officers, dogs, horses, vehicles, closed circuit television (CCTV) and automatic number-plate-recognition (ANPR) technology. These tactics were deployed in locations that were potentially subject to terrorist or criminal activity. For North Yorkshire Police, this has included, but is not limited to, the historic walled city centre of York (a major tourist destination with a high footfall) and Catterick Garrison (a large army base). The Project Servator approach also required the deployment of promotional campaign materials such as tannoy safety messages, leaflets, social media, A-board posters and Project Servator webpages. These materials all convey a variety of mild fear-appeal-based messages for example: ‘She’s here to keep you safe. Don’t

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worry our search dogs are friendly. They sniff out drugs, firearms and explosives and help us keep them off the streets. Together, we’ve got it covered.’ (North Yorkshire Police, nd). This message, and others like it, were designed to convey the need to be vigilant but also to report any suspicious (criminal/terrorist) activity. The latter message also hints at the police use of surveillance techniques, which would only be likely to raise fear levels in those people who are up to no good. One question that arises is whether other countries faced with a threat from Islamist terror groups might launch their own version of Project Servator, e.g. the Nigerian government to deter Boko Haram. Actions to counter the threat and to reduce the fear generated in the public could include criminalising the acceptance of their loans, developing their own legitimate loan-assistance programme and setting up a system of reporting ‘dodgy loan’ offers, using a social-marketing campaign (the sort of tagline that might be used could be ‘Been offered a “loan” you can’t refuse? Report in confidence to XYZ’), to allow security forces to respond accordingly. The campaign might need to be tailored to young and older people, men and women, all of whom will have different reasons for being duped into accepting a loan and responding to that situation and will feel differently about their own abilities to get themselves out of the dangerous situation they are in. Such an activity might help to close down one of the many tactics used by Boko Haram to terrorise the Nigerian people. Note how the Boko Haram intervention suggests the need for segmentation, self-efficacy, enforcement and mixed communication channels that are culturally tailored.

THE RISE OF THE STRONGMAN IN A GREAT GAME How might this suggested approach apply to the context of a US analysis of the North Korean biological weapons propaganda in

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1952? Much of the theory informing terrorism and insurgency was developed in the 1950s. With a post-hoc rationalisation of the North Korean campaign, we note the strategic nature of the assessment, including the collective term ‘communist propaganda’ for a series of activities that had Russian, Chinese and Asian dimensions. How audiences were to be segmented in culturally relevant ways would have been a challenge with significant resource implications. Self-efficacy as an antidote to the threat of biological and germ warfare (and the perversion of science) does present a problem, and one that has been utilised by communist propagandists for precisely that reason. Not only is there an attempt to accuse the United States of atrocities, but there are other audiences involved, including citizens in the Soviet Union and Asia. From a US perspective, their assessment required a response based on these potential fears of local populations, whilst noting that these weapons presented a fear for the authorities in Russia and Asia as well. As a consequence, the United States assessed that an effective response could not rely on countering the propaganda alone. Instead, it would require a mixture of joint statements with credible others, inspection regimes and finding opportunities to show the United States was effectively supporting disease prevention and pest control. These, in the language of the fear-appeal theory arising since 1952, would feed into mechanisms for fear and danger control. From a communist perspective, the biological warfare messaging could create fear in local populations in which self-efficacy and response efficacy are both low. Susceptibility would also be enhanced by stories of abuse in Korean prisons, and severity would be raised through the narratives of perverse science. In this situation, the population may blame the United States for local disease but also feel they have little alternative but to unite behind their leadership against an evil enemy. The fear appeal in this circumstance becomes one of control by the regime, particularly when

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there is an information asymmetry between government knowledge of the threat and science and the local population’s knowledge and ability to fact check. In these circumstances, one can sense how difficult it would be to rebut one’s own government assessment, let alone the risks inherent in opposition. It is easy to argue that fear, uncertainty and frustration have marked recent years in the international information environment. The year 2014 saw the annexation of Crimea by Russia, as it continued to develop a hybrid approach to warfare that accentuated propaganda and information warfare alongside traditional operations. Since then, Russian interference in the French and US elections have seen the rise of cyber operations, both in terms of hacking and social media manipulation. The international community has struggled to respond to a Russia that acts with impunity, including in its support for a Syrian leader clearly using chemical weapons against his own people, implicating Russia in war crimes. Of course, Russia has also used advanced chemical weapons against a target in the UK. Immigration dynamics influenced by war, politics and economics in the Middle East and Africa have fuelled a growth in right-wing politics in US and European politics. Whilst Russia was hacking the elections, data-mining companies in the west have been shown to be illegally and unethically using microtargeting of the population for political effect. Notions of fakeness and alternative facts have dominated the daily news. The year 2017 saw threats of nuclear annihilation, exchanged in very personal and insulting language by the leaders of the United States and North Korea, with a cooling effect in 2018 as both leaders seemed to move towards showing how good their relationship is. It would seem to be clear that responsibility for whether nuclear war will or will not happen lies within the power of two opposing individuals, each seeking to influence internationally and, perhaps more importantly, their base support. Some degree of segmentation is required in understanding audiences in which

fear is generated and controlled in a context much more complex than the supposed bipolar world of 1952, where trust is low and fear is driven by environmental, social and nuclear concerns, amongst others. Like the 1952 assessment of biological weapons, when it comes to nuclear war between the United States and North Korea, the apparent audience is the mind of the leadership of the opposing country. However, as the messaging from a US perspective is promoted at political rallies and on the president’s twitter, one can at least assume that the US population, and the president’s support base in particular, are affected audiences. The fear appeal in shaping public opinion behind the US president is promoted in the context of him personally being tough in his deal-making, a trope he has pulled through from his business life, both for enhancing perception of his skill and offering a different approach to the usual form of politics. When it comes to international issues, particularly in the nuclear context, a sense of self-efficacy may be low in the population. There is little opportunity to personally respond, other than to hope the president succeeds and doesn’t make matters worse. In these circumstances, the perception of the likelihood of nuclear war is increased, as is the impact involved with such weapons. Fiery language has of course been a characteristic of North Korean bellicose propaganda, broadcast on state TV to the North Korean population and then re-broadcast by carriers around the world. The very real development of the nuclear threat by North Korea, alongside its rhetoric, has required an international response. As with the US president’s tactics, the identified threat lies abroad and is used to enhance control over, or influence, the local population and provide opportunities for the leadership’s self-esteem. We can see in both the United States and North Korea propaganda approaches that are designed to enhance fear and reduce the self-efficacy and response efficacy of populations. In the context of information asymmetry, the aim is

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arguably to raise support for the strongmen and offer prestige when they have broken through in a crisis they themselves helped to create. Arguably, this political use of fear appeal is manipulating the same variables highlighted in our model, and it therefore has utility in thinking about how trust is formed and behaviour influenced in the uncertain world of hybrid warfare. It is likely that effective approaches to mitigating fear appeal in politics will require rebuttal and fact-checking to understand the likelihood and impact of the real risk that is posed, even whilst political rivals try to manipulate these variables towards their own ends. Civil engagement in the issues requires a demonstration of how individual actions and responsibility in democratic processes can help shape policies, which at times seem remote from everyday life. Yet, the new great game is being played out at a hyper-local level on the mobile phones of individuals, which in turn may yet provide a real opportunity for exercising self-efficacy and response efficacy in a way not possible in 1952.

through this self-efficacy, their lives can really be safer someday. At the other end of the scale, the return of great power confrontation looms on the Korean peninsula, South China Sea and Central Europe. The rise of strongmen, working through secretive bi-lateral engagements, reduces the feeling of selfefficacy in populations, raising anxiety for some and bellicosity from others as they form right and left in- and out-groups in identity politics. Thirdly, an understanding of fearappeal theory can help shine a light on the strategies of others and may help formulate responses that reduce anxiety, bellicosity and perhaps the outbreak or escalation of conflict. What we have tried to show in this chapter is that armed with fear-appeal theory, one can start to dissect the propaganda of others in much more detail. One can then start to understand more fully the way that propaganda is intended to work, and on whom, and construct measures by which one might counter such propaganda. The challenge for our time is to think about the scale of our analysis in an era of terrorism and strategic strongmen.

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

A number of conclusions can be drawn from the discussion presented in this chapter. Firstly, the topic of ‘fear’ in propaganda is persistent. From the few examples we present, we can think about it in strategic and tactical terms: in great powers dialogue on the one hand and in individuals whose door has a night letter nailed to it on the other. Secondly, what these scales of focus have in common is the anxiety felt by individuals and their ability or inability to do something about it. The Afghan lives alongside their potential attacker, presenting a very real threat that needs to be countered by reassurance and local security. The challenge of people maintaining a personal collaboration with law enforcement requires a belief that

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Dickinson, S. and Holmes, M. (2008). Understanding the emotional and coping responses of adolescent individuals exposed to threat appeals. International Journal of Advertising, 27(2), 251–278. Dillard, J.P. and Anderson, J.W. (2004). The role of fear in persuasion. Psychology and Marketing, 21(11), 909–926. Dillard, J.P. and Shen, KL. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication. Communication Monographs, 72(2), 144–168. Foxley, T. (2007). The Taliban’s propaganda activities: how well is the Afghan insurgency communicating and what is it saying? A SIPRI Project Paper, June 2007. Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Higbee, K.L. (1969). Fifteen years of fear arousal: research on threat appeals 1953–1968. Psychological Bulletin, 72(6), 426–444. Human Rights Watch (2010). The ‘Ten-Dollar Talib’ and women’s rights: Afghan women and the risks of reintegration and reconciliation. New York: Human Rights Watch, July. Retrieved from: http://www. refworld. org/ pdfid/4c3c07372. pdf (accessed 21 July 2018). Ingman, K.A., Ollendick, T.H. and Akande, A. (1999). Cross-cultural aspects of fears in African children and adolescents. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37(4), 337–345. Janis, I.L. and Feshbach, S. (1953). Effects of fear-arousing communications. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48, 78-93. Janis, I. (1967). Effects of fear arousal on attitude change: recent developments in theory and experimental research. In: Berkowitz, L. (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 164–224), New York: Academic Press. Johnson, T.H. (2007). The Taliban insurgency and the analysis of Shabnamah (Night Letters). Small Wars and Insurgencies, 18(3), 317–344. Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P.F. (1955). Personal Influence. New York: Free Press. Laroche, M., Toffoli, R., Zhang, Q. and Pons, F. (2001). A cross-cultural study of the persuasive effect of fear appeal messages in cigarette advertising: China and Canada.

International Journal of Advertising, 20(3), 297–317. LaTour, M.S. & Rotfeld, H.J. (1997). There are threats and (maybe) fear-caused arousal: Theory and confusions of appeals to fear and fear arousal itself. Journal of Advertising, 26(3), 45–59. LaTour, M.S. and Zahra, S.A. (1989). Fear appeals as advertising strategy: should they be used? Journal of Consumer Marketing, 6(2), 61–70. Leventhal, H. (1967). Fear – For Your Health. Psychology Today, 1(September), 54–58. Leventhal, H. (1970). Findings and theory in the study of fear communications. In: L. Berkowitz (Ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 119–187). New York: Academic Press. Maheswaran, D. and Agrawal, N. (2004). Motivational and cultural variations in mortality salience effects: contemplations on terror management theory and consumer behaviour. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(3), 213–218. North Yorkshire Police (nd.). Project Servator. Retrieve from: https://northyorkshire.pol ice.uk/what-we-do/tackling-crime/projectservator/ [accessed 4 June 2019]. O’Cass, A. and Griffin, D. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of social issue advertising believability. Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing, 15(1–2), 87–104. Paul, C. (2008). Information Operations: Doctrine and Practice. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Pyszczynski, T. (2004). What are we so afraid of? A terror management theory perspective on the politics of fear. Social Research, 71(4), 827–847. Rogers, R.W. (1975). A protection motivation theory of fear appeals and attitude change. The Journal of Psychology, 91(1), 93–114. Ruiter, R.A.C., Verplanken, B., de Cremer, D. and Kok, G. (2004). Danger and fear control in responses to fear appeals. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 26(1), 13–24. Samu, S. and Bhatnagar, N. (2008). The efficacy of anti-smoking advertisements: the role of source, message, and individual characteristics. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 13(3), 237–250.

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22 Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology Dianne Dean and Haseeb Shabbir

INTRODUCTION ‘Can there then be no meritorious propaganda?’, asks O’Shaughnessy (2004: 15) in his seminal work on the intersection between politics and propaganda. This, he elaborates, is an important question since propaganda has become a pejorative term, largely due to its historical associations with Hitler and the Third Reich. Furthermore, following on from World War II we saw the creation of the Soviet Union and the start of the Cold War. Throughout this post-war period, ‘black propaganda’ was used both by the West and the East to manipulate opinion, (see for instance, Schwartz, 2009) and, for Lenin, to ultimately change culture (Hazan, 1982). Recognized as an insidious type of persuasion that manipulates citizens, appealing to emotion rather than reason and using ‘dirty tricks’ and lies to achieve its objectives, propaganda has been instrumental in creating outgroups, demonizing minorities and consequently fostering xenophobia (Croft and

Dean, 2014). These effects are typically achieved through repetition, fabrication and myths, amplifying cultural symbols and embedding emotional, irrational messages. For Briant (2015), propaganda comprises a series of multidimensional continua: truth/ lies; internal/external; vertical/horizontal and state/insurgents. Numerous scholars argue that it is the breadth of propaganda that provides the biggest cause for concern (Briant, 2015; O’Shaughnessy, 2004), for instance through the contested relationship between propaganda and education (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992/2001; Wooddy, 1935), entertainment (Ellul, 1965/1973) and even academia (Jones, 2009). The pervasiveness of consumer marketing penetrating almost all aspects of everyday life has also been scrutinized as a form of propaganda (Applbaum, 2004). Indeed, for Pratkanis and Aronson (1991) advertising is nothing more than commercial propaganda. However, rather than replicate these notions of the insidious and pervasive nature of

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propaganda, this chapter adopts an alternative lens in addressing O’Shaughnessy’s question. It does this by proposing that peace marketing is not only a meritorious form of propaganda but also an effective counter propaganda tool, reducing the efficacy and reach of agitative propaganda. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War heralded a ‘Peace Dividend’ where reductions in defence spending could be used to build stronger economies (Knight et  al., 1996). However, within two years the Balkans were riven by war, with more than two million people displaced and over 100,000 people killed (Woodward, 1995). Moreover, the increase in civil conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and the growth of global non-state terror has shown the peace dividend to be an illusory ideal. The need for a realistic and renewed peace dividend, therefore, is more urgent than ever (Kotler, 2017). We seek to show how peace theory can be operationalized by the marketing domain, concurring with Galtung’s (1996: 265) view that ‘theory building is not the goal: action to reduce violence and enhance peace is the goal’. More recently, Philip Kotler has underscored the role of marketing for peace at the Hiroshima World Peace Conference (Kotler, 2016), arguing for a strategic alliance between the diverse range of peace organizations, greater emphasis on sustainability, a reconsideration of the distribution of wealth and resources and discussion of the implications of satisfying the needs of competing groups as we move from conflict towards peace. Astorino-Courtois (1996) considered how political marketing could be applied to the Jordan–Israel peace agreement, emphasizing the benefits of strategically positioning peace messages to diverse interest groups. More recently we have seen the Colombia peace process come to fruition by integrating marketing activities with outreach to paramilitary groups (Ghosh, 2015; Logan, 2016) and marginalized groups, including women, (Herbolzheimer, 2016) to secure a sustainable peace. We structure this chapter

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by firstly delineating the similarities between marketing and propaganda while arguing that marketing is not only more nuanced than propaganda but can also be used to constructively inform, educate, remind and reinforce. Crucially though, and contrary to the conventional view of propaganda and indeed of marketing, peace marketing focusses on citizens’ benefits from peace rather than manipulating their needs, creating fear and uncertainty. Finally, we show how marketing, as a strategic type of integrative propaganda, can be used to counter agitative propaganda and build peace.

PROPAGANDA Propaganda has been defined by Jowett and O’Donnell (1999: 6) as ‘the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist’. An important component of propaganda is the ability to create a story with occasional truths rather than just lies, which provides a wedge of credibility (O’shaughnessy, 2004). These occasional truths need to fit with existing social-cognitive schemas, which reinforce their credibility and legitimacy. As Edelman (1964/1985: 31) observed, It is a characteristic of large numbers of people in our society that they see and think in terms of stereotypes, personalization and over simplifications, that they cannot recognize or tolerate ambiguous and complex situations, and that they accordingly respond chiefly to symbols that oversimplify and distort.

These simplified narratives are used to shape perceptions of the target group, for a purpose. They often create a negative picture of a particular group of people, building a clear distinction between the ‘in’ group and the demonized ‘other’, to use Anderson’s (1983) terminology. Terrorism is another tool of propaganda, an act of terror or ‘propaganda of the deed’, which as an act of political

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violence that creates shock and its associative psychological effects, through action rather than words. Bolt (2012) argues persuasively that insurgents use violence by articulating the relationship between revolutionary memory, time and narrative. This notion of agitative propaganda is in stark contrast to the more inclusive integrative propaganda. While agitative propaganda reflects Jowett and O’Donnell’s (1999) notion of disinformation, urban myths, folk wisdom, insecurity, fear and the creation of outgroups, integrative propaganda is considered to be the propaganda of nation building. There is, however, a degree of overlap here as integrative propaganda can also induce fear within their own states, for instance by creating fear of other states, other ethnic groups and other political systems or religions. It is this Machiavellian approach to nation building that persuades the citizen that their ontological securities can only remain intact by conforming to these hegemonic and symbolic values. This is consistent with Bernays (1928/2005) and Ellul (1965/1973), who view integrative propaganda as long-term, adaptable, participative and emphasizing the importance of becoming a member of an integrated society, sharing the same values. Moreover, ‘Integrative propaganda aims at stabilising the social body, unifying and reinforcing it’ (Ellul, 1965/1973: 75). As Bernays (1928/2005: 48) argued ‘propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government’, but for Wooddy (1935: 231), ‘propaganda masquerades as a contribution to the public benefit’. Chomsky (1997/2002) also takes a critical stance on this process, arguing that the elites within government are framing the messages to appeal and persuade a dull, naïve population to conform to their views and agendas. This specialized class of citizens plans, controls and executes decisions because, using Lippman’s analogy, ‘we have to protect ourselves from the trampling roar of a bewildered herd’ (Chomsky, 1997/2002: 16). This inherent governmental control of opinions is particularly pervasive where there

is limited engagement in politics, as ‘democracies are controlled through their opinions’ (Dewey, 1929: 519). The prevailing view in early communication studies suggested that the bewildered and naïve citizen may have little interest in or understanding of politics but can be mobilized through sentiment, ‘that can be manufactured by mass methods for almost any person or cause’ (Dewey, 1918/1982: 119). This is utilized by propaganda in the form of state-sanctioned news outlets providing ‘the cheapest and most effective way of developing the required tone of public sentiment’ (Dewey, 1929: 519). More recent studies illustrate the underlying tension between scholars ‘scholars who argue there is a relationship between the controlling elites who seduce a passive citizenry and those who believe that propaganda is merely a mechanism used by elites to ‘focus and sharpen existing trends and beliefs’ (Welch, 2015: 11). The contrast between these perspectives conceals the real issue for propaganda, in that it is a mass-communication method using a range of tools whereas a modern successful strategy needs to resonate with the experiences and needs of the intended target audience (Edelman 1964/1985: 124; Payne, 2009). For Schattschneider (1960/1988: 137), The most important thing about any democratic regime is the way in which it uses and exploits popular sovereignty and what questions it refers to the public for decision or guidance and how it refers to the public, how the alternatives are defined and how it respects the limitations of the public. Some groups of citizens tend to be accepting of the ‘tyranny of an elite’ (Riesman et al., 1964: 165) and view political issues rather like spectators, casually observing and maybe subject to occasional manipulation. For instance, the peer-group exchange of consumers preferences, …. [these] preferences are seldom taken into the political market and translated into purchase of political commodities. (Riesman, et  al., 1964: 171)

Instead, they are persuaded to vote for the political commodities that are presented within

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a recognizable narrative as beneficial to them, whether they truly are or not. While Qualter (1985: 124) stops short of suggesting that this is manipulative, he does concede that propaganda is ‘the deliberate attempt by the few to influence the attitudes and behavior of the many by the manipulation of symbolic communication’. This reflects the basic premise of marketing, where understanding consumer needs are paramount when devising an appropriate marketing strategy, and the use of segmentation, targeting and positioning is what distinguishes marketing from traditional views of propaganda. It is precisely because citizens/ consumers are not a bewildered herd that segmenting the market is crucial, and through this process different groups are identified with different levels of interest, different levels of ability and who are exposed to different types of media. Therefore, citizens are diverse groups with a range of multiple characteristics such as rationality, irrationality, apathy, cynicism and emotion, all with different levels of understanding and engagement with politics (Dean and Croft, 2009).

MARKETING AS PROPAGANDA This chapter does not seek to elevate the ethics of marketing above propaganda, as marketing does indeed focus on uncertainty and occasionally fear as persuasive mechanisms (Dean, 2005; Packard, 1957/2007; Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992/2001). Marketing also has its critics, and it is commonly perceived as a pernicious persuasion tool that equates to ‘spin’ and ‘commercial propaganda’ (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessey, 2003; Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992/2001;). Marketing is seen as the foot soldier of capitalism, who parades the commodification of everything from culture (Fuat Firat and Dholakia 1998; Hetrick and Lozada, 1999) to health (Pellegrino, 1999) and even time (Araujo, 1999; Debord, 1984). Moreover, the motivation to consume is underpinned by inducing desire to ‘magically’

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transform the self through one’s possessions (Belk, 1988) and through our relationships with brands (Schembri et  al., 2010). An extreme example of this illusionary transformation of the self includes the consumption of cosmetic procedures (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, 2006; Hurd, et  al. 2007). Integral to this commodity fetishization is the notion of exchange: a central tenet in marketing theory. Commodity exchange is the transference of values associated with product, brands or services to the consumer. However, the transaction between producer and consumer conceals the undercurrent of power in these relationships, where consumers can become locked into the power of the market (Montgomerie and Roscoe, 2013); for instance, when consumers perceive that they will incur costs if they switch to a new product, thus increasing the power of the producer and generating brand loyalty (Klemperer, 1995). There are other tactics such as obfuscation pricing and distribution-channel obstruction that are indirectly linked to propaganda, but they also help to maintain the balance of power with the producer. Furthermore, consumers are persuaded to believe that their aspirations can only be realized through the exchange of a product or brand that is imbued with the magical qualities that can transform the self through ownership of these brands (Belk, 1988). Thus, identity is produced and sustained through consumption, but as these products or brands do not in fact fulfil the brand promises, consumers then need to go shopping again (Klein, 2000; Lodziak, 2002). The shift towards experiential, affective and symbolic consumption is far removed from the notion of the rational processor of information that shapes consumption decisions. The range of choices and consumer capacity for rational decision making is determined by their ability and motivation to evaluate the range of options available (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). However, for Klein and Yadav (1989), even consumers with strong cognitive capabilities make few decisions based on analytical

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processes. This is exacerbated further by marketers who focus on risk and uncertainty in their communications strategies (Hoyer et al., 2010/2013), and this clearly casts marketing in the light of propaganda. Therefore, both marketing strategists and political elites seek to manage their citizens’ or consumers’ preferences by ‘reducing their alternatives to the extreme limit of simplification’ (Schattschneider, 1960/1988) or, conversely, using choice complexity to create cognitive dissonance, which uncouples the consumer from the decision-making process (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000). Therefore, engagement is determined by a range of heuristic devices that both simplify and constrain the degree of elaboration in both the electoral and consumer decision-making process. However, marketing can be also be used for meritorious and transformative purposes (Mick et al., 2012a, 2012b). The transformative potential of marketing is evident, for instance, in the growth of organic and ethical consumption such as FairTrade (Cherrier, 2007), in the promotion of recycling (Shrum et al., 1994) or in presenting the self through the ethical consumption of food (Grauel, 2014). Indeed, the birth of Kotler and Zaltman’s (1971) Social Marketing was a direct response to Wiebe’s (1952) question: Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap? Since this counter-point, numerous applications on the use of marketing to encourage positive behaviours and discontinue negative behaviours have emerged (Kotler, 2006). Specific examples include Andreasen’s (1995) work on using marketing to promote health communications or Sargeant’s (2009) work on non-profit marketing. Perhaps the most recent example of this transformative potential of marketing is the idea of peace marketing as a unique form of international diplomacy based on social marketing (Nedelea and Nedelea, 2015). Each of these examples, whether rooted in social marketing, non-profit marketing or peace marketing, conform to the same values of integrative propaganda: guiding the citizen towards behaviour that supports both the citizen, the

society and the environment. Given the role of agitative propaganda in engineering conflicts and social violence (Bagdikian, 2004), peace marketing represents an important integrative form of propaganda to counter these maladaptive effects. However, there is increased urgency as recent forms of propagandists, such as Daesh’s death-cult brand, ‘ISIS’, have shown increasing strategic and refined forms of propaganda, integrating marketing techniques into their armoury and social media (Shane, 2017). Peace marketing as a theory and practice enables strategists to build sustainable peace in the face of increasingly sophisticated propaganda designed to disrupt peace and social harmony.

PEACE MARKETING Peace marketing seeks to understand and develop marketing programmes and insights designed to foster peace-building and peacemaking between belligerent groups. (Shabbir, 2017). As Nedelea and Nedelea (2015: 188) remind us, peace marketing is needed because ‘our future depends on the efficiency of the marketing campaigns for peace’. Extending the concept of marketing to peace should not be viewed as ‘sarcastic, facetious or flippant’, since ‘no other means, after all, have brought permanent peace’ (Foegen, 1995: 29). Indeed, Reychler’s (2006: 13) seminal research agenda on the challenges facing peace research also concludes with a recognition of the need to ‘ask marketing specialists’ to ‘make the concept of peace more attractive’. While propaganda is typically characterized by its ‘mass suggestion’, hypodermicsyringe methods and disallowance of critical reflection and choice (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1999), peace marketing is rooted in constructive engagement and dialogue with affected stakeholder groups or segments (Shultz, 2007; 2016). Unlike propaganda’s ‘mass suggestion’, peace marketing therefore relies on segmenting citizens into key-actor

Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology

groups and subsequently understanding how the benefits of peace can be positioned for each group. There needs to be an overarching strategy rooted in constructive engagement, distributive justice and ethics (Shultz, 2007; 2016), but one which also enables a multiple-positioning approach to differentiate between the nuances of individual stakeholder segments. A specific mix of marketing messages, tools and channels are selected, in order to achieve optimal impact. Public relations, for instance, can also be harnessed within this mix, since the identification of influential opinion leaders is important in optimizing reach. This is a gradual process, and once the peace marketing strategy has been initiated, an iterative process of evaluation and adaptation is required. To understand this process further, we examine the conceptualization of peace in more detail. For Galtung (1996: 9), peace ‘is the absence/reduction of violence of all kinds. Peace is nonviolent and creative conflict transformation’. Galtung (1969) classically differentiated two types of peace: negative peace, where peace is enforced, and positive peace, which uses engagement leading to citizen empowerment that consequently engineers peace. For Galtung (1969; 1996), power is critical to the success of peace, since political, military, economic and cultural power all need to be harnessed in different combinations in order to encourage and sustain an optimal peaceful outcome. This interplay of power dynamics can be used to install both, or either, negative or positive peace. Negative peace is enforced through imposition of practices that force a peaceful solution. This is peace characterized as the absence of violence, but this is unsustainable as it obscures or suppresses rather than address the core nature of the conflict. It is impossible to overstate the impact of social distance and othering of social or political groups, nations, religions and the rise of conflict. Gandhi’s critique emphasized the zero-sum game that creates and sustains conflict:

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It is not nationalism that is evil, it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness, which is the bane of modern nations which is evil. Each wants to profit at the expense of, and rise on the ruin of, the other. (cited in Singh, 1998)

Sharp’s (2002/2012) work focusses on peaceful internal insurrection against dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, and it adopts a realist-outcomes perspective. Inspired by Gandhi’s example of peaceful, civic disobedience in agitating and disturbing colonial repression, the Salt March was indicative of the symbolic power of peaceful protest. The strength of Sharp’s work is based upon the need for a strategic vision for the successful overthrow of dictatorships, through an understanding of the history, context and the environment in which the oppression or conflict occurs. This need for strategic vision is closely aligned with the approach of marketing, which also examines the context and the environment to generate an overarching strategic vision to drive marketing interventions forward. Indeed, central in marketing logic is the imperative to understand the needs, wants, values and desires of targeted segments of consumers/citizens. Similarly, within a conflict situation it is crucial to understand citizens’ motivation for peace and to prioritise groups’ willingness to engage in the peace process (Shultz, 2007; 2016). Therefore, for peace to be sustainable, citizens have to be persuaded that the benefits of peace outweigh the continued costs of war and conflict. Clearly, just as there is significant overlap between marketing and integrative propaganda, there is also overlap between integrative propaganda and peace marketing. Both seek to persuade through positive communications and peaceful symbolic actions that shape public opinion and change behaviours, and for Gandhi (1951: 1961), ‘the method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion’. Critically, however, we argue that peace marketing, as a unique form of integrative propaganda, is more nuanced and more sustainable than agitative propaganda. While agitative propaganda relies primarily

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on fear, anger and building social distance between groups, often cloaked in positive symbology (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1999), peace marketing as integrative propaganda relies on genuine constructive engagement, fostering mutual empathy and attaining distributive justice. Peace marketing builds a deeper understanding of citizens through marketingresearch methods to identify the needs, values and desires of a wide range of actors, while recognizing the history and context of the conflict (Shultz, 2007; 2016). Moreover, in line with Gandhi’s philosophy, peace marketing seeks to reduce social distance (Sharp, 1973), opening the door for humanizing dehumanized ‘others’ and thus contributing towards conflict resolution. Peace marketing uses positive-peace methods such as constructive engagement, dialogue, distributive justice, ethics (Shultz, 2007; 2016) and, of course, deeply symbolic gestures that are embedded in the culture and context, in order to re-humanise ‘others’ and subsequently foster mutual empathy between conflicting stakeholder groups (Shabbir and Dean, 2017). Building on the central tenets of marketing – segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) – we propose a framework that shows the intersections between actors, the environment, propaganda and peace marketing. Given the explicit role of STP in marketing, we argue that understanding the values, needs, desires and wants of affected stakeholder conflict groups, or actors, is central to harnessing peace marketing. This should be embedded within an understanding of the complexity of the conflict-laden environment, such as its historical and contextual dynamics. Understanding the needs and wants of consumers or citizens enables strategists to produce targeted communications, derived from an understanding of demographic, psychographic, geographic or behavioural characteristics (Dibb and Simkin, 2009; Wedel and Kamakura, 2000; 2002). This logic should also apply to conflictaffected stakeholders, since here there is also

a range of different actors all with different levels of power and influence, commitment to the struggle and, most importantly, willingness to accept conflict resolution. Ergo, once the segments have been identified, specific groups can then be targeted and the product, service or political promise optimally positioned in the minds of the consumer (Baines et al., 2014). Each actor group is exposed to a different conflict-resolution message; i.e. with an adapted message that focusses on the benefits they uniquely seek. Hence, the consumer or citizen sees what they expect to see, which is, of course, also what they are told they want. In contrast to the classical view on propaganda, marketing’s requirement for STP demands a constructive and differentiated stakeholder approach rather than the destructive logic of traditional and contemporary propaganda (Stanley, 2015). Communication strategies for traditional agitative and integrative propaganda, therefore, have tended to focus on a mass audience, using heuristic devices, spectacular events and repetitive messages, often through unconscious processing routes, using a range of communication channels. More recently, contemporary propaganda continues to use the same heuristic devices but engages in STP using destructive rhetoric, fear and the de-humanization of others. The significance of peace marketing is its strategic impetus to identify key target segments and subsequently develop a constructive positioning strategy. The role of public relations and opinion leaders is also crucial in enhancing the value and credibility of the message, to persuade each target group. The strategy is then evaluated in order to measure effectiveness, evaluate and adapt where necessary, and the process starts again. Figure 22.1 provides an illustration of the subtle differences between propaganda and marketing. Central to our model is, however, the voice of the key actors, or segments, in the conflict. However, essential to sustainable peace marketing is emancipation of the silenced voices in the conflict. An emancipatory ethics

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Figure 22.1  Marketing & Propaganda (Dis)similarities

framework can underpin peace marketing as a mechanism for constructive engagement and empowering this often silent majority. For Booth (2007: 112), emancipatory ethics is ‘the philosophy, theory and politics of inventing humanity’. Emancipatory ethics focusses on the vulnerable in the conflict rather than the state-centric political elites (McDonald, 2007). Conflicts silence the vulnerable, taking away their voice, and thus they are under-represented in any actions, negotiations or even chances of escaping the conflict (Dingli, 2015). Emancipation is ‘freeing people from those constraints that stop them carrying out from what they would freely chose to do’ (Booth, 1991: 319). In peace marketing, the design and implementation of any peace product ultimately rests on unlocking the silenced voice as the primary segment of focus, hence its constructive ethos.

BUILDING THE ISIS BRAND THROUGH AGITATIVE PROPAGANDA Some of the most successful agitativepropaganda campaigns over recent years have been initiated by Al-Qaeda and more latterly by Daesh’s death-cult brand, ‘ISIS’. Such was the success of ‘brand ISIS’, for instance, that Ignatius (2015) argued it was ‘one of the world’s most powerful brands’, and Sheffield (2015) suggested it had become ‘a global brand to rival Western corporations’. We adopt a peace marketing lens in order to understand how this marketing application can, or rather could have been, leveraged more effectively to dismantle the propaganda machinery of the malevolent communications of ‘brand ISIS’. Central to our approach is the leveraging of an often neglected key actor, the mainstream Muslim voice (Esposito and

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Mogahed, 2007), which is consistent with an emancipatory peace marketing approach: unlocking the voice of the ‘silenced’. Al-Qaeda was a global franchise of individual, regional jihadi groups brought together by an ideological base that was determined to provide a response to Western secular, cultural and globalized hegemony (Burke, 2007). ISIS, born out of one of these groups in Iraq, subsequently presented in many ways a stronger and more targeted message to young disenfranchised Muslim men. Adopting its more virulent ‘management of savagery’ (Maher, 2016), their messages sought to differentiate themselves from other radical Islamic groups, in particular from Al-Qaeda, through a message of visually visceral hyper-violence and therefore aggressive propagandist imagery of torture and often ‘live’ vicious executions (Fishman, 2016). Winter (2017: 13) summarizes their propaganda as ‘clumsy strategic communicationsfocused exegesis of the Quran; analogiz[ing] the hadith and Sunnah; and cherrypick[ing] from other ideologues’ work’. Successfully aligning themselves with ‘Islamic cultural values to justify their actions’ (Antúnez and Tellidis, 2013: 118) was central to both malevolent brands and therefore so was using Islamic values as a ‘veneer of legitimacy’ (Kundnani, 2016: 23). Moreover, and consistent with agitative propaganda, ISIS propagandist messages in particular sought to agitate and instil anger by creating a rhetoric of Muslims as victims, while also creating an apocalyptic messianic option. The notion of the ‘Islamic State’ or a caliphate, played on the process of ‘othering’ Non-Muslims and ‘infidel’ Muslims (Corman and Schiefelbein, 2008), with radical social identity strengthened further by an irrational binding with scripture, thus accentuating a sense of purpose (Flannery, 2015). Presenting the caliphate as a lifestyle option or as ‘a utopian alternative within which the new adherents would be blessed as founding fathers and mothers’ (Winter, 2015: 30), ISIS’ vision of resurrecting an idealized caliphate

was imbued with a ‘sense of serving a sacred mission’ (Gerges, 2014: 342). This is consistent with radical apocalyptism, or the active eschatology wherein an ushering in of the ‘end times’ is positioned as a noble mission (Flannery, 2015). Using traditional and social media as its global channels of communications, they built a slick propaganda apparatus that served the dual purpose of recruiting new ‘Jihadis’ to the cause but also reinforcing the morale and commitment of ‘Jihadis’ within the caliphate (Winter, 2018). The key tropes articulated in the material focused on the victimhood of Muslims, showing footage of civilian casualties and fatalities carried out by the ‘crusaders’, wrapped in a utopian vision where Muslims could feel safe and secure with a sense of belonging, rather than being an alienated ‘other’. The propaganda adopted therefore illustrated a marvellously functioning and yet illusionary caliphate, portrayed with pleasant schools and public spaces and economic and even manufacturing capabilities. The illusory caliphate presented an environment that was safe for families and children, with an emphasis on Sharia law, demonstrating swift retribution for transgressors with public shows of punishment such as executions and the like. Finally, the propaganda focused on celebrating warfare, to demonstrate that they could still defend their caliphate and to emphasise their effectiveness as a military force (Winter, 2018). However, as Winter (2018) has noted, there was shift in the propagandist rhetoric from 2015 to 2018 after sustained military attacks on the professed caliphate. This led to a dispersal of the key actors within ISIS to other areas in the Middle East such as Libya, with many ‘Jihadis’ seeking to return to their countries and work from the inside rather from the professed caliphate. Despite the dispersal of its mercenaries, a central aim of ISIS was retained – positioning itself as representative of Islam. Rafiq (2016) argues that using the Islam label benefits ISIS and its variants in achieving two aims. First, by legitimizing their identity to Muslims, it enables the organizations

Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology

to conceal the underlying non-religious ideology they are promoting, thus ‘…coating their poison with honey’ (2016: 120), and second, by legitimizing their identity to non-Muslims, it deflects exposure and criticism of their actual ideology to mainstream Muslims or the ‘genuine adherents to which they are the staunchest enemies’ (2016: 120). ISIS therefore, employed and continued to use a common propaganda technique, ‘block and bridge’ (Hill, 2015), or ‘shift[ing] focus from a primary issue to a secondary issue’ through ‘block[ing] the key issue by bridging or shifting interest to the secondary issue so it appears from the first issue’ (Rafiq, 2016: 276). The illusionary link between Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction (see for example O’Shaughnessy, 2004; Lewandowsky et  al., 2013), for instance, was engineered by a ‘block’, the ‘45 minute’ lie, and the bridge to terrorism created by Hussein’s apparent involvement with Al-Qaeda. ISIS uses Islam as its ‘block’, to divert attention on its underlying ideology by shifting it to ‘Islam’. This works especially well, given the widespread pre-existence of Islamophobic schemas (Entman, 2003) and the regurgitation of its own rhetoric of ‘Islamic Terrorism’ by its opposition (Waller, 2007), thus utilizing a complementary propaganda tool – the bandwagon technique – or using the ‘premise that everyone is doing it, and so should you’ (Hill, 2015: 276). Given the perverseness and agitating form of such propaganda, we address how peace marketing can serve as a form of meritorious integrative propaganda.

PEACE MARKETING AS COUNTER PROPAGANDA In order to provide a counter branding-based propaganda strategy, this work seeks to extend Sharp’s strategic approach to peace and democracy by using peace marketing as a counter propaganda tool against ISIS. One

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key aspect that Sharp (1973; 2002/2012) emphasizes is that there has to be a coherent, realistic plan because ad hoc activities don’t build momentum, hence the need for consistency between the aims of the strategic plan and its anticipated outcome. We also concur with O’Shaughnessy and Baines (2009), who argue that there are no simple solutions, a part of any solution must be the development of a counternarrative, one as compelling as the deviant terrorist narrative, and sustained and refreshed also through global marketing channels.

This is a long process, and the moral imperative is crucial to maintain propagandist superiority over ISIS. Tugwell (1986) argues that ‘Political, spiritual and cultural leadership are in the end even more important than intelligence, response teams and firepower’. With this in mind, there are some peaceful counter propagandist practices that can be encouraged, and controlling the message through the media is crucial for the successful execution of this advocated approach. Unfortunately, the international media has reinforced and glorified the spectacle of terror by reporting and replicating the messages of ISIS (Jackson, 2007; Waller, 2007). This also alludes to the notion of ‘an Islamic terror’ or the ‘Muslim Other’, and it essentially conflates Islam with terrorism. Furthermore, media coverage reinforces Huntingdon’s myth of the irreconcilability of the Christian West and Islamic countries (Jackson, 2005; Kumar, 2012). As well as inferring a legitimacy of being Islamic to extremists and extremist organizations, thus reinforcing their intended self-identity and public image, the ‘regular association of Islam and Muslims with crime and terror in the media and on the internet is vital to the spread of Islamophobic rhetoric’ (Versi, 2015: 1). Confirming and adding credence to these myths perpetuated by ISIS has the effect of increasing the social distance between groups and placing all Muslims into one group that is sympathetic to the ISIS cause. In one of the

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few dedicated counter-branding studies on the War on Terror, Waller (2007: 54) argues that ‘Having accepted the enemy’s terminology and adopting its definitions as our own, we ceased fighting on our terms and placed our ideas at the enemy’s disposal. We are hardly conscious of it’, and in doing so ‘we reward the enemy’. Therefore, rather than ‘starving terrorists of the oxygen of publicity’, a reference made by the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1985) in relation to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Western media has used, for instance, ISIS’s propaganda ‘in ways that serve Islamic State’s objectives’ (Williams, 2016: 1). Alarmingly, according to former Head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard Dearlove, as a result, ISIS are getting more coverage than in ‘their wildest dreams’ (Norton-Taylor, 2014). Freear (2016), referring to the War on Terror brands in general, argues that, ‘it is clear that today’s persistent terrorist organizations are manipulating marketing ideas like consistency, uniqueness and credibility far more effectively than we are undermining them. Often, we inadvertently help them, without realizing how they are succeeding’. In doing so, peace marketing here is constructively engaging with a silenced stakeholder segment; namely, the voices of Muslim majority. Therefore, during the segmentation process, actors and groups need to be identified in order to assess their propensity to support initiatives that reduce the social distance between Muslims and non-Muslims but also crucially to increase social distance between mainstream Muslims and ISIS or other Islamic-terrorist actors. Key actors in this initiative would be opinion leaders within the Muslim community, politicians and media representatives. These actors are influential in encouraging others to become involved. Indeed, the counter-narrative scholarly community also recommends challenging extremists, using Muslim-derived Islamic theological accounts, thus accurately decoupling extremist narratives from Islam (e.g.

Braddock and Horgan, 2016; Christianmann, 2012; Corman and Schiefelbein, 2008, etc). As Corman and Schiefelbein (2008: 19) note, ‘A key problem for jihadis is legitimating what they do, [therefore], the tenets of Islam provide rich sources of contradiction that complicate their legitimation efforts’. It follows, therefore, that the ubiquitous ‘Islamic terrorism’ discourse, will, by default, fail to establish the legitimacy of the source of their narratives and therefore fail to be successful, since ‘credibility, legitimacy and relevance are…key ingredients of [successful] narratives’ (Barrett, 2009: 8). Some Western scholars have also noted the need to re-label or re-position Muslim extremists as ‘Khawirijites’ – an historical term in Islamic theology, effectively referring to a renegade in Islam and commonly accepted as the worst possible label a Muslim could be given as it indicates apostasy – to challenge the nature of the ideology such a person has embraced inaccurately as Islamic. Habeck (2006), for instance, observes that Muslim anti-radicalization discourse against extremists, based on the Khawrijite label has been so strong that these groups have been forced to deny this claim, in fear of it eroding credibility and thus delegitimizing their propaganda. Habeck (2006: 175) further highlights that given that the term is already present in Islamic discourse and polemics, ‘Making khawrij a common term for jihadis will not only differentiate them from the rest of the Islamic world, but it will also make it plain to moderate Muslims just how heterodox and violent toward other Muslims the jihadis are’. Antúnez and Tellidis, (2013: 131) also highlight that ‘Kharijites’ way of thinking has been replicated in modern times by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups claiming to represent Muslims and/or to emanate from Islam’ and, based on this, they propose ‘labelling of those terrorist groups that emphasise the practice of takfir and justify the killing of innocent people as neo-Kharijites’ (2013: 131). Consistent with Habeck (2006), Antúnez and Tellidis (2013: 131) justify this

Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology

term’s efficacy based on its widespread disdain among Muslims but also for the ‘ignorant, overly simplistic and, in some cases, purposefully misguiding Western discourses to win back their legitimacy on Islam-related terrorism’. Ironically, the CRCL report for Homeland Security USA (2008) also recommended educating the American public on the ‘cult’-like nature of the Khawarij, since ‘“Cult” is both normative and accurate in that it suggests a pseudo-religious ideology that is outside the mainstream’ (2008: 4). Indeed, Larson (2011: 119) concludes that the decline of al-Qaeda’s framing efforts was as a direct result of ‘reducing al-Qa’ida’s ideological appeal’ through the use of ‘Khawarij’ labelling efforts by Muslim critics. More recently, the Economist (2016: 1) in an article called ‘A disarming approach – can the beliefs that feed terrorism be changed?’ proposed that ‘Today’s jihadists can also be cast in an unflattering light by drawing parallels with an extremist sect from Islam’s earliest days… Known as the Khawarij’. Counter propaganda that opposes the propaganda of ISIS discredits and presents an alternative negative view of the Islamic state to the target groups and is consistent with recognizing that ‘language is the vehicle for demagogic propaganda’ (Stanley, 2015: 410), thus delegitimizing the language of agitative propaganda. As there will be multiple groups identified in the segmentation process, it needs to be ascertained which groups should be prioritized again in order to help encourage momentum to represent silenced unrepresented voices in the seemingly intractable conflicts. In order to mobilise effectively, each specified group requires their own marketing strategy with their own marketing mix. The marketing mix includes product, price, place and promotion. Each group is targeted with a focus on the ideology, but a different emphasis is placed on the values and policies. Therefore, each target group is presented with a slightly different product that meets their needs most closely while still being clearly identifiable with the core brand

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offering (See Downs, 1957: 135, for example). ‘Homegrown’ Muslim movements in the West that are actively involved in counterradicalization at the grass-root level and that are regarded as best-practice examples have used the Khawrijite label as an instrumental part of their counter-radicalization strategies. The STREET project in London, for instance, formerly funded by the UK government, has been recognized as a model of good practice (Christianmann, 2012) and is characterized by changing extremist ideology by raising awareness of the dangers of the Khawrijite ideology. Similarly, Active Change Foundation (ACF), founded by a reformed former extremist, Hanif Qadir, and also formerly funded by the UK government, similarly recognizes extremism as a manifestation of Khawrijite ideology. Furthermore, Islamagainstextremism.com, founded by Amjad Rafiq and affiliated with Salafipublications.com – arguably the largest online Salafi education platform in Europe – seeks to counter the claims of extremism through a theological evidence-based approach and has published several-hundredthousand pamphlets against ISIS, describing them as Kwarijites – many of which have been adapted by other anti-radicalization Muslim initiatives in the UK and translated into French and Dutch. As Rafiq (2016: 68) points out, ‘The Kharijite terrorists have been continuously refuted and condemned by Islamic scholarship for 1400 years’. Figure 22.2 provides a simple overview, comparing agitative terrorist propaganda from ‘ISIS’ with its decoupling using a counter-branding peace marketing approach. However, just as costs are incurred with consumer products or brands, engaging in peaceful political action has a cost. When making a peaceful stand against an aggressor, there is the personal cost of the loss of safety due to violent retribution; indeed, ISIS promulgates the message of reprisal against non-adherents to ISIS values. For Gandhi, this is where courage is so highly valued. There are few groups that do engage in the

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Figure 22.2  Replication and counter branding strategies

early stages of a response to an aggressor, but if they are successful then more groups will follow. Distribution is defined as the place where the process of exchange takes place. This is where the physical acts of peaceful protest take place, such as marches and so on. Sharp’s work is again useful where he identifies peaceful activities such as pray-ins (1973: 379) and religious processions (Sharp, 1973: 155). These conform to universal Islamic values, and as peaceful endeavours they seek to bring into sharp relief the violence and aggression of the terrorist organization. But, as Gandhi commented, non-violent activities are courageous and selfless acts because there is a risk of violence against participants in such non-violent activities, from the group who seek to control the agenda. Non-violent activities are also deeply symbolic of the true values of Islam. Promotion is the most familiar element of the marketing mix. This includes the control of the media, rhetoric and counter arguments and public-relations activities, all related to propaganda methods. Apart from controlling the media channels, as suggested earlier, there needs to be a positive, inclusive message dramatically contradicting the ‘clash of civilizations myth’. David Cameron’s failed attempt (supported by a written letter endorsed by 120 members of the British Parliament) to convince the BBC to refrain

from perpetuating the intended brand identity of ISIS as the ‘Islamic State’ is also a case in point, and it raises the need for adopting ‘peace media’ outlets as critical stakeholder groups in fully actualizing peace marketing communications. The potential for the business community to contribute to peace communications as corporate social responsibility is an area being championed by Kotler (2016), and a good exemplar of this is Amazon’s 2017 Christmas campaign, displaying the friendship between a Church of England Vicar and a Muslim Imam, providing a rhetorical challenge to viewers on the need for Christian ethics and, in the process, a reversal of the clash of civilizations discourse to a collaboration of civilizations. The key aspect is that this process is ongoing, and all the stakeholder groups are involved in the process, therefore once the strategy has been articulated and put into practice, it then needs to be monitored, evaluated and refined. Peace tends to be built initially on a fragile foundation that needs to be maintained and can be strengthened over time. Therefore, the questions to be asked are: Where are the potential flashpoints? What successes are there? How are the peace resources allocated? To what extent has the message been accepted? These questions will help us to revise the strategy to ensure a more sustainable peace.

Peace Marketing as Counter Propaganda? Towards a Methodology

CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter has been to investigate if there is indeed a meritorious form of propaganda. We have distinguished integrative propaganda from agitative propaganda and used peace marketing to provide an initial foray into the meritorious nature of integrative propaganda. It is crucial for integrative propaganda to respond to the current cultural environment where there is a range of actors, frequently with different needs. The integrativepropaganda message needs to be maintained and respond to the dynamics of current and historic cultural, political, economic and social concerns. Therefore, the democratic state must ‘channel and shape public opinion’ (Ellul, 1965/1973: 126) that prepares for the end of conflict and builds a new pathway to peace. We argue that peace marketing has the capability to undermine agitative propaganda and build a platform for peace. We use the case of ISIS to demonstrate how their agitative, maladaptive propaganda machine can be destabilized by a counter-propaganda strategy using peace marketing methods. The core of our argument focusses on decoupling Islam from the terrorist discourse, thus constructively engaging, through representation, with the ‘silenced’ view of mainstream Muslims as the key actors. By giving representation to these key actors, peace marketing demands the marginalization of what Pyszczynski et al. (2008: 320) describe as the ‘Zealots on each side hold[ing] an apocalyptic vision in which the elimination of the other will benefit humankind while demonstrating the superiority of their own worldview’. In line with this, we have shown how STP, a crucial component of a peace marketing strategy, identifies and prioritizes these key-actor groups and then positions the benefits of peace in relation to their needs and wants to other like minded segments. The segmentation process therefore includes not only state actors, media and conflict groups but, crucially and foremost, the victims of the conflict as the central fulcrum in this process. This is an inclusive

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segmentation process that has the potential to emancipate the silent majority or those without a voice in the conflict discourse (McDonald, 2007). Giving a voice to a usually silent or excluded minority or marginalized group helps to counteract and dilute the more extreme messages and therefore shifts the focus on building momentum for peace through constructive engagement. However, this is a slow process, recovering from war, conflicts, suspicions, grievances, perceived injustices and unhappiness, so peace marketing as an integrative counter-propaganda method needs time and courage.

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PART IV

Propaganda in Context

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23 Propaganda and Information Operations in Southeast Asia: Constructing Colonialism and Its Antithesis, Statehood and Peaceful Ambiguity Alan Chong1 INTRODUCTION It is a moment of enormous irony composing an exegesis on propaganda in the region of Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. Modernization was theoretically supposed to have systematically cleared out superstition, false beliefs, and unthinking tradition in the minds of the young populations who have grown up without the direct experience of the trauma of mostly Western colonialism. But this has yet to be realized in the practice of modern statecraft among the ten countries that formally comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). These ten postcolonial states have instead found it poli­ tically convenient to resort to the hybridization of political knowledge and the outright obfuscation of contentious politics. In the act of colonialism, a relationship of informational power had to be constructed by the West over indigenous Asian society in order to subjugate the latter. But subjugation was not the only purpose for which colonial information power

was applied; it was also to organize and animate the subjugated into networks of productive power. This supported European empires economically and militarily for nearly four centuries. When the colonial information power was consequently undermined through the proliferation of elite education among the subjected peoples and the exposure of double standards by two world wars, the indigenous elites that succeeded at the helm of the modern state, constructed by colonial power, tweaked the information power, for developmental purposes. This is where Southeast Asian modernizing states stand: the power of information needs to continuously introduce modernity while retaining the values of a none-too-distant precolonial past that celebrated a patrimonial form of politics within and across fluid borders. Modernity, too, manifests its built-in contradictions in Southeast Asia as much as in the industrial heartlands of the original West: the emerging consumption-driven middle class finds its members’ occupational mobility crimped by

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technological changes and wage pressures of borderless economic competition; the obsession with science and Cartesian thought marginalizes traditional philosophies of humane considerations and manual craftsmanship, and the rivalry between explaining causation through human intervention and the reliability of machine-like automation. This elaborate sketch of the Southeast Asian culture and practice of propaganda is necessary to preface this chapter, since it epitomizes the centrality of propaganda in the politics of modernizing societies. Jacques Ellul’s (1973) reflective ruminations on the adjustments needed to adapt to what he dubs the technological society, instead of ‘modernity’, captures the underlying rationale for propaganda in Southeast Asia today, circa 2018. For man to adapt to the idea of technique or method in modern life, he must find its approximation to the notion of pre-modern ‘magic’. The latter refers to ‘an aggregate of rites, formulas, and procedures which, once established, do not vary’ (Ellul, 1973: 24). This ready-made set of formulas mediate man’s needs and the supernatural, ‘higher powers’ by binding the latter to serve man, by delivering a predetermined result through strict performance of a series of prearranged invocations. The social contract for protection between gods and men is bound by a blind faith. Likewise, scientific ‘technique serves to cause nature to obey’ (Ellul, 1973: 24). The typewriter, the railway, the steam ship, the motorcar, the weather barometer, the almost perfectly homeostatic refrigerator, and now the artificial intelligence within iPads, laptop computers, nuclear reactors, driverless cars and aircraft autopilots were all designed to calm man’s fears of the unexpected or the likelihood of malfunction. Hence, modern education in Southeast Asia is intended to be transformative by reassuring the population that science works for both regulating the economy and stabilizing the government for their welfare. With the idea of diffusing the techniques of modernity in mind, the political scientist

Harold Lasswell (1995) argued that values are embedded, and thus disseminated, along with the learning of techniques that one takes for granted, like learning to read and write, ‘lathe handling’ or comprehending and then applying science through the manipulation of dialectical forces (Lasswell, 1995: 13). Propaganda comes into being when it encourages the predisposition to act out techniques learnt in order to be modern. For Lasswell (1995: 13), propaganda ‘is the technique of influencing human action by the manipulation of representations’. Unsurprisingly, a very thin, and often invisible, line divides education from propaganda. In every political activity in the modern era, parties, revolutionaries, governments, lobby groups, pressure groups and every conceivable nongovernmental organization (NGO) practises propaganda to spread their cause. The Catholic Church had ironically coined the term way before the discourse of modernization arrived: propaganda was meant to spread the faith, literally to propagate beliefs staunchly espoused from one centre outwards. Writing in the 1930s, Lasswell’s meditation on propaganda amply paid heed to the rise of totalitarian fascisms. Where one ruling elite is scandalized in the perception of the population it rules, a rival elite is often waiting in the wings to take its place. To actually set into motion the change of regime, the hearts and minds of ‘the masses’ needed to be captured. This is where Lasswell placed propaganda as the anvil of revolutionaries and other political challengers, legal or otherwise, liberal and authoritarian, as equally prolific in propaganda campaigns (1995: 17). As such, Lasswell (1995: 25) has given us that famous phrase: ‘The propagandist takes it for granted that the world is completely caused but that it is only partly predictable…’. The propagandist must actively use every means, including violent ones, to reinforce attitudes favourable to one’s course while reversing hostile attitudes favouring the other side. Where public opinion cannot be decisively swayed in one’s favour, it is an

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acceptable achievement to merely isolate and maintain its indifference to one’s political ascent (1995: 18). For all of modernizing Southeast Asia’s relatively short geopolitical history, propaganda was integral to political mobilization, whether for domestic change or foreign adventures. The points by Ellul about the burdens arising from modernizing populations who are unaccustomed to the idea of modernity are completely relevant in comprehending the rest of this chapter, in relation to why every visibly stable government cannot take its vigilant official hand off the rudder of their propaganda machine. And the definitions and characterizations of propaganda by Lasswell are instructive in the strategizing of propaganda in Southeast Asia as equally the arts of liberation in domestic politics, as well as of closure and the checkmating of one’s opponents at home and abroad. To pronounce fully the characteristics of propaganda in Southeast Asia, we engage in turn the colonial and anti-colonial campaigns; the propaganda of asserting statehood amidst conditions of othering the external enemy; and the institutionalized diplomatic technique of peaceful ambiguity practised repeatedly by ASEAN. In each of these three sections, it should be understood that propaganda operates as a dialectical or bipolar process: for every thrust, there is a counter-thrust, and where the latter is weak compared to the initial thrust, one might – at the very least – term the reaction of the target an informational parry. This is something Harold Lasswell understood very early on in the twentieth century. Hence, in this chapter, while we acknowledge that propaganda is evidently widespread as a political practice in Southeast Asia, its subset, ‘information operations’, needs to be taken into account specifically as ‘that entire range of symbolic resources straddling both military and civilian spheres that are aimed at achieving national objectives in both peacetime and wartime. These include psychological operations (PSYOPS), military deception (MILDEC), electronic

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countermeasures warfare, and public diplomacy’ (Chong, 2014a: 601). This overlap needs to be acknowledged from the outset, since this Southeast Asian experience with propaganda ranges from the politicization of scientific knowledge to revolutionary incitement, to peacetime information campaigns vilifying an entire rival state and to wartime military propaganda. This chapter therefore articulates through a historical survey a set of Southeast Asian ‘lessons’ to the perennial question of how political propaganda is practised through the manipulation of content. In this case, the content ranges from pure humanistic knowledge to scientific information.

CONSTRUCTING COLONIZATION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE MANIPULATION The historical entry point for the practice of propaganda in the region is actually an imported one: the propaganda of Western colonialism. Colonialism, as it is conventionally understood, meant the creation of settlements for people displaced either voluntarily or involuntarily from elsewhere. The land where the colonies were to be settled could be acquired as a result of pure discovery of uninhabited territory or the forcible eviction of pre-existing inhabitants. In many Southeast Asian cases, it was usually a hybrid of reasons, where Western colonial settlers desired to trade with the existing inhabitants of the land, and so they needed to reside beside their commercial partners. Alternatively, colonial settlement for trade, mineral extraction, naval ambition, military protection or acquisition of cheap, indentured local labour necessitated Westerners drawing up legal occupancy rights for their settlement. This appears to have been mostly non-violent and matter of fact by the standards of twentyfirst-century neoliberal globalization. The historical reality, however, was far from it.

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Colonialism started with the act of amassing cartographic knowledge. In the words of historian Jeremy Black, Cartography provided an opportunity to understand and assess the success of overseas territories and was thus linked to efforts in metropoles to develop tools of national accounting. More generally, geographical information was an adjunct, if not an enabler, of imperial power, and this information was fed through to plans for colonisation. (2015: 78)

In this regard, Spanish and English coloni­ alism in the Americas set a troubling precedent for the native inhabitants, when the remit of their legalistic propaganda, targeted obviously for the consumption of their European peers, articulated the superiority of their conquest through cartographic appropriation. One sample issued by King Henry VII to the intrepid Venetian explorer John Cabot and his heirs granted them full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns, with five ships or vessels of whatsoever burden and quantity they may be…to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.2

Cabot’s rival, the infamous Christopher Columbus, obtained a comparable patent for acquiring those parts of the New World for Henry’s rival monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain in 1492–1493. Alarmingly for the natives of territories ‘discovered’ by the imperial European states, these patents interpreted discovery and investigation liberally to include conquest of the said territories, including the rights of tolerating and dispossessing the pre-existing inhabitants of the land. This form of naming, geographical and economic propaganda in the service of physical imperium subsequently escalated into anthropological imperialism. In this chapter, imperialism is treated as a deliberate attempt to impose one’s intellectual, governing and

territorial needs upon a pre-existing territory, culture, government and population without their express consent. Cartographical imperialism came first. In Southeast Asia’s ‘discovery’ by the first Western colonizers from Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands from the 1500s through to the 1700s, maps had to be made that incorporated this region of the world, into European consciousness. Ironically, fragmentary historical artefacts from the region suggest that long before the European arrival, Arabs, Chinese and various Indian and Malay ethnicities had already treated the Straits of Melaka, the Straits of Johor, the Straits of Singapore and the South China Sea as major maritime junctions for trade and ideas. Kingdoms that professed to be inspired by blends of Buddhism, Hinduism and Animism imported from proximate Asian lands established ports all along the northern Sumatran coast as well as the western coasts of the Malay Peninsula (Borschberg, 2010: 19–20). Rival maritime kingdoms competed nearby by establishing themselves on Java, the Malukus, along the coasts of the present-day Gulf of Thailand and Vietnam. Not content to be merely one among multiple traders, the Portuguese Estado da India trading company entered the scene by conquering the Kingdom of Melaka in 1515. Knowledge of the Malay Sultanate of Melaka supplied the means for its conquest. Following in their train, Portugal’s Iberian rival attempted to locate an important fort somewhere along the same Straits of Melaka to establish a threatening position vis-a-vis Portuguese Melaka. Not coincidentally, the Spanish fleet, headed by Ferdinand Magellan, ‘discovered’ the Philippines by sailing across the Pacific and claimed the territory for his sovereign. Consequently, the British, the Dutch, the French and, by the late nineteenth century, the Americans, all entered Southeast Asia, utilizing in whole or in part the conjoined arguments of trading with the locals and mapping the ‘unknown’ archipelagos, river basins and interior highlands. (Gunn, 2011; Headrick, 2000) This

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was ostensibly propaganda targeted at audiences in the metropoles of the West to legitimise imperialism far from home. The natives of Southeast Asia knew who they were even if they thrived within a proto-sovereign inter-societal system of political relationships that were completely comfortable with amorphous territorial borders (Chong, 2012). Western colonial powers invoked a different form of propaganda strategy to pacify the natives and to gain their acceptance of them as legitimate interlopers: anthropological imperialism and power balancing. In regard to the latter, when the Spanish and Dutch attempted to outsmart their Portuguese rivals, they offered ‘protection’ and ‘alternative trading’ to Southeast Asian port entities across the Malay world and much of Indochina in the hope that the native populations would ditch their trading relationships and subservience towards the Portuguese. Likewise, the latecomers – the British, the French and Americans – in turn carefully urged the native populations to abandon political fidelity towards the Portuguese, Spanish and the Dutch and to invite the new interlopers into the region on the basis of building a better ‘peace’ that included justice and progress. In promoting the latter, anthropological imperialism can be construed as a unique form of propaganda that converts the inquiry into the original, physical and cultural development of particular human races into a discourse of civilizational improvement that invites external intervention to facilitate it. Britain’s ‘forward movement’ into gaining a political foothold in the Malay Peninsula between 1819 and 1885 was deliberately explained away, both to local Malay sultans and Western audiences, as delivering social and political order to a hitherto chaotic world. The infamous tract titled British Malaya, by the one-time British Governor of the Straits Colony (of Singapore, Melaka and Penang) and High Commissioner for the Federated Malay States, Frank Swettenham, boldly claimed that between 1867 and 1874, when Britain started consolidating its first

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colonial Malayan possessions under a unified administration, ‘it was almost inconceivable’ that no European, and ‘very few Malays’ could correctly name all the governed territories from Singapore island in the southern tip of the Peninsula up to the boundary with the kingdom of Siam (Swettenham, 1948: 113). In place of cartographic order, the majority of Malay elites knew and practiced rapidly shifting alliances that participated actively in sporadic political and military warfare between rival claimants to a power ‘which claimed comparatively few victims’ in direct combat. Instead, up and down the Peninsula, the lands were ‘being depopulated more by emigration and disease than by the numbers slain’ (Swettenham, 1948: 113). With a self-assumed air of authority, Swettenham asserted that if local Malays and Chinese (immigrants) had not lent money to those engaged in fomenting these disturbances and had not appealed to UK authority in Penang, Melaka and Singapore for legal and other restitution of the loss of their investments, the violence would have claimed lives ‘to the last man without our interference’ (Swettenham, 1948: 114). It was therefore inevitable that UK officials had to undertake the study of the Malay in his pastoral setting: The searcher after knowledge must journey with them by land and river and sea; he must take the field with them, join in their sports, listen to their gossip, their complaints, their stories…respect their prejudices, be kind to their superstitions, and always treat them with consideration. If he does this, and exercises a great patience, he will gain his end, and the end is worth the effort. Only he must be able to make or seize the opportunities without which he cannot reach the innermost heart of the people. (Swettenham, 1948, 133–4)

By strategizing to convert the Malay population into willing tutelage under the British Empire, British Malaya lasted 171 years, with the brief exception of 1941–1945 when Japan seized Malaya during the Second World War. Britain set out to elaborately treat the Malays as intellectually and vocationally underprepared for the modern ways of an industrial

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empire, and to protect their traditional occupations of smallholding agriculture, fishing and arts and crafts. A select few were provided limited schooling and were groomed to serve as enforcers of law and order on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, on Malayan soil. Meanwhile, UK officials retained and accorded a mostly ceremonial respect for the traditional Malay monarchies (sultanates) reigning in the respective Malay states. Effectively, modern laws enacted by the British Crown, in tandem with its officials dominating the partially elected state assemblies in the Malay states, served as the foundation of unchallenged UK authority. The effects of this sort of structural propaganda are still felt and politicised by ‘postcolonial’ Malaysian politicians including the much acclaimed Mahathir bin Mohamad, who warned his ethnic countrymen that their deferential mental attitudes towards Westerners, non-Malays, and alienation from the world of rational scientific methods needed to be eradicated by fiat, if necessary, if the country were to make developed status by the 2020s (Chong and Balakrishnan, 2015; Mahathir, 1970). Likewise, the French in Indochina and the Americans in the Philippines acted to acclimatize the native populations to modern civilization, using varying degrees of propaganda mixed with official sanction. In Vietnam, the transition to French rule provoked an acrimonious intellectual confrontation among court officials long inured to Confucian values under the reign of the Nguyen Dynasty emperors. Three values ordered social and political relationships: loyalty to the ruler, which is approximately analogous to loyalty to one’s parents; piety of the son to the father; and fidelity, especially that which binds wives to husbands (Tai, 1998: 29). Evidently, the latter was an inner ordering principle, from which piety and loyalty emanate into becoming wider, socially encompassing values. The court official’s or Mandarin’s career depended on the faithful observance of these values. The French colonial authority demanded an

absolute transfer of loyalty by the mandarins. This polarized the pre-existing court elite. One eminent mandarin, Pham Dinh Phung, refused to accept French sovereignty, since it violated the Confucian order where his loyalty was owed ultimately to the Emperor, or his successors, who were now declared ‘protectorates’ under French rule. Phan organized an ‘Aid the King’ movement that initiated an insurgency. The opposite route, embodied by Hoang Cao Khai, embraced the modern idea of patriotism and the abstract idea of a contractually framed colonial state. As such, Hoang was embraced by the French as the exemplary new patriot. Being contemporaries in the former Nguyen court, Hoang pitied Phan and appealed to him in the language of the French nationalist discourse, a la the revolutionary ideals of 1789, calling on him to cease his armed resistance, since this would bring down greater misery upon the countless families in his region, given the fact of the inevitable French economic and military retaliation against his insurrection. In other words, Hoang was reinterpreting loyalty to family and fidelity to one’s people as transcending loyalty to the Emperor (Tai, 1998: 30–1). By doing so, Hoang was hoping to preserve the Vietnamese people’s core values in the face of political encroachment by an indomitable European invader. In doing so, Hoang’s prescription could also be viewed as a strategic concession to French colonialism. Likewise, in the late nineteenth century, the US control of the Philippine islands following their lopsided victory in the Spanish– American War of 1898, was positioned as an exercise of pastoral power facilitated by the continuous operation of information operations through social and economic structures that claimed to deliver benefits to the native populations. Historian Rebecca McKenna (2017) has argued that pastoral technology had already been deployed in a simplistic way by the Spanish colonists when they appointed missionaries across the distant reaches of the provinces, as collectors of tributes, exercisers of the delegated power of appointing natives

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as arms of colonial administration in the remote villages as well as acting the part of pacifiers of souls through ‘Christianization’. Quoting Foucault, McKenna (2017: 31) explains that pastoral technology comprised the ways and means of achieving spiritual sway over the Christian flock, and this in turn set the broad precedent for the pervasive thought control exercised by the modern state emerging in the 1500s. The US colonial apparatus in the Philippines appropriated much of the Spanish precedent but dressed it up in modernist discourse. The Americans promised ‘benevolent assimilation’ in all spheres, despite having turned their guns upon their expedient Filipino allies in the counterinsurgency war of 1899–1902 that followed immediately after the US fleet destroyed Spanish authority in the islands during the Battle of Manila Bay. US propaganda was spectacularly successful in pacifying the Filipinos after 1902, through the physical construction of roads and regulated, sanitized marketplaces. Roads for motorcars and horse-drawn transportation connected towns and marketplaces in an unprecedented way. Filipino land-holding elites were persuaded that US road building helped to secure their interests. At the same time, the remaining holdouts from the insurgency, hiding in the jungles and mountains bestride the roads, were depicted as bandits and highway robbers acting inimically towards progress (McKenna, 2017: 52–3). Modern roads also offered employment and the honing of modern skills to the previously ‘backward’ and ‘apathetic’ natives. A wage economy quickly displaced the informal patrimonial economy of non-monetary exchange in favour of a new culture of freedom of labour, within a system of contracts (McKenna, 2017: 55–61) Likewise, the renovated Filipino physical marketplace was a site for the observance of fair trading and consumer choice. Moreover, previously hostile ethnic groups would learn that their historic rivalries could be converted to profitable commercial relationships if

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their agricultural produce and crafts could be offered for sale in a common emporium. Additionally, the Filipinos would learn hygienic food handling under the new US guidelines for wearing clean garments when serving customers, sanitizing hands before selling and putting meat in ‘screen cages’ to protect their freshness from disease-carrying insects, et cetera (McKenna, 2017: 122–7). Commercial civilization tames unruly public passions and fosters cultures of respect and fair exchange among the hitherto unrefined native ways. This is clearly an information operation aimed at pacification through the ‘marketization’ of native culture. In 1911, the erstwhile US Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, was quoted as arguing that the Filipinos should not be exhibiting the habits of Latin American people indulging in ‘overattention to political thought and discussion and underattention to commerce and business’ (McKenna, 2017: 112–3). Hence, US administration ought to deliberately reorient the Filipino mind towards business and material improvements at the expense of fostering aspirations towards political autonomy. It is only now that historians of the Philippines have shed appropriately harsh light on the enduring effects of colonial propaganda, the tone of which reinforced the myth that US colonialism in the Philippines was tremendously benign (Ileto, 2017).

CONSTRUCTING SOUTHEAST ASIAN AGENCY: DECONSTRUCTING COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES THROUGH NATIONALIST POLEMICS Understandably, substantive decolonization required a response to cultural subjection and the ideational reincorporation of the colonized subject into a world of teleology and history. In other words, the various strands of Southeast Asian nationalist thought collectively embody a propaganda of awakening towards recovering the autonomy of the subject. Filipino

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nationalists set this as the aims of the ‘Propaganda Movement’, which witnessed its greatest output between the 1870s and mid1890s. For illumination, we turn to the Philippine nationalist philosopher Jose Rizal for an entrée into this section. His entire body of writings was virtually hinged upon rewriting the purported superiority of colonial narratives in their public constructions of their native subjects. Sample, for instance, Rizal’s philosophical commentary on Spanish colonial educational policies in 1889: The duty of modern man to my way of thinking is to work for the redemption of humanity, because once man is dignified there would be less unfortunate and more happy men that is possible in this life. Humanity cannot be redeemed so long as there are oppressed peoples, so long as there are some men who live on the tears of many, so long as there are emasculated minds and blinded eyes that enable others to live like Sultans who alone may enjoy beauty. Humanity cannot be redeemed while reason is not free, while faith would want to impose itself on facts, while whims are laws, and while there are nations who subjugate others. (Rizal, 1992: 128)

As historian Cesar Majul put it, the incipient goals of Philippine nationalists were to awaken the conscience of both Filipinos and Spaniards towards renovating a colonial relationship that had morally degenerated (Majul, 1996: 2–3). In authoring abstract ideas about the place of humankind in world history, and along with it articulations of indigenously synthesised ideas of man being bound to society though moral dignity, the leading lights of the propaganda movement, including Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez-Jaena and Mariano Ponce, were collectively trying to redeem Spanish political virtue while simultaneously educating Filipinos about their place in the world. Only when Spain failed to realize and mend its wickedness did the need for political independence arise (Majul, 1996: 25–7). The massive attempt to theorize nationalism, statehood, human rights and moral intellect was a propaganda of idealism. For reasons of space, I will quote

Rizal, the most internationally renowned of the Movement, on the need for anti-colonial nationalism to be righteous in anger and universally communicating with world humanity. In the first of his two ambitious novels castigating Western imperialism, Rizal renders a reflective confession of political incompetence, through the fictitious character of the Governor-General of the Philippine colony: Here, we old soldiers have to do it all and be all: King, Minister of State, of War, of Governance, of Supply, of Grace and Justice, and so forth. What is even worse is that for each thing we have to consult the faraway Mother Country [i.e. Spain], which approves or rejects, according to the circumstances, sometimes blindly, our Proposals… Besides, generally we come knowing very little of the country and we leave it when we have begun to be familiar with it…I have to be frank with you for it would be useless to be otherwise. Thus, if in Spain, where each governmental branch has its minister, born and developed in the same locality, where there is press and public opinion, where a frank opposition opens the eyes of the government and enlightens it, everything works defectively and imperfectly, it is a miracle that here things are not in upheaval, lacking those advantages, and with a more powerful opposition living and conniving in the shadows. We, the ruling government, are not wanting in goodwill, but we are obliged to make use of outside eyes and arms, which generally we do not know, and which perhaps, instead of serving the country, are serving only their own interests. This is not our fault; it is due to circumstances. The friars are a big help in meeting the problems, but they do not yet suffice. (Rizal, 1996: 251)

The government of the Westerner is depicted as knowingly practising double standards. This is the result of administrative centralization qua incompetence, and it is also partly the result of the wilful neglect of a faraway overseas colony. In Spain proper, government is checked by a political opposition, whereas in the faraway colony the opposition is ‘living and conniving in the shadows’ (Rizal, 1996: 251). Spanish administrators and their allied mestizo officialdom are the

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mercenaries hired to operate the colonial machinery, and yet they are not trustworthy or conscientiously governing for their hapless charge: the Filipino natives. Pastoral power exercised by the Spanish-appointed friars become all the more oppressive because there was no countervailing check on their authority. In the character of Elias, the rural son of a persecuted and financially distressed farmer, Rizal gives voice to the Filipinoinsurgent discourse that is equally martial and philosophically outraged: Remember what the prudence of the CapitanGeneral de la Torre achieved: the amnesty he granted to these hapless wretches [of rural bandits] has proven that in those mountains still beat the hearts of human beings who only yearn for pardon. Terrorism is useful when the people are enslaved, when the mountains have no caves, when power places behind each tree a sentry and when the slave’s body has only guts and hunger. But when the desperate one who fights for his life feels the strength of his arm, his heart beats and his whole being is filled with bile. Will terrorism be able to put out the fire on which it pours more fuel?… [To the authorities, terrorists are] Criminals or future criminals – but why are they such? Because their peace has been broken, their happiness wrenched from them; they have been wounded in their most cherished affections. When they asked justice for protection they became convinced they can expect it only from themselves. But you are mistaken, Sir, if you think criminals only ask for it. Go from town to town, from house to house, listen to the silent sighs of families; you will be convinced that the evils the Civil Guard correct are the same, if not less, than the evils they continually cause. Are we to infer from this that all the citizens are criminals? Then what is the use of defending the others? Why not destroy all of them? (Rizal, 1996: 326–7)

These extended quotations reveal the subtleties and moral cudgels embedded in the nationalist discourses that were ingrained in virtually every colony in Southeast Asia in the decades of transition between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Colonial governments, in spite of all their claims to benevolent tutelage of inferior peoples and the deployment of pastoral technologies of pacification, all ran out of normative

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credibility when the more educated among the colonial subjects built propaganda for selfdetermination through political theorizing. Rizal was articulating his own political theory as anti-colonial propaganda around the same time that Marxism began to appeal to the working classes in industrialized Europe. Before long, the future Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh was agitating against French colonial rule by rousing the ire of the working class, conjoined with patriotic appeals to an incipient rendering of ‘folk nationalism’ in pre-modern Annam. In interpreting Ho Chi Minh thought, Vietnamese communism was creatively syncretic in retrospect. Although Marx and Engels emphasized class warfare in the rudiments of their theory of revolutionary violence, Ho and his fellow compatriots plumbed historical lessons from Vietnam’s struggles against foreign occupiers – notably the erstwhile Chinese imperial dynasties. Two lessons have been highlighted in official tracts. Firstly, one was to achieve national solidarity between the reigning ruler and his subjects. When translated into policy, this meant that the monarch ought never to drive his subjects into deep resentment over matters of welfare and governance to the point of revolt. Secondly, the foundation of resistance against alien rule ought to be built upon mustering the strengths of the entire population (Ministry of National Defence, 2016: 18–20). If honouring these principles enabled Vietnamese ‘patriots’ in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries to defeat their foreign oppressors, ejecting French colonialism required an armed revolutionary strategy animated by the propaganda of tactically class-blind unity. Marxist thought was amended with Lenin’s arguments about a national armed force that could not only attain revolutionary ends but defend the same revolution against reactionary forces. Additionally, deriving military victory meant using propaganda to rouse the resourcefulness of the entire population. A ‘people’s war’ would theoretically blend the folk tradition of ‘bamboo-like’ resistance – bending with the wind without breaking – and the scientific

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premises of Marxism–Leninism about eradicating the political and economic domination of the French imperialists (Ministry of National Defence Vietnam, 2016: 2–5). Southwards across the South China Sea, the Dutch East Indies witnessed a comparable ideological struggle to attain nationalism, through the critique of a racialized capitalism that triggered territorial and economic imperialism in Southeast Asia. Soekarno, leader of the Partai Nasional Indonesia, the first President of independent Indonesia and ultimately an ally of the ill-fated Indonesian communist party, the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI), produced an elaborate discourse condemning Dutch colonial power as a conflation between racism and crude non-industrialized capitalism. In Soekarno’s thesis, capitalism as an exploitative economic system was imported from ‘white’ Europe but with very different ‘colour’ characteristics in each Asian colony. Mindful of the Indian nationalist campaign against UK capital in India, he argued that Indian nationalists were able to effectively pursue a campaign of autonomous production and consumption – the politics of the Swadesi movement – to force the British to the negotiating table by displacing imported consumer goods produced by UK-owned firms in Indian markets. Indian entrepreneurship and capital were already imitating UK industrialization in fits and starts alongside the penetration of British manufactures in the Indian colony (Soekarno, 1966c: 132–4). Therefore, the pursuit of Indian independence revolved around beating British capitalists at their own game of industrialization. In the nascent Indonesian-independence struggle, the propaganda reasoning had to condemn instead the crudeness of an essentially underindustrialized Dutch capitalism that was parasitic in the worst sense, upon the colonies. In Soekarno’s words, Dutch society is a society poor in basic raw materials, a society without iron mines, a society with not much coal, a society that is too “anaemic” to be able to become a liberal industrialistic society…Are we surprised if this Dutch imperialism has never in

its deepest principles known the teachings of modern liberalism, namely, freedom in various matters, for instance “free labour, free competition, free trade, free contract” and other similar things? Are we surprised if that Dutch imperialism is always basically monopolistic? (Soekarno, 1966c: 135)

The truth about Dutch capitalism qua imperialism during the 1800s–1930s may well be more nuanced than Soekarno made it out to be, but this simplification paved the way for his logic of returning to the idealization of a subsistence economy that was fairer to the original inhabitants of the East Indies before it was colonized. Soekarno coined ‘marhaenism’ to describe his idealistic vision of a nationalistic economy comprised of millions of subsistent smallholders growing food for themselves and their families, as the more righteous alternative to Dutch monopolistic machinations in the service of profit and exploitation (Soekarno, 1966c: 142–4). ‘Marhaen’ was the ‘David’ to the Dutch imperialist ‘Goliath’. Moreover, as a tactical device, it suited Soekarno’s strategic alignment of socialism, Islamism and nationalism into a united front for mobilizing mass action against the restoration of Dutch authority following the Second World War (Soekarno, 1966a). If budding nationalists from the ‘larger’ colonial territories of the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia sought energetically to reimagine their peoples’ places in world history and political thought for salvation from colonial subjugation, the task was even more immense for the ‘smaller’ aspirants to independence. Cambodia was once the seat of a Khmer kingdom associated with the world-renowned Angkor Wat palatial temple site, but its royal fortunes had ebbed considerably before the advent of French rule. Under France’s jurisdiction, it became a state, with borders fixed by European notions of geography. Following Japan’s short-lived occupation of French Indochina, Cambodian nationalism found advocates among both commoner politicians educated in the West and the royal personage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Despite his royal upbringing,

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Sihanouk was determined to be his own man and the leader of independence from France, capitalizing on France’s tenuous situation in neighbouring Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh was leading a full-scale armed revolution against the re-imposition of colonial rule. The Cold War offered both opportunity and danger alike to Sihanouk’s Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh’s cause. But, Sihanouk was determined to side with the enemies of the Western powers expeditiously, where it helped further the termination of Western colonialism, first by France (1953–1954), and subsequently a neo-colonial strategy practised by the Nixon Administration in the United States (1970–1975). Consider the sophistication of political narrative contained in this salvo of anti-imperialist critique fired by Prince Norodom Sihanouk at the Nixon presidency’s strategy towards ending the Vietnam War in 1970: I am not and will not become a communist, for I disavow nothing of my religious beliefs or of my nationalism. But I know the Khmer people, the Vietnamese people and the other peoples of our region too well to believe that they can accept having the interests of reactionary, fascist, militarist and corrupt leaders imposed on them or accept having a great white power insist that for their own sakes they should take dictatorship in place of democracy and the satellization of their country in place of national independence. In the eyes of rich bourgeois and feudalists, communism must seem terrifying. But in the eyes of peoples who are continually exploited by these bourgeois, these feudalists and these dictatorships which owe their strength solely to US protection, communism can only be, now and in the future, a deliverance. A deliverance, yes – because the problems of social injustice, of corruption, of militarist or bourgeois dictatorship, and of national independence, too (see the examples of China, North Vietnam and North Korea, which are incontestably independent), are being or will be solved thereby. This is why the longer the United States insists on maintaining unpopular and pro-imperialist regimes in our countries, the more it will draw upon itself the hatred of our peoples and will, in consequence, build up both their revolutionary movements and their fighting solidarity.

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In the face of the pro-United States “Phnom PenhSaigon-Bangkok-Vientiane Axis” there was formed, in April 1970, the “Axis” of the revolutionary peoples of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, China and North Korea. The pro-United States axis will vanish the moment the Washington government stops supporting it with dollars, guns and bombs. But the common anti-imperialist front of the Khmer, Vietnamese, Laotian, Chinese and Korean peoples will survive it whatever happens, for even atom bombs will not be able to halt the revolution of the Asian peoples. (Sihanouk, 1970: 5)

These are indubitably the words of a nationalist, quasi-socialist ‘David’ against the ‘Goliath’ of lingering Western imperialism reinterpreted through the local lenses of the Cold War. Today, Washington’s power circles are still trying to come to terms with the inconvenient truths that the ‘Vietnam War’, which ensnared Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, was perceived very differently from a global contest between communism and capitalism, simplified inside the ‘Beltway’ of Washington policymakers. Even tinier Singapore threw up important anti-colonial visionaries such as Lee Kuan Yew and S. Rajaratnam, who sought to position their artificial new postcolonial states as integral parallel ventures in anti-colonialism. Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs record the moment between 1946 and 1947, when living in the UK, that Lee found his moment of epiphany in terms of defrocking the myth of colonial superiority, vis-a-vis its Asian subjects. He wrote, I had now seen the British in their own country and I questioned their ability to govern these territories for the good of the locals. Those on the spot were not interested in the advancement of their colonies, but only in the top jobs and the high pay these could give them; at the national level they were primarily concerned with acquiring the foreign exchange that the exports of Malayan rubber and tin could earn in US dollars, to support an ailing pound sterling. (Lee, 1998: 113)

Like Sihanouk, Soekarno Ho Chi Minh and Jose Rizal, Lee proved he was never averse to siding with the political left, in both riding and driving the tides of nationalism towards political independence. Lee also had

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no veritable roadmap. He only mustered the art of improvisation and synthesis of political thought as he sought, first, a merger with neighbouring Malaysia that was ultimately unsuccessful, and thence, by default, an independent island state that even the colonial founders had never imagined. Propaganda then, at the point of independence in 1965, made much of the new postcolonial state, inheriting its entrepot functions. By the early 1970s, the nationalist narrative reinvented the state into becoming a ‘global city’ and a technological oasis, able to marshal modern economics and capital into a modernized Venice of Asia, the parallels of which had yet to be accurately invented (Chong, 2006). By 2017, it was a huge moment of irony that Malta, Iceland, Scotland and the former colonizer, the UK, openly aspired to be ‘Singapores’ in their immediate regions! Such is the malleability of the propaganda of anti-colonial imagination (Castle, 2017; Neal, 2017).

INFORMATION OPERATIONS WITHIN INSURGENCIES AND POSTCOLONIAL CONFLICTS Most of the decolonization-propaganda campaigns mounted by Southeast Asia’s nationalists achieved their intended targets by the late 1960s. Yet, helming a modern state turned out to be a more severe challenge than their idealistic propaganda promised. This was an operational terrain of modernizing societies through the twin paradigms of state-building and nation-making (Black, 1967). Institutions had to be created to endure by earning and reinforcing the newly liberated populations’ confidence in them (Lara, 2016: 2–4). This confidence needed in turn to transcend the structural injustices perpetrated by the pastoral technologies and the cartographic and anthropological imperialisms put in place by the departing colonial powers. In short, the propaganda of the new national governments had to be attuned to demonstrating that they

were something other than reinvented colonizers of their own peoples. Soekarno’s rhetoric had notably juxtaposed the ‘brown front’ of Southeast Asians united against imperialism, alongside the persistence of ‘white neocolonialism’ and continuing armed imperialism of the Dutch and French reoccupation forces in the late 1940s through 1950s (Soekarno, 1966b). In this section, we can identify three themes of the information operations involved in state- and nationbuilding: security and prosperity in a multiethnic polity; unity within ideological diversity vented against foreign neo-colonialism; the wars of national liberation anchored to indigenous versions of Communism; and the threat from unintegrated Islamic minorities. I label these as information operations, since they are designed to conflate the boundaries between wartime and peacetime, for such is the nature of state- and nation-building in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the indigenous elites manning these successor states have had to occasionally leverage on the departing colonial powers’ resources and residual goodwill, to win ‘hearts and minds’ over to their cause. Information operations therefore often involve psychological operations, influence operations and even military deception. (Chong, 2014a) The fact that the first three case studies of the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Konfrontasi and the Indochina Wars overlapped and were partly provoked by the global Cold War, with the United States on one side and the USSR and China on the other, ensures that they are comprehensively relevant as classic ministudies of propaganda usage. The Cold War was, after all, mostly conducted through the publication of falsehoods, semi-fabrications and semi-truths, to displace the enemy’s confidence in its ideology and welfare provisions. The post-9/11 fundamentalist Islamic unrest afflicting mostly Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines will also feature as an important ongoing subdrama of the Southeast Asian episode in propaganda struggles.

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The Malayan Emergency: 1948–1960, 1968–1989 The creation of the vast majority of Southeast Asian postcolonial states coincided simultaneously with either the ongoing insurgencies against the return of colonial rule or the start of one. In the latter case, it was usually the ‘losers’ of the independence settlement or the outcasts of the emerging political spectrum who were intent on destabilizing the status quo. Additionally, information operations on both sides – that is, of the ‘peaceful’ mainstream political parties and colonial authorities on one side and the armed insurgents on the other – had to begin by reckoning with the legacies of the Second World War, when the European empires across the region were ideologically emasculated by the blitzkrieglike momentum of Japan’s military occupation forces. The Japanese military had deliberately preached their ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a conjoined undertaking to liberate their fellow Asian races from white domination. The sole exception to this propaganda picture was the Chinese race, which was singled out for persecution by Japanese-military authorities everywhere. The Japanese proceeded to arm the natural opponents of the European colonists: the Indonesian nationalist groups that included Soekarno’s followers, various Malay Islamic nationalists in both Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and briefly even the communist underground in Malaya, and Indochina. In Burma, the Japanese unleashed a young General Aung San and his Burma Independence Army as a de facto fifth column to wreak havoc behind UK lines, that was to coincide with a Japanese invasion. The Japanese even installed or openly supported ‘puppet’ regimes headed by previously jailed or exiled nationalists in Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the Dutch East Indies. The nominally independent government in Bangkok underwent a coup that sought to realign Thailand with Japan and its Axis Alliance. Subsequently, a few of these

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groups turned against Japanese brutality and duplicity and sought an expedient realignment with the ousted Western powers. For the communist groups, the falling out with the Japanese came about because of Japan’s siding with Nazi Germany, in the latter’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The upshot of these manoeuvres was to generate a complicated propaganda labyrinth for both the Western colonial powers and the nationalist groups on the ground. The latter collaborated with the Japanese imperialists hoping to play them off against the British, French and Dutch powers, but, subsequently, they joined a revamped ‘anti-fascist’ alliance with their despised white colonizers, in an underground movement of armed resistance against their erstwhile allies, the Japanese. In Malaya, the communists created the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), as a form of guerrilla movement cum ‘revolutionary army in waiting’. When the Japanese occupation ended following the Allied atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the propaganda conundrum deepened: would the anti-Fascist native underground forces and other nationalists reconcile themselves with a return to the Western colonial order that existed before 1941 (Aldrich, 2000; Poulgrain, 2014)? Here is where the Malayan Emergency offers a case study of information operations conducted by moderate and status quo forces, encapsulating the grand strategy of political concessions in an open democratic process, alongside law and order rhetoric and urban resettlement aimed simultaneously at the modernization and sanitization of the local population’s temptation to support revolution. This was wartime and peacetime commingling. To begin with, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) sought to pursue a Marxist–Leninist strategy that capitalized on the economic disaffection of mostly Chinese urban and rural, agrarian workers (Ramakrishna, 2002: 28–9). Just as it did in the interwar years when the Great Depression hit the Malayan and Singapore economies,

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the capturing and consequent mobilization of the trade unions was expected to pay political dividends for the MCP, under an open quasi-democratic colonial legislature that seemed to allow the possibility of attaining power through the ballot box and negotiation for self-government. However, ‘open front’ activities were soon severely crimped by UK ordinances restricting the political mobilization of trade unions, along with the declaration of a state of emergency in June 1948 (Ramakrishna, 2008: 8–9). Moreover, the influence of Moscow’s new Cominform line persuaded the MCP to initiate a fullscale armed revolution in 1948 instead. Simultaneously, the MCP leadership sought to emulate Mao Zedong’s successful capture of the apparatus of state power located in the urban centres by building ‘safe bases’ in the countryside from which to strangle the cities into political capitulation (Stubbs, 1993: 59–60). On top of that, the MCP promised the hardworking, pragmatic, mostly agrarian Chinese labourers and their families a secure future as citizens of a ‘Peoples’ Republic’, instead of the heavily UK-influenced plans for, first, a Malayan Union under Crown control, and subsequently a mostly Malaynegotiated Federation plan that privileged ethnic Malays as primus inter pares among citizens (Stubbs, 1993: 22–9). In short, the Malayan Emergency or the decision by the MCP to proceed with armed revolution established the propaganda battle-lines around securing an independent multi-ethnic independent Malaysian postcolonial state that assured its Chinese residents of citizenship of the protection of their livelihood and the political confidence that their future lay with peaceful pathways towards building a modern Malaysia. The propaganda rhetoric of the MCPcontrolled newspapers and radio, first Freedom News and subsequently the Voice of Malayan Revolution, played on corruption, elitism and the economic inequalities perpetuated by UK colonialism and their ‘puppet’ non-communist nationalists, such

as the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) (Ministry of Home Affairs, Singapore, 2008). Moreover, taking a direct leaf out of Maoist revolutionary doctrine, the MCP could mobilize its experienced fighters from the recent guerrilla war against Japanese forces (1941–1945). Under the cover of fighting Japanese imperialists and aiding the ‘united front’ with the Anglo–American powers, the MPAJA secretly stockpiled captured Japanese and Allied arms for a future reckoning with the British and other reactionary forces in Malaya and Singapore. In this sense, the MCP could transform the MPAJA into the MPABA – with the ‘Anti-Japanese’ substituted as ‘Anti-British’ in the middle initials – and prepare to reprise Mao Zedong’s success on the Chinese mainland. Subsequently, the MPABA was renamed the Malayan Races Liberation Army (MRLA), and ultimately the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The idea of the MCP and MPABA/MRLA/ MNLA acting as sincere defenders of the rights of the Chinese rural community gained traction, given the difficult economic times of 1946–1949, and the rise of a very threatening Malay nationalism fronted by UMNO, which seemed to desire the disenfranchisement of every Chinese person living in Malaya. This eventually compelled Britain’s political and military representatives in Malaya to embrace the idea of a quicker pace towards granting independence to Malaya, and subsequently Singapore, as a way to undercut the MCP information operations that were drawing strength from the argument of prolonged Western imperialism in both territories. The constitutional forward movement between 1948 and 1957, inclusive of elections for self-governing indigenous cabinets, was thus a response by mainstream non-communist nationalists and Her Majesty’s Government to undercut the MCP politically. Tactically, it took the UK a few more years, following the spate of assassinations and terrorist bombings that the MCP

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launched from 1948 onwards, to realize that the communist rank-and-file fighters were the very pragmatic rural Chinese who needed a reason to switch their support to the status quo of a peaceful transition to a postcolonial Malaya. As historian Kumar Ramakrishna pointed out, successful information operations had to acknowledge the highly borderline sympathies that most able-bodied young Chinese men and women held for the MCP (Ramakrishna, 2002: 28–30). After initially promising more police patrols in rural areas and proscriptions against nocturnal movements but failing to provide effective protection against MCP attacks on innocent Chinese and Malays in the rural areas, the UK brought in veteran counterinsurgency military and police officers with experience in Palestine, Iraq and India to devise a military-oriented strategy of carrot and stick. The stick was deployed to rout the communist jungle camps through deep-penetration commando raids, foot patrols and targeted aerial bombings. But these tactics depended excessively on accurate intelligence and were prone towards wrong targeting, inciting even more anticolonial hatred among those susceptible towards MCP propaganda (Jackson, 2008). The plan instituted by Lieutenant-General Harold Briggs put forth the idea of an urban resettlement of the Chinese rural population, away from the fringes of the jungles, as a way of securing them from MCP blandishments and intimidation. At the same time, the resettled populations were to be privileged with new houses, guaranteed land for cultivation and other modern amenities. The initial optimism of urban resettlement quickly gave way to disillusionment with the UK largesse between 1950 and early 1952. The ‘Briggs Plan’ did not live up to its promises, due to mistakes in implementing the so-called ‘Resettlement Areas’. Moreover, the Malay population whose land the resettlement encroached upon mounted fierce resistance to what they perceived as heavyhanded UK policies. When the British resettled the Chinese to new locations following

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Malay ‘resistance’, the resettled Chinese felt betrayed. In large part, the UK propaganda of words – promising a safe, stable new future – was not fully reconciled with the propaganda of deeds; that is, implementing the new settlements faithfully. (Ramakrishna, 2002). It required a final reshuffle on the UK side, principally the fusion of the posts of High Commissioner and the Director of Operations, in the fresh appointment of General Gerald Templer, another experienced ex-soldier, that tipped the counterinsurgency campaign into a winning streak. Up until early 1952, UK information operations made significant inroads into MCP propaganda, but the former never decisively turned the tide. Templer improved upon the Briggs Plan with more public outreach and what would be termed ‘positive spin’ in modern public relations. Not only did Templer rename the resettlement areas as ‘New Villages’, he encouraged its residents to take charge of their township and organize social activities among themselves. He made the local governments guarantee the Chinese farmers’ landholdings in the new territories. Templer’s staff not only improved the fencing around the New Villages, he encouraged its residents to actively volunteer information in order to assist the forces providing law and order. Finally, Templer conducted himself as a ‘man of the people’ by visiting residents in the New Villages and mingling with them to hear their grievances and constructive criticisms. As Ramakrishna described it, Templer ‘wanted to impress upon the common Chinese that Government was not a Tormentor but a Provider, a Friend’ (Ramakrishna, 2002: 125). His innumerable visits to the ground conveyed the air of an earnest politician who was desirous of winning the confidence of the general population, instead of intimidating it through the discourse of economic deprivation, class antagonism and inter-ethnic hostility (Ramakrishna, 2002: 125–43). This was how the Malayan Emergency turned out in favour of the mainstream political protagonists by 1960, when the state of emergency was lifted by a confident Malayan

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government representing all the major races in a consociational form of democracy. To date, this episode has been treated in strategic studies as one of a handful of textbook counterinsurgency operations. The revitalized Communist Party of Malaya restarted a second insurgency between 1968 and 1989 on the assumption that the psychological gravity of communist victories in Indochina and the Maoist cultural revolution in China would aid in its ‘war of national liberation’. But, the second insurgency fared even worse, since the Malayan communists could not fully capitalize on a foreign imperialist bogeyman in their propaganda; Malayan living standards were steadily improving and the Sino–Vietnamese and Sino–Soviet strategic ruptures undermined the solidarity of world revolution (Weichong, 2015: 148–72).

Indonesian Konfrontasi 1963–1966 The Republic of Indonesia was born from the Dutch East Indies, as a product of an armed struggle that lasted between 1945 and 1949. During the colonial era from the early 1600s to 1949, the Dutch Administration had deliberately under-funded formal education for the natives. In fact, they reproduced the UK strategy of schooling mostly the children of a cultivated pro-colonial native elite to the standards of a European society. The rest of the natives were allowed to access disparate traditional education avenues in the various dialects or Indonesian Malay (Bahasa Indonesia). Officially today, most descriptions suggest that there exist over 300 ethnic groups in Indonesia, corresponding to an equivalent number of indigenous languages. Most of these predate even the formation of the Dutch East Indies. Such anthropological diversity posed a tremendous barrier to the propaganda of building nationalism as a discourse against Dutch colonialism and, consequently, for building a stable postcolonial nation-state. Like the protagonists on all sides in the Malayan Emergency in their rival

aspirations towards creating a modern society, the independent Republic of Indonesia sought to establish in every sphere of public life its own narrative that could engender confidence in the new society, which could be claimed as Indonesian modernity. Understandably, this was an unprecedented and even uphill task. Soekarno, the most prominent author of fiery, left-wing-tinged nationalist tracts, was himself a mercurial figure inspired to synthesize a quixotic blend of ‘folk Indonesian-ism’ and modern ideologies that were circulating worldwide since the early twentieth century. In many ways, Indonesia epitomized the creation of a post-colonial state, out of the very unlikely ethno-religious strands that were prevalent in the precolonial past. Dutch colonialism had hardly assisted in the anthropological dimension of moulding a nation together. Instead, the Netherlands left behind a legacy of an extractive economy that reduced native smallholding villagers to near slavery, while forcibly assigning roles in plantationstyle cash-crop cultivation schemes designed to enrich large Dutch companies (Boeke, 1980). It was the same situation as the mining of raw materials from Indonesian ground for Dutch profits in a global economy. This was a colony that was only partially modernized through pure exploitation while its workers kept below subsistence. In parallel with Soekarno’s struggles as a nationalist agitator, the cultural and psychological narrative of a modern Indonesia could only cohere around ‘a shared sense of revolution and change, and faith in the future’, as one scholar put it (Lindsay, 2012: 2–3). As a case study of nation-building information operations directed abroad as a revanchist foreign policy that targeted primarily UK neo-colonialism as represented by its associated Malaysian and Singaporean statehoods, the campaign of Konfrontasi had its beginnings in the cultural and ideological struggles with ‘being Indonesian’. Between, 1950 and 1965, various political factions and even ethnicities were caught up in intense

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debates about Indonesia’s new-found place in world history and whether its motley population were even empathetic towards their new common identity as citizens. By the mid 1950s, the ideas of the left were in the ascendant, and they grew intolerant of those who disagreed with them. It was a trend that the charismatic Soekarno, the pre-eminent Indonesian politician and nationalist, agreed with. As Jennifer Lindsay explains, artists and cultural practitioners sought alignment (and protection) with political groups such as the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, Revival of Islamic Scholars) or the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI, Indonesian National Party). Debates were no longer relatively innocent combatant exchanges of ideas between energetic young men, but became more inclined towards vicious personal vilification. And divisions and tensions were not only between broad ideological ‘camps’, but also within them. (Lindsay, 2012: 4)

Besides the NU and PNI, the greatest beneficiary of the leftward turn towards incendiary political debates was, of course, the PKI, who persuaded Soekarno to sanction the creation of Lembaga Kesenian Rakjat (LEKRA), which translated as the Institute of People’s Culture. The latter replayed a strategy that most communist states enacted worldwide during the Cold War – art, culture, ideology, education and religion, insofar as was tolerated as an interim alignment of belief towards socialism, needed to be guided towards creating the new Socialist Citizen. The roots of the politico-military campaign of Konfrontasi partially begins in the cultural wars that existed in the first 15 years of the Indonesian republic. The spirit of the Indonesian Revolution between 1945 and 1949 that liberated the country from the Dutch was expressed in a wide array of cultural, intellectual and literary forums in the decades that followed. The ‘cultural political and literary journal’ Konfrontasi is one example that was closely associated with nationalists and socialists who disavowed communism (Foulcher, 2012: 31–2). It was characterized by audiences and

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contributors who perceived Indonesian nationalism as being both part of ‘world culture’ as well as influencing its formation. Featuring interviews with cultural figures from Asia and the West, along with longer think pieces, the journal’s content was characterized by an ‘ambiguity towards both the West and the indigenous heritage [of Indonesia]’, and a creative tension of encouraging Indonesians to embrace fusions that had never been attempted before. Most crucially, the journal’s editors stood for ‘universal humanism’, which connoted an ‘aesthetic ideology founded on secularism, individualism and a commitment to the cause of political justice and equality that would enable the full realization of a common and universal humanity’ (Foulcher, 2012: 34). In this regard, the journal was living up to its name, which literally translates as ‘Confrontation’. The journal encouraged the revalorization of ‘Asian values’ as well as an openness to foreign ideas. By 1956–1959, the subject matter of culture became overtly political, as the domestic climate lurched to the left. Konfrontasi’s editors lamented the erosion of the original values of truth, honesty and principle of the Indonesian Revolution and the double standards of Chinese and Soviet communism under Mao and Stalin and Khrushchev respectively. Konfrontasi even dared to publish an interview with anti-communist Hollywood filmmaker Boris Pasternak, and the journal overtly criticized a speech by a senior member from the PKI-fronted LEKRA mentioned earlier (Foulcher, 2012: 49–53). By 1960–1961, allies of LEKRA and of Soekarno and the PKI started applying pressure on publications that stepped out of line with ‘Guided Democracy’ and the transfigured new revolution targeting neo-colonialism around Indonesia’s boundaries. Konfrontasi, the moniker, now acquired a violent new meaning of ‘crushing’ the newly established Federation of Malaysia, which included Singapore as well as the peoples and territories of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo, half of which was Indonesian controlled.

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Mirroring the pluralistic struggle among intellectual currents, the domestic political situation between 1950 and 1956 careened from the collapse of one cabinet and coalition to another. Democracy seemed to breed excessive competition, to the detriment of both economic growth and political stability. Additionally, President Soekarno’s reputation and transcendental position as ‘leader of the revolution’ came under threat from these conditions. Inexorably, the patriotic Indonesian military, ABRI, who had valiantly fought a guerrilla war to displace the Dutch reoccupation forces, needed to be involved in any stabilization scheme. And then there was the ‘civilian’ PKI, representing the possibilities of taking the revolution further in the direction of eradicating social inequality by force (Crouch, 1978: 43–5). In Soekarno’s perception, he needed a catch-all conceptual slogan to unite the disparate factions roiling the political scene, while also uniting all Indonesians distracted by multipolar ideological competition, through the fight against a common external foe. The historical era dubbed ‘Guided Democracy’ (1957– 1965) was explained to the public and the world as an act of authoritarian salvation for Indonesia. It was interpreted as a continuation of the unfinished Indonesian Revolution from 1945. It can equally be analysed as an information operation aimed at homogenizing the plurality of rival ideologies portrayed so vividly by the short-lived proceedings of the Konfrontasi journal. In this new order, Soekarno needed to both balance and expediently align the PKI and the ABRI on his terms (Crouch, 1978: 44–51; Hunter, 2007: 118– 24). Reprising typical authoritarian strategy, ‘disciplined’ unity at home needed an accompanying narrative of a foreign enemy at the borders. It was an old enemy, white neo-colonialism, or simply a rear-guard holding operation by an incompletely defeated Western imperialism that sought to divide and exploit the weak postcolonial states. Between 1961 and 1962, Soekarno successfully implemented this strategy in ousting

the remaining Dutch colony in neighbouring West Irian with astonishing US approval. Before 1962 ended, another convenient public enemy abroad presented itself for defining Konfrontasi: the formation of Malaysia sired principally by the pro-British Prime Minister of Malaya, together with the centre-left premier of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. In military terms, Konfrontasi is often described as an undeclared war, or a low intensity war, occasionally amounting to an externally supported insurgency. Other official accounts in Malaysia and Singapore describe it as a series of armed incursions, state-sponsored terrorism and plenty of information operations designed to turn the sympathies of the constituent parts of Malaysia against the political centre in Kuala Lumpur. Western military accounts mostly treat Konfrontasi as a series of successful counterinsurgency operations by both conventional and special forces, using airborne reinforcements and deep jungle patrols that thwarted mostly poorly trained rebels who were armed and supported by Soekarno’s government (Jackson, 2008: 119–40). One scholar argued that Konfrontasi even provided the UK, fresh from its victories in the Malayan Emergency, with an opening to counter Indonesia’s military adventure, by inciting ‘retaliatory’ insurgencies among a number of separatist groups within Indonesian territory itself. This ‘doomsday’ plan was ultimately deemed unnecessary, given the way Soekarno’s political fate was decided by the coup and countercoup of late September 1965 (Easter, 2000). The real nature of Konfrontasi lay in its information operations by both sides. As it has been detailed above, Indonesia’s domestic political currents behaved in a revolutionary mode, experimenting with ideological shifts, incited no less by a restless, idealistic Soekarno, an ambitious communist party (PKI) and a politicized military. Simultaneously, Indonesia’s revolutionary introspection was obsessed with the security of its ‘national identity’ (Budiawan, 2017). Indonesian-propaganda posters of the Konfrontasi period depicted

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British puppet masters orchestrating indigenous politicians in Singapore, Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak, who were singing from London’s script. Malaysia’s Premier, Tunku Abdul Rahman, was portrayed as standing at the ready, pen in hand, to take dictation (Wirawan, 2017). Under the influence of the left-leaning LEKRA, various popular-music studios took to romanticizing the youthful male enlistees who were sacrificing their time, and potentially their lives, to ‘crush Malaysia’. The patriotic melancholia of leaving one’s girlfriend or wife behind the frontlines was equally the object of celebration (Farram, 2014: 11–2). On the Malaysian side, Konfrontasi justified continuation of the gentlemen’s alliance with UK military power, as a natural insurance policy against the neo-communist and communist threats from all directions. Likewise, Singapore officially remembers Konfrontasi as a marker of the wide spectrum of tangible security threats against a nascent small state with little strategic depth lodged between large, potentially predatory, underdeveloped postcolonial states. The declassified UK accounts cited by Greg Poulgrain’s (2014) book, The Genesis of Konfrontasi, suggest that the information operations by Her Majesty’s Government may well have successfully provoked Konfrontasi to enable the deposition of President Soekarno and the protection of UK interests through internal Indonesian actions. Poulgrain argues that ‘long-term hostility’ between the Republic of Indonesia and UK colonial power in neighbouring Malaya, Singapore and Borneo (Kalimantan) had been effectively seeded in 1945, when the UK occupation forces were authorized by the Dutch to reclaim the Indies on their behalf (2014: 9). Predictably, the revolutionary forces armed by the outgoing Japanese forces put up a stiff resistance, which culminated in the Battle of Surabaya, which resulted in UK casualties. The British ambassadors in Jakarta between 1960 and 1963 have also gone on the record to state that their mission

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to protect the Malayan and Bornean flanks included fomenting sufficient hostility, either within Indonesia or between Indonesia and its new neighbours, to supply momentum to oust President Soekarno (Poulgrain, 2014: 9). Additionally, an undeclared economic war between Indonesia and the erstwhile UK colonies of Singapore and Malaya, from 1951 to 1955, contributed to the reinforcement of suspicions from both sides of each other’s aggressive designs. Indonesia claimed that the port of Singapore was diverting exports (especially in rubber, textiles and consumer goods) between Indonesia and its major trading partners, profiteering excessively as a middleman and encouraging wanton smuggling. UK businesses also alleged in 1954 that the Indonesians were secretly setting up ‘liberation commands’ just across the border with British North Borneo, to stir up economic disenchantment as a prelude to revolution (Poulgrain, 2014: 86–7). This set of complaints encouraged the UK Colonial Office to seriously contemplate preparing both public opinion and nationalist elites in those territories for some form of defensive political union, to contain forces inimical to the continuity of UK mercantile interests. In Malaya and Singapore, following the successful UK accommodation of the still friendly Malay campaign for a Malayan Federation, the Commissioner-General Malcolm MacDonald argued in 1955 that one primary objective of granting independence to Malaya is to achieve ‘self-government within the [British] Commonwealth’, but this would be put at risk if ‘the Malays lose their liberty through cold war or hot war conquest by a Communist or other foreign aggressor’ (Poulgrain, 2014: 130). Towards this end, MacDonald reported to his superior in London that I for one have been sedulously planting the idea…in the minds of local journalists, over the last eight years, and urging them to give public expression now and then to this ultimate aim, so that the people are gradually educated towards it… (But) the Bornean leaders are perhaps less aware than those in Malaya of our grand design. (Poulgrain, 2014: 133)

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The story of the formation of the Federation of Malaysia through referenda in Singapore, Sabah (ex-British North Borneo) and Sarawak, between 1962 and 1963, consequently came to be dominated by the statements and manoeuvres of the nationalist politicians in these territories up until and during the Konfrontasi period (1963–1966), carrying the strong implication that UK information operations could claim some credit in delivering the desired result. Furthermore, there was evidence that UK authorities and US intelligence were assisting the simultaneous PRRI and Permesta rebellions in Central Sumatra and Sulawesi, to varying degrees through ‘propaganda of the deed’, in allowing the supply of weaponry to these antiSoekarno rebels. Although the UK forces technically did not supply arms, the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy actively intercepted Indonesian armed vessels who strayed into Singapore and Malayan waters in pursuit of smugglers. The UK too closed one eye to the rebels’ acquisitions of arms through Singapore. It was the US CIA, whose arms were captured by forces loyal to the government in Jakarta, who were shamed by the public exposure of US plots to destabilize Indonesia. One CIA pilot assisting the rebels, Allen Pope, was shot down in his US-made B-26 bomber, captured by Indonesian forces and paraded by Jakarta as proof of Western complicity (Poulgrain, 2014: 197–200). Additionally, the UK-controlled Singapore was depicted by Indonesian propaganda as a SEATO base for the undermining of Indonesia (Poulgrain, 2014: 174–88).

The Indochina Wars 1945–1954, 1964–1975, 1978–1991 The Indochina wars mirrored the local political dynamics operating in the Malayan Emergency and Konfrontasi. Yet their protagonists became entangled in the global Cold War to an unprecedented degree, arising from the interventions of the United

States, the USSR and China. In fact, information operations were deliberately played up through both official and unofficial readings of history and ideology. As with the preceding subsections on information operations managing the ambiguity of delineating wartime from counterinsurgency and lowintensity war, the tactical deployment of propaganda is less important than the grand strategic interplay of narratives that justified and energized kinetic combat by the various armed protagonists. If one examines the two ‘wars of liberation’ that culminated in the unification of Vietnam as an independent socialist republic, there are significant similarities in terms of the contention and overlaps between local propaganda dynamics and the strategic ones operated among the intervening great powers. For this reason, this chapter will only focus on Vietnam’s ‘American war’ as the more representative (Asselin, 2018). Revisionist historians have in fact served the study of propaganda extremely well. Pierre Asselin’s (2018) book has attempted to understand the Vietminh’s struggle against the French return, as a re-enactment of an unfinished civil war between the North and the South in Vietnam’s two-century-old history as a united territory. Our earlier mention of the divergent routes of proto-nationalist resistance to French colonialism echoed this. The South was mostly a borderland population that was variously subject to the rival ancient empires of Champa, occupying the present-day Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam and Angkor in neighbouring Cambodia. This variegated population protected their mixed identity fiercely and resisted attempts to homogenize them (Asselin, 2018: 18; Turley, 2009: 10). This identity-cum-political crisis was exacerbated by various attempts by indigenous clans such as the Trinh and Nguyen to forcibly unify the northern parts with the southern. The north was subjected to heavy Chinese influence and evolved a more Confucianoriented political culture that also grafted on, via Chinese inspirations, a penchant for

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territorial acquisition. According to more recent accounts, it was highly plausible that kingdoms in the south were amenable to French protection from the predatory behaviour of ruling dynasties in the north. Hence, it was no surprise that France’s earliest political beachheads in the colonial takeover of Vietnam were all in the south (Asselin, 2018: 18–20; Turley, 2009: 9–10). The alignment of pro-Western sympathies with the missionary successes of Catholicism reflected the deep entrenchment of colonial ideas in what was to become South Vietnam, or the Republic of Vietnam following the final defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Availing themselves of freshly declassified Vietnamese sources, historians have now shed light on North Vietnam’s elite thinking about the urgency of reunification of the south between 1954 and 1964. Coinciding with the peace settlement at Geneva that divided the former French colony into two halves at the 17th parallel, the leadership of the Lao Dong Party (Vietnamese Workers’ Party) had begun debating whether the eventual reunification of the country under the leadership of the north should be postponed until such a time when the north had rebuilt its war-ravaged economy and overcome the conditions of under-development bequeathed by two centuries of French colonial rule (Ang, 2002: 14–5). At the same time, Ho Chi Minh and others within the Lao Dong Party were acutely conscious of their responsibilities towards Moscow’s designs for a world proletarian revolution. A third consideration would be to avoid demoralizing the communist underground in the south, who made sacrifices to disguise their ultimate plans for armed reunification with the north (Ang, 2002: 18–20). Ultimately, the Lao Dong Party’s directive to their southern counterparts was to set up so-called self-defence units and ‘armed propaganda forces’, in anticipation of the eventual call for a violent insurrection against the supposedly decadent capitalist-puppet nationalists ruling in Saigon under Western protection (Ang, 2002:

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20). Although North Vietnam’s leaders were always fully conscious of their obligations to the cause of global communism as integral to their prosecution of a war of national liberation, the thrust of their revolutionary strategy was to evict the final vestiges of neo-colonialism, whether it manifested in the guise of the French or the Americans, after 1954. A study of Viet Cong propaganda in the south, specifically noted that graphic radio descriptions of both fictitious and actual US and South Vietnamese acts of torture of innocent civilians were intended to fan the outrage of Vietnamese citizens against the foreign occupier and its local partners in oppression. The study by a US Lieutenant Colonel concluded that American soldiers cannot set foot in alien and underdeveloped countries without becoming targets for charges of aggression and imperialism. And the charges will probably stick. Backward peoples often do not understand political idealism, and no profound statement by the US Government is likely to ring as true in their ears as the bald assertion that the rich foreigners are in their country out of blatant self-interest. (Flammer, 1973: 213)

In a remarkable mirror of the obsession of the Hanoi communist elite in reunifying the country, South Vietnam, which titled itself officially as the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, as opposed to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) north of the 17th parallel), appears to have instilled significant patriotism towards its own cause. This obviously reprises the traditional historical dynamic of north–south rivalry in prestige, population manipulation and territorial control. Recent ethnographic studies of the memorialization of the Republic of Vietnam Army, Navy and Air Force former personnel who were exiled, primarily in the United States and Australia, have revealed a spirit of steadfast dedication to their cause. South Vietnam’s soldiers did not flee combat or suffer instantaneous collapses in morale as regularly as the popular Western narratives have depicted (Nguyen, 2016). Former Army General Lam Quang Thi fondly recalls his service to the RVN as

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‘the twenty five year century’ (i.e. 1950– 1975): he was part of the founding of the ‘Vietnamese National Army’ in 1950, fought in the battles of ‘the Viet Cong Tet Offensive in 1968 and during North Vietnam’s multidivision Great Offensive in 1972’. This signals significant joie de vivre at the top ranks of the RVN. By his own admission, General Thi responded to the erstwhile colonial French General de Lattre’s call to arms in 1951, on the basis that fighting the Vietminh was the fight of patriots to claim the country for themselves (Nguyen, 2016: 21). In another case, Vu Hoai Duc’s military career as a high-level officer and one-time Special Aide-de-Camp to the controversial Catholic RVN President Ngo Dinh Diem was also comparable to General Thi’s trajectory. Duc ardently believed in his cause, and when appointed commander of the RVN’s Psychological Warfare College in 1969, he posited that good officers needed to be virtuous in conduct and be persons of experience. Additionally, good propaganda effects on morale within the ranks depended on treating one’s subordinates in an inclusive manner, regardless of religion and ancestral backgrounds. Duc argued that he was too late arriving in his appointment to implement the Allied forces’ lessons in psywar from North Africa, where the Allies obtained local cooperation by constructively aiding local communities through gifts of books, newspapers, ‘school equipment’ and the provision of decent healthcare services (Nguyen, 2016: 24–5). Duc argued that it was a pity that even though the RVN government usually produced good plans, implementation had been disappointing. In the clearest statement of how RVN propaganda inculcated conviction in its soldiers, the statement of faith by Bao, an air-force helicopter pilot, suggests that the Second Indochina War was indeed a case of an indigenous ‘us’ against its own self-identified ‘other’: We, the South, we just defended ourselves. We did not go up to the North. We were fighting but also building our country. Up North, it was a different story. They were supplied by Russia and China.

They did not build the country, they always sent troops down to the South. They set up a third government in the South, saying it was from the South when it was actually from the North. After 1975, you no longer saw the flag with the two colours and the star in the middle [the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG)]. The war was controlled by the North. We are all upset because now when people talk about the war, they talk about the American war against North Vietnam. South Vietnam has been forgotten. (Nguyen, 2016: 63)

It is precisely this sort of logic, countervailing the more hegemonic-flavoured ideological information operations from the north, that today enables us to argue that what US scholars term ‘the Vietnam War’ as a spectacular US military failure obviates the true trajectories of the propaganda conflict across the 17th parallel. In the US-based perspectives, the Vietnam War was either part of the global militarized ring of containment against the communist menace or a challenge that evoked the time-honoured, always victorious American way of war. Scholarship on the memorialization of the Vietnam War focussed heavily on the role of morality and faith in government, as well as the disconnect between means and ends; hence the frequent invocation by both scholars and politicians of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, ‘hawks’, ‘doves’ and ‘liars in government’ (Hagopian, 2011: 23–9). Additionally, the idea of pinioning the Southeast Asia of the Cold War into the ‘domino theory’ was a wholly Washington production that began under President Truman in 1947 and endured several iterations under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. It was particularly blatant under the Johnson Presidency, whereby the President and his advisors ignored the CIA’s warning that ‘a continuation of the spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread which did occur would take time – time in which the total situation might change in any number of ways unfavourable to the communist cause’ (Gustainis,

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1993: 13). The fact that the domino theory did not pan out as planned, following the Fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh in April 1975, vindicates the resilience of the nationalist and modernization-related information operations that the other pairs of conflicts that we have examined in the preceding subsections bear witness to. Even North and South Vietnam each touted their own grounded nationalist creeds that militated against the other. US-generated propaganda to prepare their forces and public for the fight against Vietnamese communism thus attains an air of surrealism in contrast to ground realities in Southeast Asia. President John F. Kennedy’s deliberate cultivation of the image of the ‘Green Beret’ Special Forces as the 1960s reincarnation of the New Frontiersmen in the US national narrative clearly abetted the US public’s complicity in supporting the initial surge in US troops despatched to Vietnam (Gustainis, 1993: 21–34). And this was also the same US media that ‘provided aid and comfort’ to the enemy by broadcasting the Tet Offensive, with accompanying rhetoric that suggested the Viet Cong were not losing, unlike what was predicted by the Pentagon. Moreover, the US-media coverage of the movements of conscience against continued military involvement in Vietnam cast the US role in terms of its own moral navel-gazing, quite removed from Southeast Asian realities and President Nixon’s self-declared ‘silent majority’ in favour of bringing the war to an honourable conclusion (Faulkner, 1981; Gustainis, 1993: 39–144; Hallin, 1986). In the final important snapshot of the Indochina theatre, one must acknowledge the information operations that were wielded by the fraternal communist governments that victoriously claimed to have completed their respective national liberation campaigns from foreign colonialists by 1975. The newly reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), which captured Saigon on 30 April 1975, had ironically found itself providing shelter for thousands of Vietnamese civilians who had been forcibly ejected from

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across the border in ‘fraternal revolutionary Cambodia’. The Khmer Rouge armies had encircled Phnom Penh and the remnants of the US-supported, but deeply unpopular, Lon Nol regime, just two weeks before the Fall of Saigon. Pol Pot, the notorious head of the Khmer Rouge, started reprising Cambodia’s traditional rivalry with Vietnam. By 1978, a foreign journalist who was allowed into the Mekong Delta region reported that the SRV had sheltered some 150,000 impoverished ethnic-Vietnamese exiles in the first five months following the Fall of Saigon. In retaliation for such large-scale ethnic expulsions, Vietnam forcibly repatriated any refugees found to be of Khmer or Chinese descent back across the border to face the genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge (Chanda, 1986: 16). Within the same few months, Vietnamese forces had seized a Cambodian island in the Gulf of Thailand and then ‘returned’ it to the Khmer Rouge, just to make a point while welcoming the top leaders of the Khmer Rouge to visit Hanoi to strengthen ties. The Khmer Rouge was already hedging secretly against Vietnamese predations by tightening their strategic embrace of Mao Zedong’s China, from whom they sought help to modernize Cambodia’s armed forces and to furnish other civilian aid (Chanda, 1986: 12–23). While China made references to revisionists and aggressors undermining Cambodian socialist ‘liberation’ and sovereignty, Vietnam countered with its Treaty of Friendship with the USSR and obtained Laotian expressions of solidarity against hegemonic behaviour from all quarters. In these ways, the victors of the Second Indochina War (a.k.a. the Vietnam War) were deterring one another against adopting armed solutions to historic rivalries. What tipped this balance of propaganda over into overt armed conflict in the form of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 (a.k.a. the Third Indochina War) were the excesses of the Khmer Rouge in attempting to transform Cambodian society into instant communism by forcibly depriving the population of

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privilege, status and creature comforts associated with wealthy decadence. The Khmer Rouge leaders truly believed that modernization synthesized from Marxism–Leninism and Maoism could succeed in achieving the ultimate postcolonial society. Some scholars have adopted strategic-ritualization theory to explain how the Khmer Rouge erected a new earthly God comprised of a collective organization of learned and wise ideologues known as the Angkar, which roughly translates into the indigenous totalitarian metaphor of the ‘manifold eyes of the pineapple’ (Delano and Knottnerus, 2018). In reorienting, or in crude Khmer Rouge parlance, ‘re-educating’ the population away from Cambodia’s Hindu–Buddhism–Animist syncretic past, the population’s mentality could be adjusted en masse to new developmental horizons. As a continuous form of information operation applied in the Foucaultian sense of biopolitics, Khmer Rouge ritualization has been documented by one of its survivors as follows: Everyone will be reformed by work. Do not steal. Always tell the truth to Angkar. Obey Angkar whatever the circumstances. It is forbidden to show feelings; joy or sadness. It is forbidden to be nostalgic about the past. The spirit must not stray. It is forbidden to beat children, as from now on they are children of Angkar. The children will be educated by Angkar. Never complain about anything. If you commit an act in contradiction to the line set forth by Angkar you will publicly self-criticise yourself at the daily indoctrination meetings that are compulsory for everyone. (Denise Affonco, 2007, cited in Delano and Knottnerus, 2018: 91)

This is an extreme, but it is clearly a parallel to the ideological reformation programmes enacted in the other postcolonial internal and international conflicts in Malaysia, Indonesia and the rest of Indochina. Modernizing postcolonial societies in this local context appears structurally inclined towards near-totalitarian propaganda. The only difference in each case is the severity of implementation and conversion of the human spirit.

Post-9/11 and Fundamentalist Islamic Unrest Since the events of 9/11, Southeast Asia has witnessed the conflation of Islamicfundamentalist terrorism and local insurgencies where minorities with Islamic allegiances have become active protagonists. In some cases, such as in Thailand and Myanmar, the degree of ‘active’ participation in violence by Muslim minorities is a matter of propagandafuelled exaggeration, a puppet manoeuvre in a game of domestic political theatre or a direct reaction to the missteps of a rigged political-recrimination campaign (Gershman, 2002). For instance, Marc Askew’s (2007) study of southern Thailand’s sporadic Muslim insurgency tracks the ups and downs of ‘the labyrinthine patterns of informal authority, corruption and influence that pervade the southern provinces’ (2007: 16). In 2004, a document produced by a ‘concerned’ and mostly anonymous ‘The People’s Intelligence Network’, surfaced to the Thai Deputy Prime Minister for Security Affairs. The document fabricated evidence that Thai Muslim politicians linked to Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party were turning traitorous to their TRT ally by preparing for an uprising, following a widely publicized but mostly unattributed raid on a Thai Army camp that pilfered weapons that would be useful in an insurgency (Askew, 2007: 12–26). Given the still ongoing polarization of Thai society into pro- and anti-Thaksin camps, Askew’s argument that the insurgency was mostly made up with the use of props such as the occasional bombings in towns and beheadings of monks, along with alleged links to Al Qaeda abroad, was directly linked to political manoeuvres in Bangkok in between elections. With a military government currently in charge and elections yet to be called, the Thai South appears coincidentally to have quietened down. Likewise, in Myanmar, the official denial of genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority by the government and military has manifested as a continuous information

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operation aimed at evading international responsibility for likely crimes against humanity, perpetrated under official sanction. Meanwhile, the Myanmar government has ingenuously cited the threat posed by what it dubs ‘extreme Bengali Terrorists’, who since October 2016 have attacked and killed several hundred Buddhists, Hindus and police officers in Myanmar (Pitman, 2017). In the ongoing psywar, these terrorists have nevertheless given themselves a name, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), that calls attention to their need for self-defence and counter-attack, by deliberately reverting the name of Myanmar’s Rakhine state to its historical name, which is more closely associated with its Islamic heritage and neighbouring Bangladesh and India. Although ARSA claims to have mostly acted in defence of the Rohingyas, who have been made homeless and stateless in their land, their initial Arabic name was ‘Harakah al-Yaqin’, which translates as ‘Faith Movement’. Moreover, their first YouTube video was issued with Arabic subtitles, which instantly fuelled speculation that they might be aligned with Al Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and any number of jihadist groups worldwide. Recent nongovernment reports suggest that jihadist groups in the Arab world and Pakistan merely paid lip service to ARSA’s cause and made little else available to them (AFP, 2017). Indeed, the leader of ARSA, Ata Ullah, was reported to have been brought up in Pakistan and educated in Saudi Arabia, while his Rohingya father taught in Saudi religious schools. Ullah’s inspiration for resistance purportedly came after the first reports of genocide against the Rohingya emerged in 2012 (AFP, 2017). Once again, the miseries of misgoverned modernization in the region were propagated as being linked to foreign interference from abroad, to provoke either sympathy for government forces or to incite external sympathy for localized causes. The case of the insurgent Jemaah Islamiyah and ISIS affiliates in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines parallels the

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Islamic unrest in southern Thailand and the Rakhine state in Myanmar, but with some important differences in the positioning of their information operations. Islam has mostly occupied a legitimate political space in all of these states at one point or another since independence from colonial rule. Hence, both moderate and radical Islamic movements and parties have thrived as open magnets for Islamic ideology as a guide towards modernizing society and the economy. In Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to a limited extent, the ruling coalitions or soft authoritarian regimes have attempted to coopt Islamic parties with national and provincial followings to good effect, until Al Qaeda and ISIS abroad made the headlines with their radical approaches to transforming governments everywhere (Singh, 2004: 55–7). In the Singapore case, it was the mostly secular People’s Action Party that marginalized the only Islamic party in the island republic, by co-opting the Malay elites into its highest ranks under the principle of multi-ethnic pluralism within a Chinese-majority state. All these civilian manoeuvres should be seen as a strategic attempt to provide overt and controllable representational space for a religiously distinct minority. The agendas of Al Qaeda and ISIS upset this equilibrium by offering a different model of religious state (i.e. that of a rejuvenated pan-Islamic caliphate) from the Middle East. Through YouTube videos and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, they attracted middle-aged and younger Muslims through their messages of a new reformation in world politics. Based on extensive research, mostly in Indonesia, where Al Qaeda and ISIS appeals appeared the strongest, Bilveer Singh has identified the causes of these appeals in five streams. Firstly, Al Qaeda and ISIS have woven a narrative that taps local ethnic/Muslim grievances into their global cause. Secondly, these Arab groups have provided funding, accommodation and even remuneration for foreign fighters to join the ‘frontlines’ against Western ‘infidel armies’

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in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and, most recently, closer to home in Marawi city in the Philippines. Thirdly, Arab terrorist groups perceive Southeast Asian security forces to be weak and penetrable. Fourthly, Al Qaeda and ISIS have taken advantage of the limited nature of counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation across sovereign jurisdictions within the porous region, unlike the tightness of terrain during the Malayan Emergency that favoured establishment forces. Fifthly, in tandem with the ‘perks’ provided to foreign fighters, association with Al Qaeda and ISIS potentially has delivered significant material advantages, vis-a-vis the families of the fighters from Southeast Asia, funds for acquiring weapons and training to destabilize existing governments in Southeast Asia (Singh, 2018: 294). Although Al Qaeda and ISIS momentarily appear to be in retreat in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the fear across Southeast Asia is that the ‘returnees’ from these frontlines could be imbued with a mission to ignite the much-feared second front in the struggle to establish the caliphate (Singh, 2018: 292–3). The siege of Marawi city in the Philippines between 2017 and 2018 was a ‘demonstration’ of ISIS-affiliated capability, not unlike perhaps the battles of Aleppo and Palmyra in Syria waged by ISIS. Messaging about how the Caliphate would supposedly restore public morality to frequently corrupted civilian postcolonial governments in Southeast Asia will remain an over-the-horizon threat to governments in Southeast Asia.

THE ASEAN WAY AS OMNIDIRECTIONAL PROPAGANDA AND THE EXTENDED PALLIATIVE OF AMBIGUOUS DISCOURSE IN PERSISTENT CONFLICTS The final thematic phase of any study of propaganda in Southeast Asia must obviously account for the formation of the ASEAN, which operates as a regional organization on

the basis of diplomatic ambiguity. Diplomatic ambiguity is encapsulated in short by the ‘ASEAN Way’ which privileges a consensus that allows for non-obstructive abstention, polite obfuscated language and the maintenance of prolonged silences on contentious issues, where none of the organization’s member states are prepared to commit to any forward momentum. This peculiar form of diplomatic propaganda, which many have criticised as the legitimization of non-decision making, arose against the backdrop of the entire range of postcolonial conflicts treated in the preceding section, short of those that erupted after the late 1960s. That said, even the internationalized civil wars in Vietnam and Cambodia were retrospectively what ASEAN sought to forestall among its members. Thanat Khoman, the erstwhile Thai Foreign Minister who served as one of the key drafters of the ‘Bangkok Declaration’, which created ASEAN on 8 August 1967, recalled three points that shed light on why ASEAN (and the ASEAN Way) had to be invented as a means of weaving a narrative about ASEAN community, where none had existed before. Firstly, it was a critical act of decolonization that did not create a power vacuum which hostile outsiders might fill for parochial reasons. The idea of ‘neighbours working together in a joint effort’ was unprecedented for a modern Southeast Asia of new nation-states, and it was normatively a step in ending conflict between member states and, hopefully, within them (Khoman, 1992: xvii). Secondly, the negative experience of having the Americans, British and the French ‘co-organize’ regionalism in the form of SEATO for the grand purpose of fighting the Cold War was inimical to local interest, since the alliance members were mostly outside the region and did not understand issues arising from contiguous borders. Finally, Khoman emphasized the need for community as a basis for projecting a more realistic and persuasive voice for both its members’ collective and national interests. By ‘hanging together’,

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so went the logic, the ASEAN members would not be strung separately to the menacing pulls of ‘Big Power rivalry’ (Khoman, 1992: xvii). In neorealist terms, ASEAN was a non-starter, due to its inherent military and economic weaknesses. But in terms of propaganda power, the ASEAN could serve as an unprecedented convening agent for the great powers, whose rivalry cannot be tempered either unilaterally or bilaterally among themselves. This appears relatively true even in the era of Trumpist isolationism, circa 2017– 2019. In many ways, the creation of ASEAN vindicates the erstwhile US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s memoirs concerning the conclusion of the United States’ 11 years of unhappy military entanglement in Vietnam, wondering ‘why good men on all sides found no way to avoid this disaster’ of the fall of South Vietnam to communism (Kissinger, 2003: 555). The whole logic behind ASEAN as a form of do-it-yourself regionalism was to find a way for less-than-perfect political ideologies, politicians, authoritarian states, semi-democracies and unevenly developed societies to coexist, initially within an environment of negative peace (that is, freedom from conflict), before progressing gradually towards a positive peace – establishing freedom of travel for citizens across the region, free-trade agreements, joint industrial coordination and mechanisms for pacific settlement of disputes and so forth. The states that join ASEAN carry no expectations that only ‘good’ statesmen and their nation-states can qualify for membership. The whole idea of ASEAN implies that peaceful coexistence is the cardinal operating principle, while existing hostilities will be allowed the elastic luxury of time to dissipate. There is no expectation either that bilateral territorial or economic disputes must be solved as soon as possible, they only need to be shelved or frozen (Leifer, 1989). Hence, the ASEAN Way has firstly been interpreted as a vague diplomatic path of consensus and consultation towards deriving a common ASEAN position on any given political issue,

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with no member allowed a veto over all of the rest. Dissenting members can only silently abstain and ignore a joint resolution without causing any public embarrassment to the other ‘consenting’ members (Haacke, 2003: 49–51). Secondly, the ASEAN Way is heavily dependent on all member states adhering to the principle of non-interference in one another’s domestic affairs in politics, economics, security and civil society. The noninterference norm is directly associated with the sovereignty principle enshrined in the United Nations Charter (S. Jayakumar, 1997, cited in Chong, 2011: 148). How, then, does the ‘ASEAN Way’ operate as a propaganda device of diplomatic inclusiveness? Firstly, the ASEAN Way presupposes the reciprocation of tolerance and the obfuscation of threat perception (Chong, 2011: 145). Given the proliferation of the propaganda of anti-colonial liberation and the simultaneous eruption of postcolonial ideological and territorial conflicts in the 1950s and 1960s, Southeast Asia’s political leaders realized that accommodation and postponement of conflict resolution was far more feasible than definitive resolution. Better still, the dynamics of the global Cold War ought not to be allowed to engender local proxy wars for the great powers. Tolerance was therefore one way of interpreting the ASEAN Way as satiating national interests without resorting to the clash of arms. Indonesia’s change of government through a coup d’état in September 1965 ushered in a new set of leaders who accepted that neighbouring Malaysia, and the newly independent Republic of Singapore, could not be forced to bend to its political will. Likewise, the Philippines also accepted that since Indonesia was unwilling to escalate military confrontation to ‘destroy’ Malaysia, Manila had to find a modus vivendi with Kuala Lumpur over its own claim to the state of Sabah. On its part, Thailand faced its own border issues with Malaysia, arising from colonial boundaries drawn by the British in the 1900s; but, Bangkok was now prepared to shelve these disputes in the interest of

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preventing the communists in Indochina from exploiting political differences among the non-communist states for revolutionary purposes. Ironically, as it has been elaborated earlier, the communist governments in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, which captured power between the 1960s and the mid 1970s following the US military withdrawal, found themselves reprising historic rivalries that predated Marxist–Leninist ideology. Among the original five non-communist members of ASEAN – that is, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – the Bangkok Declaration and the subsequent ambiguously titled Bali Concord and Treaty of Amity and Cooperation were drafted as touchstones of political toleration (ASEAN, 1967; ASEAN, 1976; Bali Concord, 1976). Toleration was framed in terms of respecting diverse national paths to peace and development, commitments to enhancing national prosperity and the avoidance of force in settling territorial and political disputes. Language was added to suggest that regional states ought to chiefly rely on cooperation among themselves to resolve local disputes. Additionally, given that four of the five founding states had retained assorted bilateral military cooperation agreements with the UK, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, ASEAN’s founding documents allowed that all foreign military bases in the region ought to be regarded as temporary in nature, without specifying any expiry limits. The ultimate deliberate act of obfuscation stated that ‘The stability of each member state and of the ASEAN region is an essential contribution to peace and security. Each member state resolves to eliminate threats posed by subversion to its stability, thus strengthening national and ASEAN resilience’ (Bali Concord, 1976). After 1991, following the breach of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR, the door was opened wide for the admission of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar into ASEAN. Between 1967 and 1991, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had shunned ASEAN

as a pro-Western front, preferring instead to align themselves with either China or the USSR. Myanmar had adopted an isolationist foreign policy back then. But after 1991, the benefits of joining ASEAN were quite evident, since all four Indochina states could avail themselves of ASEAN’s qualities of toleration and repudiation of the use of violence in settling interstate disputes, including any extant ideological scores. Joining ASEAN also meant that national communism could be accepted, since ASEAN did not contain any clauses demanding regime change or ideological uniformity. Secondly, the ASEAN Way could also be extended to elaborate a climate of soft diplomatic balancing; most neorealist analyses do not admit this possibility (Simon, 1995). But ASEAN’s modus operandi has meant that the consensually derived ASEAN statements at virtually every summit and foreign- and defence-minister meeting are watched for clues as to whether they lean towards or against particular great powers currently involved in a bilateral or multilateral dispute with ASEAN members or third parties. Officially, ASEAN declares in formal language that it encourages the pattern of an open and inclusive ‘regional security architecture’ that obscures any explicit threat perceptions towards China, India, Japan, the United States or Russia. In signalling displeasure, ASEAN communiques usually make veiled statements to the effect that the organization and its great-power dialogue partners commit themselves to forego the use of force in settling disputes, while reaffirming longstanding pledges to adhere to the UN Charter and various ASEAN documents (Chong, 2011: 150–4). In this way, ASEAN has mollified China over the South China Sea island disputes, involving Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, by not explicitly mentioning ‘international law’ and its sanctions while reminding Beijing through indirect language that it expects civilized behaviour over the island disputes, in conformity with a rule- and norm-based

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climate. Not infrequently, ASEAN has also strategically facilitated India’s diplomatic pot-shots at China’s intransigence over an array of border disputes between both great powers, by alluding to Beijing’s pattern of behaviour in ‘bullying’ weak states without once mentioning ASEAN by name. This has frequently happened since the mid 1990s at ASEAN-driven wider forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus. On the economic front, ASEAN’s highly consistent full-throated support of free trade in its dialogues with the great powers, signals to Washington, Canberra and Tokyo that protectionism might undercut their access to markets in ASEAN and further afield in Asia. Currently, the fact that ASEAN is being courted by both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Indo–Japanese–US vision of the ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’, testifies to its discursive success in soft balancing (Chong and Shang-su, 2018). Other scholars have termed this form of discursive balancing as either ‘associative balancing’, ‘great power enmeshment’ and omni-directional balancing, or a creative reinterpretation of the ‘English School’ of international relations in creating ASEAN-centred regional and international societies (Emmers, 2003; Goh, 2007/8; Quayle, 2013). It is quite evident that the ASEAN Way as a propaganda appendage of ASEAN’s contribution to regional peace is a fine sample of what many have termed a dominant strategic narrative (Miskimmon et al., 2013). It is also a significant case study of how words circulated as ideas assume the status of a psychologically entrancing mantra for diplomatic behaviour. Indeed, much scholarship has appraised this point comprehensively in relation to Asia (Ba, 2009; Tan, 2013; Haacke, 2003). It remains for this chapter to highlight the fact the ASEAN Way has been propagated equally in the informal diplomatic circuit known as ‘Track Two’. Track Two obviously is distinguished from the formality

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of diplomacy fronted by senior officials, foreign ministers and heads of government in summits and ministerial dialogues. Track Two is usually attended by ex-Ministers, former defence chiefs, ex-ambassadors, professors and think-tank heads normally associated with particular governments. Track Two forums occur under the monikers of ASEAN Institutes for Strategic and International Studies, the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, the Network of ASEAN Defence and Security Institutions and the Asia-Pacific Roundtable. A few, such as the Shangri-La Dialogue, hosted by the UK-based International Institute for Security Studies, have been quickly transformed into a meeting involving both ‘unofficial bureaucrats’, ex-foreign affairs and military personnel and sitting defence ministers from ASEAN and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific states. Deep interpersonal networks are built up over time among the relevant foreign and security professionals involved in decisionmaking, and the reference to ASEAN as the pioneer in shelving disputes is always inevitable and time-honoured. But, the position of ASEAN officials and think-tanks as the progenitor of Track Two is somewhat disputed (Soesastro et  al., 2006; Tan, 2012). That does not matter, since it is almost always an ASEAN city that hosts the omnibus forums for Track Two meetings with the more technical workshops, such as those concerned with preventive diplomacy, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian-disaster relief, safety at sea and peacekeeping dispersed to other localities in the Asia-Pacific, including Hawaii. It is widely known that the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and, to a lesser extent, India, have always pushed for more transparency and more tangible, timetablespecific initiatives in diplomacy and security. By contrast, ASEAN, the two Koreas, China and Russia tend to be more accepting of elastic proposals that merely make a start in discussing sensitive topics (Chong, 2014b; Tan, 2007). ASEAN representatives often push

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a de facto discourse of achieving a ‘comfort level’ for all Track Two participants, before formulating proposals that can be fed ‘upwards’ as recommendations for Track One action. Oftentimes, Track Two also acts as a necessary political safety valve, where Sino–Japanese, Sino–US, Sino–Indian and US–Russian tensions burst into open confrontation through speeches and incendiary questions aired by the great powers’ ‘unofficial’ representatives (Chong, 2014b). These occasions for verbal and visual mudslinging are also tests of resolve, behind the proverbial closed doors of informal diplomacy. ASEAN representatives almost always manifest their ASEAN Way of circumspection and therefore appear, by default, as the most diplomatic parties in Track Two. This in turn vindicates ASEAN’s soft ‘convening power’.

CONCLUSION The study of Southeast Asia through the lenses of propaganda has largely demonstrated the prospect that no society is worthy of its existence if its members did not author their own narratives of creation. Jacques Ellul and Harold Lasswell were correct in reading the pulse on the intertwining of modern society with the generation of a commensurate propaganda of change and of faith in ‘progress’. Yet, due to the space constraints in this venture, this chapter has not examined the propaganda practised by the pre-modern stateless societies of Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, the modern history of the region is visibly intertwined with the modernist premises of Ellul and Lasswell. It was the advent of the colonial era that provided the natural marker for the present chapter, since it was also the moment in history where ‘Southeast Asia’ was mapped into formal existence. The first important lesson that must be drawn from this chapter is that the cartographic and legal imperialism of naming territories and geographical possessions have

an enduring impact. It is the power to define identities consequently. It is equally the power to constrain one’s political successors in their choices of manoeuvring around prefabricated boundaries. Therefore, in relation to Global South regions, scholars can reasonably discuss them using the phrase ‘structural properties of colonial propaganda’. The second important lesson is that the political theory of liberation, indigenously synthesised or invented, is potent propaganda for nation-building and national exclusion. The anti-colonial tracts that have been sampled for this chapter are fine samples of path-breaking propaganda. The liberation of a person and his entire community can only be enabled through the shattering of preexisting mentalities and imagining new personas that the new society can embrace. In fact, all political theory should be subject to propaganda-oriented analysis to enhance our social-scientific knowledge in every aspect of area studies. Thirdly, the Southeast Asian experiences with postcolonial conflict have given birth to the reality that warfighting is equally a simultaneously fluid battle between narratives of denial and affirmation. The struggles among rival ideologies cannot be won alone by physical contests, as the cases of the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Konfrontasi and the Indochina conflicts show. Even today, the ongoing religiously coloured insurgencies in the region have to be scrutinized to determine whether they are indeed merely matters of law enforcement or the evisceration of an isolated group of troublemakers. The propaganda analysis of ISIS and Jemaah Islamiyah and other Islamic-fundamentalist groups may yet reveal that the substantive fight might lie with issues of social justice and extreme interpretations of religion as solutions to socio-political distress. Finally, the diplomatic hybridity that is embodied by the political regionalism of ASEAN offers yet another ‘Global South’ lesson. Propaganda can assist in the cause of building interstate peace insofar as it helps

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to conjure an imperfect community out of hitherto hostile nation-states that brook no compromise on their national ideologies. If the study of propaganda can speak to peacebuilding efforts in the developing world, it must be that vagary, calculated discursive obfuscation and the optimal deployment of euphemisms are politically useful. ASEAN’s practice shows that propaganda can produce a workable, imperfect peace that is celebrated by its beneficiaries, even at the expense of clarity of truths, identities and power relationships. In this sense, Harold Lasswell’s (1995: 25) formulation that ‘the propagandist takes it for granted that the world is completely caused but that it is only partly predictable’ is actually sage advice for peacemakers everywhere.

Notes 1  Generous research assistance for tracking the sources consulted for the composition of this chapter was provided by Benjamin Low Quan Hui and See Hao Yuan. Both of these budding scholars will one day advance the social sciences in Southeast Asia. 2  Reproduced in (Hunter D., 2011, p. 165).

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24 The Construction of the Chinese Dream C h u n g - M i n Ts a i

INTRODUCTION China’s Xi Jinping – General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CCP), President of the People’s Republic of China, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission – first mentioned the phrase ‘Chinese Dream’ in late 2012 when visiting ‘The Road of Rejuvenation’ exhibition at the National Museum of China. He had just become China’s top leader two weeks earlier. He defined the Chinese Dream as the great rejuvenation of the nation but did not illustrate concrete ideas. Nonetheless, the use of the phrase has become widespread ever since. The Chinese Dream has become the method by which Xi has consolidated his power base and unified Chinese society behind a single ideology. By framing the dream with Xi and the CCP at the center, he is presented as the only one who can bring back a glorious China. Since the initial propaganda phrase, the concept has evolved into the basis of his whole ideology. Understanding the

Chinese Dream can be deconstructed into these three stages: the development of the Chinese dream from an initial political slogan; a ubiquitous symbol of ideology epitomized by Xi himself; and finally, the current status of the Chinese dream and its relationship to Communist Party rule. Based on the humiliation discourse and rejuvenation narratives, the Chinese Dream was originally raised as a propaganda phrase showing that China has gone beyond the waning influence of Marxism–Leninism and is now aiming to regain the glorious history and excellent culture of the Chinese nation before the First Opium War in the early nineteenth century. Under Deng and later Hu and Jiang, the idea of Chinese development was humble by comparison. Under Xi, the Chinese state has enriched the strategic connotation of the Chinese Dream and developed it into the guidelines for policymaking, covering various critical issues such as sustainable development, economic and political reform, individual lifestyle, and

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international influence. In the 19th National Party Congress in October 2017, Xi Jinping further solidified his thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, which was approved and incorporated into the Constitution of the Communist Party of China. The idea of the Chinese Dream is now integrated into the official political doctrine as the grand vision of socialist modernization and national rejuvenation. This chapter illuminates the core concepts and evolvement of the Chinese Dream into the three dimensions above. It contributes not only to our understanding of the construction and implementation of China’s official ideology but also the rationale of the CCP rule.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHINESE DREAM Origin of the Dream The Chinese Dream is not an innovative notion coined by Xi. Over the last two decades and with the experience of rapid economic growth in China, the term ‘Chinese Dream’ emerged in the early 2000s, along with extensive commentary about China’s rise. Both Western and Chinese scholars have published books on the topic, such as Studwell (2003), Li (2006), Mars and Hornsby (2008), Liu (2010), Wang (2010), and Lemos (2012). Thomas Friedman published an op-ed on October 2, 2012 in the New York Times titled ‘China needs its own dream’, a month before Xi officially presented the idea. Friedman’s comments seemed to have had an impact on Chinese top leadership. Such an impact is atypical in the recent interactions between China and the West, therefore Xi’s uncharacteristic move to adopt such a slogan is puzzling for several reasons. First, the history of CCP sloganeering rarely reveals the official adoption of a major catchphrase as responding to a American idea like the American Dream.

Second, the Chinese media attributed the term to Friedman, a three-time Pulitzerwinning American author and journalist, in the context of Xi’s oration. Third, Xi delivered the seemingly unscripted remarks in the absence of an official policy trend originating in the National Party Congress. Xinhua Daily, an organ of China’s state-news agency, published an article on December 7, 2012, about a week after Xi brought up the Chinese-dream topic during a visit to the National Museum. Written by three Xinhua News Agency journalists, it began with the observation that: ‘Some points in time are out of the ordinary. The morning of November 29th was just such a special juncture’ (Economist, 2013). That date was when Xi delivered his unscripted remarks on the dream to a gaggle of reporters and museum workers (yet another unusual dimension: Chinese leaders are not known for developing grand ideas on the hoof). Having summarized Xi’s oration, the journalists added the following: Will the next Chinese leader have a dream that is different from the American dream? In a year of political transition, the world’s gaze is focused on the East. On the eve of the 18th Party Congress the American columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an article devoted to analysis of the ‘Chinese dream’ titled ‘China Needs Its Own Dream’. It expressed the hope that marries people’s expectations of prosperity with a more sustainable China. Suddenly the ‘Chinese dream’ became a hot topic among commentators at home and abroad. (Economist, 2013)

While the article could have pointed to many a discussion in recent years of Chinese dreams, it chose Friedman’s. Xi himself appeared to be suggesting that he was talking about a recent upsurge of discussion. Friedman (2012) argues that ‘Everyone is talking about the Chinese dream. I believe that the greatest dream of Chinese people in modern times is of the great revival of the Chinese nation’. This article had indeed drawn some attention, at least in the official media. A translation of it appeared October 11, 2012 in Reference News

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and the country’s best-selling newspaper. It was cited in the headline. On November 12, three days before Xi took office and while the 18th Congress was still under way, Oriental Outlook magazine adorned its cover with the words ‘Chinese Dream’ as well as ‘dream’ in English. The related series of articles under the title of ‘Quartet of the Chinese Dream’ inside was prefaced by a note from the editor: The 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party convened November 8. ‘Does the next generation of Chinese leaders have a “Chinese Dream” that is different from the “American Dream”? Because if the next government’s dream for China’s emerging middle class–300 million people expected to grow to 800 million by 2025–is just like the American Dream (a big car, a big house and McDonald’s Big Macs for all) then we need another planet’. This was a question raised by one of America’s most influential media figures, Thomas Friedman. (Oriental Outlook, 2012)

Friedman was front and center of Chinesemedia discussion, and the link to Friedman is hard to dismiss; the Chinese media have continued to suggest one, albeit obliquely. Using mediated discourse analysis, Wang Jiayu (2016) discussed the difference between media coverage of the Chinese Dream in the United States (‘othering’ or judging Chinese ideas with American eyes) and China (‘blind to others’ or not paying attention to foreign conceptions of the Chinese Dream), respectively. Wang (2016) calls for the Chinese and US media to reconcile cultural differences in order to better understand one another’s national narrative. Despite the apparent differences pointed out by Wang, realizing the ‘Chinese Dream’ of the great revival of the Chinese nation has become the best response to Friedman and Western critics.

Interpretation of the Dream Since then, the rhetoric of the Chinese Dream has developed beyond a stage when its origin is of any consequence. The Chinese media, along with scholars, have taken the phrase and run with it. The ideology had proven

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meritorious in almost every circle of Chinese society; however, the message was vague and lacked the support of tangible policy initiatives in its realization. What characteristic changes, then, did Xi’s version of the Chinese Dream entail? In July 2012, just before the announcement of the official ‘Chinese Dream’ ideology, the Wall Street Journal (2017) examined the contemporary literature on China, juxtaposing that from several years earlier: the comparison indicated that the middle-class aspirations, that ‘job security, good health, educational opportunities for their children, better housing–are universal’ of normal Chinese were slowly slipping away. This observation came on the back of the purge of Bo Xilai and several corruption scandals that painted a venerable picture for the CCP, thereby corrected through the Xi administration and the new hopes of an attainable ‘Chinese Dream’. Interpretation of Xi’s conception was open to debate, both from within and outside the country. The examination of his remarks in 2012 exploded. International conferences followed, such as ‘The Chinese Dream(s)’ in November 2014 in Denmark at Aalborg University. The Journal of Chinese Political Science dedicated a 2014 issue exclusively to the Chinese Dream. Interpretations have ranged from optimistic reform for citizen rights and environmental protection to pessimistic power plays by the CCP. In their piece on media coverage of the Chinese dream, Zhong and Zheng (2016) reinforce the CCP economic, developmental and power girding effect of the Chinese Dream narrative. They also reinforce Wang’s (2016) concept that the United States has largely upheld the ‘political myth’ narrative that characterizes the slogan as propaganda in support of one-party rule. They point primarily to speeches in order to show that while state interests and even individual economic prosperity are central themes ‘basic human rights and individual interests such as freedom, equality, rule of law, and democracy’ are not commonly addressed (Zhong and Zhang, 2016).

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Fewsmith’s (2013) discussion of the 18th Party Congress indicated early on that Xi would be given a ‘relatively free hand’ over the next few years, and he even alluded to the relatively advanced age of the Politburo Standing Committee, pointing to a potential change in the succession process. The trend of significant power turnover is ‘decennial’ in nature, Fewsmith argues, citing Deng from 2002 and the 18th CPC in 2012. His focus on a trend away from institutionalization through the appointment of Xi (balancing power between political interests) rang true at the 19th Party Congress. Although the conception of Chinese governance was not altered in the text of the Constitution, the relegation of Mao thought to an era of past ‘valuable lessons’ and the inclusion of freedom, equality, fairness, and rule by law into the ‘core values’ made way for a re-conception of the Chinese Dream. Landsberger (2015) writes about the Chinese Dream from a historical perspective, leading all the way back to the Mao era. He defines not only the eras of pre- and postreform as an ‘inward’ vs. ‘outward’ perspective but also provides a new way of thinking, concerning the origin of the current ‘Chinese Dream’, which can hereafter incorporate longstanding internal and external objectives dating back to the Qing Dynasty. In this sense, Landsberger (2015) is even able to redefine the idea of ‘mengxian’ (dream) as it has been altered throughout several regime changes. Wang (2014) sympathizes with Landsberger, by arguing that the Chinese Dream is actually just an effort towards rejuvenation of Chinese traditional power, stating that Chinese victimization by the West has led to a collective desire to regain a former glory. The Chinese media’s interpretation was similarly speculative as to the nature of Xi’s Chinese Dream. This time, the delineation was practical. What form would it take and how could policy drive his remarks? The speech by the Minister of the State Council Information Office, Cai Mingzao, in December 2013 indicated the embrace of the

Chinese Dream by the Chinese people, citing ‘more than 100 million’ articles related to the topic. Turning next to a ‘mass line’ of education activities, Cai then emphasized the importance of such efforts to educate bureaucrats on the practice of good governance (Mingzhao, 2013). The Deputy Director of The Institute for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Meng Xiangqing (2013), takes a singularly important stance on the PLA when discussing the idea of the Chinese Dream. He cites the need for a ‘force of quantity’ to become a technologically competent ‘force of quality’ (Xiangqing, 2013). This is one of the few analyses focusing on the military aspect of the new Chinese ideal. David Gosset (2013) suggested that the Chinese dream was actually more concerned with a ‘reinterpretation of (Chinese) traditional notions’, emphasizing the meta-concept of what it means to be Chinese. In this sense, the dream was less about development or economic goals, but rather a reinvigorated national identity. Jusuf Wanandi (2013) and Martin Khor (2013) highlighted the challenges ahead in order to achieve it. Both cite a need for social equity, to allow the market to play a ‘decisive’ role in setting prices, for social reform (especially in the rural areas), and for political reform in terms of an independent judiciary and through tolerance for NGOs.

The Chinese Dream Takes Shape After exhaustive interpretation both in academia and the media, it was Xi’s propaganda that gives us true insight as to the actual meaning of his Dream. At the opening session of the 12th National People’s Congress (2013–2018), Xi made a speech that characterized the Chinese spirit and core force as a series of ‘persistent efforts’, ‘indomitable will’ and ‘patriotism’ that required that the nation ‘unite as one’ (Xinhua, 2018). His first official act as chairman was the first step: bring everyone in on the ownership of a

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shared dream. Once it caught on, he was able to shape the ideology through tireless dissemination rhetoric as it evolved to incorporate a diverse array of issues. Below are a series of quotes (Ma, 2018), organized chronologically, each attributing various components of Chinese life to the Chinese Dream: November 2012 (Inclusive): ‘Achieving the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the advent of modern times. This dream embodies the long cherished hope of several generations of Chinese people’. December 2012 (Military): ‘To the military, the dream is to make our forces strong. To achieve the aim we must both enrich the country and build a strong national defense and powerful military’. May 2013 (Youth): ‘The Chinese Dream is composed of the dream of every person, including that of the youth … only by integrating individual dreams to the national cause can one finally make great achievements’. July 2013 (Environment): ‘Ushering in a new era of ecological progress and building a beautiful China is an integral part of the Chinese Dream’. October 2015 (International): ‘The Chinese Dream is closely linked with the dreams of people in other countries … China’s development is facilitated by the development of the world, and it will bring about greater impetus and opportunities for the common progress of all countries’. April 2016 (Belt and Road): ‘In proposing the Belt and Road Initiative, we aim to carry forward the spirit of the ancient Silk Road by combining the dream of Chinese people with the of people living in countries involved with the initiative’. October 2017 (Party): ‘To deliver on the two centenary goals, realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation, and steadily improve our people’s lives, we must continue to pursue development as the Party’s top priority in governance’.

The quotes above show the various dimensions to which Xi has expanded the Chinese Dream. By incorporating the gamut of Chinese societal pressures, he is able to stage a comprehensive shift from propaganda to

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policy. His initial step was to get everyone on board, which may explain his adoption of an existing phrase coined by a foreign journalist. Regardless of the origin, Xi repackaged the phrase to positively resonate with the Chinese people. Xi pledged ‘to realize the great renewal of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history … History tells us that everybody has one’s future and destiny closely connected to those of the country and nation’ (Xinhua, 2012). Among the efforts to disseminate propaganda concerning the Chinese Dream, the interaction between the CCDI (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection) and Chinese Universities was one of the most critical. The CCDI’s ‘rectification reports’ citing low activity of party committees at universities along with Xi’s ‘National meeting on political thought work in universities’ meant to train ‘social successors’, show the extent to which Xi’s emphasis on ideology generally was reaching new heights (CCDI, 2017; Ministry of Education, 2017; Xinhau, 2016). Already, Xi was building up a network of outlets for ideological dissemination while bolstering the academic community’s commitment to his Chinese Dream. This method is nothing new, though, as pointed out by Zhang Lifan, who reminds us of the constant duality of capitalist funding and party control in Chinese universities (Doyon, 2017; Zhang, 2016). Alongside the universities, the Communist Youth League (CYL) was also overhauled in the years following Xi’s expression of the Chinese Dream. This came in response not only to corruption and over bureaucratization reforms, but also as a reinvigoration of a key tool in propaganda dissemination. The reform agenda, aimed at ‘shrinkage at the top and replenishment below’, resonated with the theme of a Chinese Dream that was meant to be shared by the entire populace, especially in an organization that has its foundation as a grassroots movement (CCDI, 2016; Central CYL, 2016). In addition to education and broad appeal, the Chinese Dream’s

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connotation took on an international, environmental, and military component. Internationally, Xi conceives of the dream of people in other countries. Later, the incorporation of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative broadens that scope and paves the way for unlimited application of the ideology in foreign policy. Mention of the environment set a precedent for outcomes like those of the Paris Accords, both with domestic and international ramifications. Although the military aspect of his dream is not commonly touched upon until the 19th National Party Congress, the need ‘to make our forces strong’ shows the foresight with which Xi was viewing the geopolitical atmosphere, although this addition may not necessarily signal conflict. As the former President of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, Ji Zhiye (2017), discusses, China needs to increase its hard power before it can implement a stronger effort towards soft power, as has been the case for the United States. All of these dimensions of the relentless propaganda associated with the Chinese Dream led to the 19th CPC Congress. Just before that in 2016, Xi became a ‘core’ (hexin) of the CCP, indicating an elevated status.

FROM THE USAGE OF PROPAGANDA TO THE FOUNDATION OF XI JINPING’S IDEOLOGY The 19th CPC Congress, Xi Pivots to a New Era It’s not until the 19th CCP Congress that we begin to see parallels between Xi’s rhetoric on the objectives of the Chinese Dream and actual policy. The transition, however, was remarkably clear. At the CCP Congress, Xi’s burgeoning ideology, ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, was officially enshrined into the Constitution (Xinhau, 2017). This both returns the ideology of the party back to the

principles associated with the party’s beginning while simultaneously strengthening CCP rule. The addition of his name to the Chinese Constitution alone indicates a rise in Xi’s profile vis-a-vis his immediate predecessors, Jiang and Hu. During the 19th Congress, Xi called on all CPC members to study the ‘spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress’ and consider it as the ‘primary political task’ moving forward. All members were to ‘study CPC Congress spirit, and adhere to and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era’ (Xinhau, 2017). By calling for a unified ‘spirit’ to guide the implementation of every policy moving forward, Xi is framing the future of China within the context of the new era, with the primary objective of realizing the Chinese Dream (Xinhau, 2017). The ‘New Era’ is meant to establish a defining moment between the previous two eras of contemporary China: Mao and post1976 reform. In July of 2017, Xi gave a speech cementing these three stages as part of the Chinese narrative by separating the ‘historic rise from standing up [1949–1976], growing rich [1978–2012] to getting strong [2012 onwards]’ (Holbig, 2017). Xi’s speech included allusions to the need for a better life for citizens and was praised by Study Times (2017) as a ‘charismatic leader’ personally responsible for the positive change in citizens’ lives (Zhongwen, 2017). Scholars like Feng (2015) set forth an analysis of values and institutions alluded to by top members of the CCP, calling the new governance style a ‘socialist way of Chinese characteristics’ with an emphasis on some core values: prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship. Nonetheless, it fails to realize that Xi’s commitment to the Chinese dream had expanded outside the bounds of economic development and the rule of law. Instead, the ‘new era’ was moving past the developmental stage associated with the 1976 post-reform time period.

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Xi’s ideology cuts into the heart of the ‘principle contradiction’ of Chinese society in his new era. Instead of simply focusing on economic development or lowering its profile, the Chinese government’s main priority is to address ‘unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life’ through ‘well-rounded human development and all-round social progress’ (Jinping, 2017). European Council on Foreign Relations’ writer Jean Mittletaedt (2017) discusses the shift in the era to the center of the ‘principle contradiction’ by citing leading Chinese scholars. The shift from one era to the next, pivoting on the contradictions in Chinese society, is necessarily focused on a single ideological judgment or persona, and becomes the justification for nearly every major policy implementation (Wang, 2017; Xin, 2017). Therefore, by the 19th CPC, Xi’s new ideology of a Chinese dream was focused on the aspects of Chinese society associated with the ‘new era’ of contradiction, specifically those that cannot be rectified by wealth alone. Legal protection, social participation, access to quality education, working rights, and even military strength are outlined in Xi’s speeches at the Congress, further indicating a desired shift from quantity to quality implements. Wang Xiaohui (2002), Vice Propaganda Minister, along with other China scholars, have emphasized the importance of Xi in the formulation of the new era, and say that without Xi, implementation of the Chinese Dream would likely fail; his ideology has become nearly synonymous with the conception of modernized socialism in China (Party Building Online Micro-Platform, 2017; Party Member, 2017; Xinhua, 2017; Wang, 2017). The media coverage of Xi’s new era is epitomized by a 2017 article in Global Times that asks, How to solve all kinds of major problems in the new era? How to utilize China’s strength? How to make the win-win principle transcend traditional geopolitics among major powers? Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New

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Era will lead us to the answers … The unity of China cannot be simply formed through institutions. A powerful guiding principle will serve as the basis for national unity. The inclusion of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era into the CPC Constitution paves the way for the CPC to embark on a new journey. This holds enormous significance for both the CPC and the country. Xi Jinping Thought will make China stand upright in the new era.

Underpinning all of the policy directions promulgated by the 19th Congress of the CPC is a common vein in striving for the realization of the Chinese Dream, as written in the 2017 CCDI work report: ‘With this, they shall provide a strong underpinning for China’s endeavor toward a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, and contribute to realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation’ (People’s Republic of China, 2017). Similarly, the resolution on the CPC Central Committee report emphasizes a ‘decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, strive for the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, and work tirelessly to realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation … and see that our people realize their aspirations for a better life’ (People’s Republic of China, 2017). All of the language associated with the Chinese Dream in the above two documents was added to the constitutional amendment concerning Xi Thought, further cementing the conception of the dream to a political reality.

Xi’s Ideology Put into Action, Propaganda to Policy Having looked back on the accomplishments of the last five years, especially the success in massive cutbacks in government graft, a sustained break-neck growth rate and effective assertion of Chinese foreign policy abroad, the party and Xi are forced to re-assess their previously stated trajectory and design

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policies which will address the inadequacies brought on by an overemphasis on rapid growth and political house cleaning. Xi’s opening speech to the Congress gave some indication towards ‘well rounded development’ and a ‘moderately prosperous society by: forestalling and defusing major risks, carrying out targeted poverty alleviation, and preventing and controlling pollution’ (Holbig, 2017). This is a big signal to China strategists, indicating the first ever intentional move by Chinese leadership to pump the brakes on Chinese economic growth, which could potentially mean rebalancing economic disparities, increasing the quality of development (over quantity), and controlling pollution and environmental degradation. The language of his speech was drawn directly from the propaganda on the Chinese Dream. This is no coincidence. During the Congress, Xi’s speech outlined the future for the party in a way that was unique to his predecessors. Instead of relaying another five-year plan, Xi expounded on a 33-year plan to take place over several milestones. The final milestone represented the culmination of the Chinese Dream into a ‘great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful’ (Holbig, 2017). Xi’s subsequent report was especially telling in the sections on national security and foreign policy, as he mentioned a ‘dream of building a powerful military’ (qiangjunmeng) and a ‘community with a shared destiny for mankind’ (renlei mingyun gongtongti) (Holbig, 2017). These major deviations from previous leadership are then tied specifically to Xi, all utilizing the idea of a dream or destiny to be fulfilled. Unsurprisingly, Xi made no mention of a previously stated pledge to double GDP by 2020. Although this may simply be due to a shift towards quality development, Xi did make additional projections beyond 2020 to the midpoint of the twenty-first century. His new formulation will take place in two stages: first, (2020–2035) emphasizing ‘basic development’ and perhaps indicating

that China itself doesn’t feel on par with her first-world competitors; second, (2035– 2050) an advanced stage, possibly moving into service sectors and following the prescribed pathways of development from light and heavy industries and into service provision. Additionally, Xi hinted at a number of other objectives by enumerating 14 points of focus that would dominate policy over the next five years. Among them, there is an increasing concern about the environment and livability, as well as a deepened commitment to good governance through oversight and inspection.1 In addition to policy objectives, Xi reinforced the role of the party and, by extension, himself in the realization of the Chinese Dream. With the party still growing and showing ever more diversification, its appeal is stronger than ever. In China, everything still centers on the party and the strengthening of it as the sole guiding arm of Chinese society. The following objectives were rehashed during the CPC in order to clarify its intent to remain at the pentacle of political power, by strengthening legitimacy and entrenching a reliance on the one-party system for maintaining stability: Uphold and strengthen overall Party leadership and ensure that the Party exercises effective selfsupervision and practices strict self-governance in every respect; Take strengthening the Party’s long-term governance capacity and its advanced nature and purity as the main thrust, take enhancing the Party’s political building as the overarching principle, take holding dear the Party’s ideals, convictions, and purpose as the underpinning, and take harnessing the whole Party’s enthusiasm, initiative, and creativity as the focus of efforts; Make all-round efforts to see the Party’s political building enhanced, its theory strengthened, its organizations consolidated, its conduct improved, and its discipline enforced, with institution building incorporated into every aspect of Party building; Step up efforts to combat corruption and continue to improve the efficacy of Party building; and

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Build the Party into a vibrant Marxist governing party that is always at the forefront of the times, enjoys the wholehearted support of the people, has the courage to reform itself, and is able to withstand all tests (China Legal Information Center, 2018).

New education policies were also proposed, meant to revitalize the Communist Youth League and younger generation participation in the party, especially associated with ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ (Doyon, 2017). In addition, Xi hinted towards expanding efforts to further legitimize party rule through ‘consultative democracy’ and closeness to the population it governs, citing documents released during the final days of the conference: unity of Party leadership, the people running the country, and law-based governance. This requires us to strengthen institutional guarantees to ensure the people run the country, give play to the important role of socialist consultative democracy, and advance law-based governance. We should deepen reform of Party and government institutions and the system of government administration, consolidate and develop the patriotic united front, and consolidate and enhance political stability, unity, and vitality. (International Department Central Committee of CPC, 2017)

There is a fair amount of talk surrounding ‘issues that concern people the most’, ‘a social governance model based on collaboration and participation’, which could indicate a more participatory, or at the very least, a consultative relationship between the citizens and government, stopping somewhere short of democratization but making progress in giving some semblance of political voice (International Department Central Committee of CPC, 2017). These changes in policy are undeniably aligned with the rhetoric that began in 2012 on the Chinese Dream. By reframing the development path of Chinese society into a ‘new era’, Xi has transformed that rhetoric into policy solutions to a new ‘principal contradiction’ facing the CCP, with Xi and the party as the undisputed leadership.

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CURRENT SITUATION AND PREDICAMENT Xi’s Leadership in Realizing the Chinese Dream, Unchallenged The 19th CPC fully personified the Chinese Dream and solidified the nature of Xi’s ideology, through a realistic outline of policy implementation. By the end of 2017, signals were clear that the Chinese Dream was fueling Xi’s motives in every aspect of political life, while also strengthening his position at the helm. A new anti-corruption agency, the Supervisory Commission, along with a mandatory oath to the Constitution for all government personnel (Xi also is the first to take an oath to the Constitution upon reelection), are signals that Xi has consolidated his power with the CCP as a reliable justification (Nadin, 2019). Political appointments at the 19th Congress paved the way for the full realization of Xi’s dream, especially Li Zhanshu. Moreover, the provincial governments are even, now, participating in the realization of the Chinese Dream (Zhiping and Xiaoli, 2018). The 2018 National People’s Congress officially negated any expression of two term limits for a single party chairman. Additionally, Xi’s strongest ally in top leadership, Wang Qishan, was appointed as vice president, while Li Keqiang was further stripped of stature through Xi’s power grab. If there was any question as to the political stability of a Xi regime, it was washed away after the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress (Zheping, 2018).

Future Policy Areas, the Dream Becoming Reality The following sections delineate the future direction of the Chinese Dream as represented by recent events at the 13th National People’s Congress and actions by top leadership. In addition, recent media coverage on the Chinese Dream helps to comprehend future impact.

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Foreign policy Foreign policy is seen as being steady since 2012, with some scholars, like Feng Zhongping and Huang Jing, iterating that Chinese diplomatic policy may be adapting to present circumstances. However, in the context of policy centered around Xi and in the pursuit of a Chinese Dream, it would make sense that foreign meetings would be more heavily focused on Xi’s personal decisions. Meetings with US presidents Obama and Trump in Mar-a-Lago and Sunnylands in California are evidence of such (Waldron, 2017). This is especially important when considering Xi’s direction towards a ‘new type of great power relations’. Particularly sensitive foreign policy issues like Taiwan and North Korea are seen by most as areas for potential conflict in the realization of a Chinese Dream. However, some scholars, like Wei Da, have placed importance on the balancing of power between China and the United States as an incremental and peaceful eventuality. Ultimately, the shift in power could mirror that which took place after WWII between the UK and the United States, ultimately relying on constant interaction toward responsible and consistent bilateral policy (Wei, 2017). Xi’s ideology has also been compared to developed nations in the West in the time of Trump and Brexit, as a steady counterweight to anti-free trade and green regulations. This gives legitimacy to Xi’s term extension as a consistent leadership by juxtaposition against foreign political-regime change (Sautin, 2017). ‘Disorder in the West has become a major source of global insecurity and instability [and] the Western model now faces grave challenges’, wrote Zhang Weiwei in the official Communist Party journal, Qiushi. ‘In contrast is China’s good order’, he added. ‘In just a few decades, China has used the model the West refuses to recognize to achieve its rapid rise’ (Kynge, 2018). Foreign policy goals associated with Xi’s ideology have even been extended to Chinese overseas. Leading up to the first session of

the 13th NPC, Yu Zhengsheng called to ‘mobilize all the sons and daughters of (ethnic Chinese) to work together for the greater national interests and the realization of the Chinese Dream’ (Shih, 2018). In addition, the Chinese Ambassador to South Africa made a statement and emphasized the international objectives of the Chinese Dream – vague though they are, he states that Internationally, China will continue to firmly hold high the banner of peace, development, cooperation and win-win, follow the principle of planning together, building together and sharing together, join the efforts of the global community to promote the Belt and Road constructions, and work together to pursue a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice, and win-win cooperation and build a community with shared future for mankind, making new and greater contributions to a more fair and just international order and a more prosperous, stable and beautiful world. (People’s Daily, 2018)

Education In terms of education, the Xi ideology has been widely embraced. By October 2017, more than 20 universities in China had initiated research institutes solely dedicated to his ‘Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (Financial Times, 2017). The ‘Mid- to long-term plan for the development of youth’, published in April 2017, signifies a shift away from economic development and healthcare back to ideological training. By implementing this sort of instructive propagandist strategy, Xi is able to make more robust the facilities for control at the disposal of the CCP (2017). Educational attainment was brought into the fold by a recent policy shift on citizenship. An article in the New York Times (Friedman, 2012) brought the rural-area orphans of economic migrants in China to light. The old Hukou system, which restricts movement (especially through a registration process that affects education and social benefits), needs reform in order to extend the Chinese Dream to those throughout the entire country.

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Economics Economically, Xi has outlined his reform agenda quite clearly through the 19th Congress into furthering supply-side structural reform. There is a wide range of issues where China has room for improvement, including upgrading traditionally low- to middle-level industries and building infrastructure that is conducive to green forms of production and energy/resource conservation. Xi’s focus on quality improvements indicates two things: first, Chinese economic growth has reached maturity and will begin to slow; second, China can be expected to genuinely change its policy away from an export-driven economy and begin to utilize and develop its own domestic consumer market. Xi aims to make China a country of innovators, with a newly bolstered commitment to education and innovation-inspiring policy, which ranges from major science and technology projects, through ventures among private, public, and educational facilities, to synergy in scientific application in the aerospace, cyber, and transportation industries. Pursuing a rural-vitalization strategy, Xi has made a significant pledge to reform property and contract rights meant to safeguard the rights of rural people. Implementing the coordinated regional-development strategy, Xi rehashed an established policy of spreading development evenly from the historically wealthier coastal areas into the middle and western regions of the country, occupied by ethnic- and religious-minority groups. Xi has promised to continue efforts in legitimizing their residency of rural dwellers and migrant workers in big cities, who have been denied certain social benefits and even legitimate work opportunities. In the midst of government interventionist policy with his other five points, Xi makes a contradictory pledge to give power back to market forces and break administrative monopolies in China while simultaneously ‘strengthening’ the state-owned sector, all in the name of elevating Chinese businesses to global dominance. Finally, in the name of openness, Xi is

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making moves toward free trade. In contrast to US protectionist policies under Trump, Xi has gone so far as to start opening up the services sector for foreign business while pledging to protect ‘legitimate’ rights and interests of foreign investors (Xinhau, 2017; Xinhau, 2017). Some of these reforms have been met with cynicism by Western media. For instance, The Financial Times indicated that the market reforms related to the Chinese Dream that are meant to move away from state control of major industries may actually be a façade. These reforms, instead, may simply be forcibly shifting resources from declining industries into valuable, technological exports, in order to meet the ‘Made in China 2025’ expectations. Xi’s team is also guiding consumer behavior in China, to address quality vs. quantity outcomes (Xinhau, 2017). In 2018, China will promote the healthy development of online shopping and express delivery services. Meanwhile, the country will create integrated tourism demonstration zones, and lower ticket prices at key state tourist sites, according to the work report (Xinhau, 2018). Further evidence of quality of life improvements have been met with praise by some Western analysts as well: Xi’s ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative calls for China to be the global leader in key technologies, including computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. Making China great again is thus not just a matter of making it rich. Xi means to make it powerful, make it proud and make the party, as the primary driver for the entire venture, once again the worthy vanguard of the people. (Graham, 2017)

Military During the 19th Congress, Xi’s tone shifted towards prioritization of military strength and modernization, with the aim to becoming a ‘world class force’ coupled with a desire to ‘develop strong and efficient joint operations’. Xi and the Central Military Commission ordered all members of the armed forces and police, especially the higher-ranking officers,

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to study the Congress outcome and documents. Media and academic actors are now required to take part in the political education of the military and police. The CMC plans to send lecturers to major military installments to assist in the formal education of its officers. Furthermore, the CMC has officially implemented a policy requiring that all military personnel formally pledge their allegiance to Xi as chairman of the CMC. Finally, following the 19th Congress, Xi made visits to the military leadership to exhibit the need for combat readiness and the ability ‘to fight and win wars’. Xi made these requests alongside a push for further innovation in military technology and an emphasis on regional theatre and joint operations-command systems (International Department Central Committee of CPC, 2017; International Department Central Committee of CPC, 2017; Xinhau, 2017). All of the developments along the lines of military improvements were mirrored at the 13th NPC when legislatures passed an 8% increase in military budget to account for Xi’s goals for military power.

Rule of law During the second session of the 13th NPC, a legislation plan was invoked to address Xi’s goals regarding the rule of law and individuals’ rights, all associated with the Chinese Dream. The plan addressed ‘legislative work for 2019, which includes deliberating on the Civil Code, formulating Amendment XI to the Criminal Law and the real estate tax law, and revising the Securities Law, among others’, as well as ‘reforms on pilot free trade zones, government review system, rural collective land ownership, financial management and the judicial system’ (Xinhau, 2018). Major legislative items also included laws related to basic medical and health care, export control, community correction, integrated military-civilian development, guarantee for veterans, and administrative discipline; and revision of the Law on Officers on Active Service, the Military Service Law, the Law on the People’s Armed Police Force, the

Organic Law of the NPC, and the NPC procedural rules. (Xinhau, 2019)

Alongside the developments Xi has planned for individual protection, some aspects of environmental policy were also addressed at the 13th NPC, including the purification of the Yangtze River.

Censorship From a larger historical perspective, the Chinese Dream may serve the dual purpose of simultaneously reorganizing the vision of Chinese past, present, and future, while also consolidating party power ahead of major political and economic reforms. This duality has on the one hand given hope to those seeking individual prosperity and increased freedoms, while on the other hand necessitated an increase of censorship and oppression, all of which could contradict what it means to be socialist or even Chinese (Mahoney, 2014). The contradiction associated with such a ‘duality’ may have overstepped the mark, especially when conceiving of a broad audience of Chinese ‘dreamers’. The implementation of censoring the Chinese Dream has taken several forms, including in the film industry, religious practices, and online censorship. For example, the Shanghai Daily (2018) brought attention to a State Council Information Office document that depicted the Chinese Dream in terms of religious freedom: ‘religious believers and non-believers respect each other, and live in harmony, committing themselves to reform and opening-up and the socialist modernization, and contribute to the realization of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation’ (Shanghai Daily, 2018). Further, the Los Angeles Times (2018) focused on the implications of the Chinese Dream on filmmaking. A Chinese filmmaker with Hengdian World Studios exposed the need to be sensitive to certain topics, even citing the need to cut a scene from a recent film that needed to avoid showing ‘people suffering’ (Kaiman, 2018). There is a pre-determined list of subject-matter topics that are out of bounds, including ‘Mao’s

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great famine of 1959-61; his calamitous Cultural Revolution of 1966-76; skepticism of Beijing’s historical claims to minority areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang’ (Kaiman, 2018). Maintaining consensus for Xi is paramount and online sources are no exception, even in special zones like Hong Kong and Macau. A visit by Xi Jinping to Hong Kong in July 2017 extended the Chinese Dream across Shenzhen and into the city. Xi’s visit indicated to rulers in Hong Kong that, just as China is stepping up censorship and control in pursuit of a consensus on the future, they too must be vigilant in the fight against independence activists and critics of party rule (Kynge, 2018). Keywords are unsurprisingly blocked by some state search censors: ‘According to a list compiled by China Digital Times, a California-based website which monitors Chinese censorship. “The emperor’s dream”, “the wheel of history” and “Dream of Returning to the Great Qing (dynasty)” were among dozens of culled phrases’ (China Digital Times, 2018). The Wall Street Journal (2017) reports a new and odd form of censorship regarding Chinese Dream concerns over automated chatbots that were commissioned by Tencent to chat on certain subjects, based on online conversations. Interestingly, they began to repeat dissent just before they were removed and sent to ‘reeducation camp’ for ‘improvements’ (Wall Street Journal, 2017). Some of the ideas they produced included things like ‘The Chinese dream is a daydream and a nightmare’, and the Chinese Dream was planning ‘to move to America’ (Wall Street Journal, 2017).

CONCLUSION Against the background of a much stronger China, particularly vis-a-vis her neighbors, the timing for the Chinese Dream has become the cornerstone of the current political status quo. Although China has risen to the status of the second most powerful economy in the world, there is still some development

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necessary to surpass the United States. Zheng (2014) groups China with her more powerful neighbors (Japan, Russia, India) to assess how realistically the Chinese Dream is being realized. After considering government effectiveness, economic confidence, direct foreign-investment confidence, intentional homicide, gender gap, international tourism, and global competitiveness, he concludes that China’s leaders have made significant progress in comparison to China’s most immediate neighbors (Zheng, 2014). For now, the Chinese Dream is still a dream, but the realization of that dream has been laid out clearly by an unopposed Xi leadership. Xi began by utilizing the concept of the Chinese Dream as a perfect articulation of a burgeoning sentiment in Chinese Society. Lu (2015) uses public-opinion data to show that the Chinese dream is somewhat an extension of the feelings of the Chinese people, rather than a top-down propaganda initiative with three interlinked dimensions of a strong and harmonious China where individuals may prosper. Lu’s origin story, while compelling, is as irrelevant as Friedman, who was dubbed the original proponent of the term. The real focus is how Xi has used it at an opportune moment to frame public opinion. By adopting this new idea, Xi recognizes that the time of rapid economic growth for China is over and new aspirations of the Chinese people are taking prominence. Once he was given the wider public shared ownership of the dream ideology, Xi began to expand the concept by highlighting several facets with speeches and propaganda through the mechanism of state media. Now a clean environment, high-quality development, and even military power have become synonymous with dreaming the Chinese way. After promulgating the shared Chinese Dream through propaganda and public opinion on social issues, Xi reimagined a cornerstone of Chinese political development known as ‘principle contradictions’, to usher in a new era of ideology to drive policy. The shift from backwards development in the reform era to a

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‘new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is meant to address the principle contradiction currently facing Chinese society, a better life for normal citizens. Xi’s success in framing the object of Chinese struggle not only justified his ideology as a policy driver but also necessitated his continued leadership. On the stage of the 19th CPC, Xi articulated the future of development policies, all of which resonated with specific components of his Chinese Dream, especially in areas like green policy, high-quality infrastructure construction, a significant boost in military spending, and education policy, to bring the CCP back into center stage. By 2017, Xi’s introduction of the Chinese Dream in 2012 had come full circle and matured into a comprehensive Xi thought, now forever enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. For five years, the propaganda had drawn public support around a collective destiny now attributed to Xi. Now that the Chinese Dream has officially evolved into the basis for Xi’s entire ideology, the challenges to realize such high expectations rest on Xi’s shoulders. With public backing for new Xi-style goals related to everyday citizens and a quality life, he has begun to solidify his leadership in the pursuit of those objectives, this time through a 33-year (as opposed to a 5-year) plan. By removing political barriers in the form of term limits and high-ranking political adversaries, Xi’s ideology is guaranteed an unobstructed path to implementation. New areas of focus resonate with the Dream ideology and can be – or will be – felt by every citizen once the plan has matured. Ultimately, the realization of such a vast dream may take time to implement; however, the process of reaching the current stage of Chinese political governance has certainly placed the CCP as the driver of everything, with Xi firmly at the wheel.

Note 1  These 14 points are: ensure Party leadership over all work; commit to a people-centered approach;

continue to comprehensively deepen reform; adopt a new vision for development; see that the people run the country; ensure every dimension of governance is law-based; uphold core socialist values; ensure and improve living standards through development; ensure harmony between human and nature; pursue a holistic approach to national security; uphold absolute Party leadership over the people’s forces; uphold the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ and promote national reunification; promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind; and exercise full and rigorous governance over the Party.

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Mars, N. and Hornsby, A. (2008). The Chinese Dream: A Society Under Construction. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: nai010 Publishers. Miller, A (2013). The new Party Politburo leadership. China Leadership Monitor 40. Ministry of Education et al. (2017). Opinions of the Ministry of Education and Five Other Ministries as to Deepening the Reform Towards Streamlining Administration, Delegation of Power, Strengthening Regulations and Improving Service within Universities. March 31. Mingfu, L. (2010). Zhongguo Meng: Hou Meiguo Shidai De Daguo Siwei Yu Zhanlue Dingwei [The Chinese Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the PostAmerica Era]. Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi. Mingzhao, C. (2013). Connotations of Chinese dream. China Daily. December 7, 2013, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2013-12/24/content_17194127.htm. Mittelstaedt, J. C. (2017). ‘New Era’ between continuity and disruption. European Council on Foreign Relations. December 15, 2017, available at https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/chinas_new_era_with_xi_ jinping_characteristics7243. Nadin, R. (2019). National People’s Congress 2018: Fulfilling Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream. Overseas Development Institute, March 7. Oriental Outlook (2012). Quartet of the Chinese dream. November 12, No. 43. Available at: http://news.sohu.com/20121115/n357719761. shtml. Party Building Online Micro-Platform. (2017). Authoritative Explanation: Why Does the New Thought Bear Xi Jinping’s Name? 2017. Availble at: http://www.dangjian.cn/.. Party Member (2017). Birth Record of the New Party Constitution. Party Member, 2017 People’s Daily. (2018). A stable, prosperous and fast growing China serves the common interests of the world. People’s Daily, April 17, 2018, available at http://en.people.cn/ n3/2018/0417/c90000-9450507.html. Sautin, Y. (2017). A ‘new type of power relations’ revisited. In China Analysis: China’s ‘New Era’ with Xi Jinping Characteristics. London: European Council on Foreign Relations.

Shambaugh, D. (2008). China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shanghai Daily. (2018). Pledge to maintain right to religious belief. Shanghai Daily, April 4, 2018, available at https://archive.shine.cn/ nation/Pledge-to-maintain-right-to-religiousbelief/shdaily.shtml. Shih, G. (2018). Beijing official urges efforts for Xi’s ‘Chinese Dream’. AP News, March 3, 2018, available at available at https://apnews. com/31f799e5e4134592b7cf37e04215766d. Studwell, J. (2003). The China Dream: The Quest for the Last Great Untapped Market on Earth. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Study Times. (2017). The formative journey of General Secretary Xi Jinping. Study Times, July 28, 2017, available at http://cpc.people.com. cn/n1/2017/0728/c64094-29433685.html. Waldron, A. There is no Thucydides trap. Supchina Sinica, June 12, 2017, available at https://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no thucydides-trap/. Wanandi, J. (2013). The Chinese dream and peaceful development. China Daily, December 24, 2013, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2013-12/24/content_ 17194125.htm. Wall Street Journal. (2017). China’s dissident chatbots. Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2017, available at at https://www.wsj.com/articles/ chinas-dissident-chatbots-1501801443. Wang, H. (2010). The Chinese Dream: The Rise of the World’s Largest Middle Class and What It Means to You. Bestseller Press. Wang, J. (2016). Narrative mediatisation of the ‘Chinese Dream’ in Chinese and American media. Journal of Language and Politics 15(1): 45–62. Wang, W. (2017). The Action Program to Wrest a Great Victory in the New Era. Torch of Thought, 2017. Available at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzI4MDExNzg3Nw==&mid=2659100402&idx =1&sn=dfe83cbf866b35bb2ec929e811f67b 20&chksm=f03751e8c740d8fe1c652d58c5 17ea2fc6d6dce44d35d545536c2414ca18c 0b9e90195b165cb&mpshare=1&scene=1&s rcid=1103kkON3Ss6M7gP5hmNjzP0&pass_ ticket=36WqxVoGzQCpuqY1%2BgaIuOfpm zgVo3iVCRpCCvOFwtuZm4wdmyBFvDWr6T T2HI1V#rd.

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Wang, X. (2002). The post-Communist personality. The China Journal January: 1–18. Wang, Z. (2014). The Chinese dream: Concept and context. Journal of Chinese Political Science 19: 1–13. Wei, D. (2017). After the 19th Party Congress, three (Chinese Foreign Policy) tendencies Lianhe Zaobao, October 5, 2017, available at http://www.chinaelections.org/article/ 1970/246940.html. Xiangqing, M. (2013). Chinese Dream includes strong PLA. China Daily, October 8, 2013, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2013-10/08/content_17012886_2.htm. Xin, M. (2017) Correctly understanding the change of the principal contradiction in our nation’s society. People’s Daily, November 3, 2017. Xinhua. (2010). Xi pledges ‘great renewal of Chinese nation’. Xinhua, November 29, 2012, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-11/29/_132008231.htm. Xinhau. (2016). Xi Jinping: The work on political thought should run through the entire education process. Xinhua, 8 December 2016, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/ politics/2016-12/08/c_1120082577.htm. Xinhau. (2017). Commentary: Milestone congress points to new era for China, the world. Xinhua, October 24, 2017, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/201710/24/c_136702090.htm. Xinhau. (2017). Decision regarding the ‘Chinese Communist Party Constitution (Revised Draft)’ of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Xinhua, 13 November, 2017. Xinhau. (2017). Full text of resolution on CPC Central Committee report. Xinhua, October 24, 2017, available at http://www.xinhuanet. com/english/2017-10/24/c_136702625.htm. Xinhau. (2017). Xi urges study, implementation of CPC congress spirit. Xinhua, October 28, 2017, available at http://www.xinhuanet. com/english/2017-10/28/c_136711933.htm. Xinhau. (2018). Economic Watch: China’s consumption, investment promotion meaningful for world. Xinhua, March 5, 2018, available

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25 Darkness and Light: Media, Propaganda, and Politics in Japan Nancy Snow

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle – George Orwell.

THE SETTING In propaganda management, the commission and omission of words and images are weapons of persuasion in war and peace. How words and pictures are used or not used, and in what manner they are presented or not presented, makes a difference in the credibility, not the absolute truth, of the information. The source of information beyond the words used matters even more. Is the source trustworthy and if not, why? What if the source, such as the nation-state of Japan, is otherwise held in high regard as a trusted and reliable ally of leading nations, is a cultural and soft power superpower and the second most wealthy industrialized free market democracy? High regard or not, vexing policy issues persist for this archipelago of East Asia and the Japanese media’s ability to

cover these policy issues is even more vexing when seen through the eyes of foreign journalists who cover Japan. Sometimes the government attempts to try to explain a policy position further exacerbate regional tensions and perpetuate perceptions of intransigence by a cultural powerhouse that then builds more walls than bridges in globally contentious matters. In this chapter, the author highlights qualities of the Japanese media and government propaganda environment that includes what foreign journalist Karel van Wolferen (1989: 93)refers to as a ‘house-broken press’ that rarely takes on, or critically analyzes, a socio-political system dominated by a political party that digs in its heels when facing a probing international or domestic press. Imperial Japan’s posture before and during World War II was to view the press solely as an instrument of state power and to integrate civil society into the propaganda aims of the government and military (Kushner, 2006). Postwar Japan uses a form of friendly authoritarianism that

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‘encourages each member of society to internalize and share the value system which regards control and regimentation as natural, and to accept the instructions and orders of people in superordinate positions without questioning’ (Sugimoto, 2010: 290-–1).

THE LETTER On October 2, 2018, The Mayor of Osaka, Japan, Hirofumi Yoshimura, sent a ten-page letter to London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, United States, announcing that the city of Osaka, after a 60 year citizen diplomacy tie,1 was terminating its sister city relationship. The letter’s opening paragraph was presented as a regretful pronouncement as if a disappointed teacher had seen a good student’s grades drop precipitously, requiring an urgent note to be sent home to the child’s parents: Much to my regret, I must deliver an unfortunate announcement. As you are aware, the establishment of San Francisco and Osaka’s sister city affiliation dates back to October 7, 1957. Thereafter, the two cities have developed genuine mutual understanding and friendship fostered upon meaningful exchanges across various fields, particularly in business, education, and arts. In spite of the prosperous relationship, I am afraid to announce that the City of Osaka must hereby terminate its sister city relationship with the City and County of San Francisco. The grounds to termination shall be detailed as follows. I must sternly emphasize that the Japanese Government holds a distinctive standpoint on perceiving history, and there is also disagreement among historians when regarding the historical facts such as the number of ‘comfort women’, the degree to which the former Japanese Army was involved, and the extent of the wartime harm. Granted the aforementioned, it was solemnly disappointing when the previous Mayor of San Francisco personally finalized the

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resolution on November 22, 2017, to accept the Comfort Women Memorial and plaque as a gift with provision of artwork maintenance on public property as an expression of the will of the City and County of San Francisco; a memorial containing inscriptions that present uncertain and one-sided claims as historical facts. The letter was released three years to the day since the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted a ‘Resolution Urging the Establishment of a Memorial for Comfort Women’ on October 2, 2015. Mayor Yoshimura and Osaka’s previous mayor had sought one – and only one – resolution on at least seven previous occasions. That resolution was to not establish a memorial for comfort women in the city of San Francisco with an inscription that singled out Japan. In opposition to Osaka, San Francisco became the first major international city to embrace the comfort women cause for recognition, remembrance, and reference to the modern condition of women. In his letter that ended the Sister City relationship, Mayor Yoshimura framed history as one of unique perspective, that Japan takes ‘a distinctive standpoint on perceiving history’, and that Japan was being unfairly targeted with charges of war atrocities against women whose involuntary status as sex slaves (‘comfort women’) has been under question by some of Japan’s political leaders, including the present prime minister. Mayor Yoshimura defended Japan’s honor as a country being singled out for engaging in what he refers to in the October 2018 letter as a ‘sex on the battlefield’ problem that was common among Allied powers: This problem was present during World War II with the American, British, French, German, and Soviet armies, as well as during the Korean War and Vietnam War with the South Korean Army. I have no intention to legitimize or defend the problem of ‘comfort women’ by the former Japanese Army just because the other countries have had the same issue. Still, attempts to single out and criticize only Japan will make

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us blind to other past atrocities and also to contemporary problems of the same kind. This issue should not be treated as an issue specific solely to the Japanese military. As long as widespread sexual problems on the battlefields by countries other than Japan are not openly recognized, past offenses, which the whole world must face, will go uncorrected, and those violations in other parts of the world will not be resolved. This is my biggest concern. What precipitated the mayor’s action was a form of Japan-based integration propaganda in response to the Japan-bashing agitprop by Comfort Women activists including coalition groups like the ‘Comfort Women’ Justice Coalition (CWJC)2 who were able to obtain the support of city and county governments like San Francisco. What particularly piqued the ire of the Osaka mayor was the representation of three different nationalities in the statue, symbolizing a systemized Greater Asia program of sexual enslavement during wartime. It shows three young women standing and holding hands, each representing China, Korea and the Philippines, where many of Japan’s comfort women originated. Looking on is a statue in the likeness of the Korean activist Kim Hak-sun who was a World War II sexual slave (‘comfort woman’) in service to the Japan Imperial Army.3 The statue is accompanied by educational tools that teach about the history of comfort women, and the presence of multiple nationalities makes it harder for Japan to single out its perennial Comfort Women chiding state, South Korea, a key US ally like Japan in a security alliance ‘vital to checking North Korea’s aggression, and to balancing China’s power in East Asia’ (Fortin, 2017). Yoshimura’s letter exposes adjunct grievances that the Japanese government holds with how its wartime image is portrayed globally. He cites a widely adopted McGrawHill world history textbook, Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (Bentley et  al., 2015), now in its sixth edition, that was openly criticized by Prime

Minister Abe in parliament for containing what the government of Japan referred to as factual errors, including one paragraph in particular: ‘The Japanese Army forcibly recruited, conscripted and dragooned as many as 200,000 women aged 14 to 20 to serve in military brothels’ (Fackler, 2015). This was not the first time the prime minister raised an objection. In his first term as Prime Minister (2006 to 2007), Abe told a group of reporters in reference to comfort women: ‘The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion. We have to take it from there’ (Tabuchi, 2007). Abe’s comment was in response to a 2007 US congressional resolution that called for Japan to ‘formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility’ for using ‘comfort women’, a Japanese euphemism for women who were in fact forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, Abe boasted to the Asahi Shimbun about his successful action to circumvent critical commentary that was part of a 2001 NHK documentary about the comfort women (Laurence, 2005; Kingston, 2017). Abe has been supported by sympathetic revisionary university professors who take umbrage with Japan being painted in a bad light or singled out for any wartime wrongdoings. Academic supporters such as Tsutomu Nishioka of Tokyo Christian University have questioned the sexual enslavement category. In his 108 page report, ‘Behind the Comfort Women Controversy: How Lies Became Truth’, sponsored by the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, Professor Nishioka refers to comfort women as ‘prostitutes who provided sex services to Japanese military personnel prior to and during World War II’ (Nishioka, 2007). Korean-American and other activists, along with former comfort women, lobbied the San Francisco government to place a Comfort Women memorial at St. Mary’s Square in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Mayor Breed released a press statement that placed the memorial in the foreground of the

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#MeToo movement and the exploitation of women worldwide:

inscription that was placed later at the base of the memorial:

The San Francisco Comfort Woman Memorial is a symbol of the struggle faced by all women who have been, and are currently, forced to endure the horrors of enslavement and sex trafficking. These victims deserve our respect and this memorial reminds us all of events and lessons we must never forget. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/04/us/sanfrancisco-sister-city-comfort-women-trnd/index. html

This monument bears witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and girls, euphemistically called Comfort Women, who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces in thirteen Asia-Pacific countries from 1931 to 1945. Most of these women died during their wartime capacity. This dark history was hidden for decades until the 1990s when the survivors courageously broke their silence. They helped move the world to declare that sexual violence as a strategy of war is a crime against humanity for which governments must be held accountable.

The former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors succeeded Mayor Edwin Lee following his sudden death by heart attack in December 2017. The Chinese-American Lee had by then spent well over two years in contact with Mayor Yoshimura in dispute over the comfort women memorial. Yoshimura’s letter to Lee (2015) said that falsehoods in the memorial inscription would be carried widely by the mass media and, as a result, many people would accept ‘this unconfirmed, one-sided view as historical truth…. this problem must not be trivialized as an exceptional case that only involves Japan’.4

At the time of his death, Edwin Lee was praised as the quintessential ‘Left Coast’ liberal and pro-underdog leader (Weiss and Bacon, 2017) in the port city known worldwide as the birthplace of America’s Counterculture of the 1960s. Lee was a civil rights lawyer and community organizer whose family had immigrated to the United States from China and had lived in public housing as a child. An up-by-thebootstraps success story, he later graduated from the University of California, Berkeley law school. It was Lee who had presided over the installation of the comfort women memorial on September 22, 2017, at which time Mayor Yoshimura said that the city of Osaka would be severing its relationship with San Francisco in the future. The statue, called ‘Column of Strength’, received approval as an art installation by the Board of Supervisors (Jones, 2017). The vote was unanimously in favor of the political art piece that indicted the behavior of the Japanese Imperial Army over a 15-year period across the Asia-Pacific, as noted by the following

Japan’s media propaganda strategic approach to the comfort women issue uses several tactics, the most obvious being: (1) ‘We weren’t the only ones’ and (2) ‘We resolved the problem’. But in the information war, the original sin in this case, from which all other transgressions follow, was the sin of omission. It took the Government of Japan nearly 50 years to acknowledge the existence of these women. On August 4, 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, the father of the current foreign minister Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese Imperial Army had forced women, referred to by the Japanese as comfort women, to work in military-run brothels during World War II. The key point of the Kono statement is force. Subsequent administrations, particularly the Abe administration, have proffered the possibility that most, if not all, of these women were not forced but were, in fact, willing prostitutes. This ambiguous responsibility injects life into the comfort woman cause that has continued well into the 21st century. The more Japan complains that it is being singled out unfairly, the more attention it draws to the activism around the issue. As the author points out in The Japan Times: Comfort women is an internet meme as much as a horrible episode in history. If one wants to use a short-circuit version of information war attacking, Google these two words and see who comes out the victor in the rhetorical battle. It’s not Japan. Why? Because people in power, like Osaka’s mayor, continue to use self-defeating persuasion tactics to suppress debate and dialogue. (Snow, 2017)

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Why is it so difficult to have public debate on policy issues that foment dissent and opposition globally and thereby impair Japan’s image and reputation? Because there is no platform in public life or the media with which the people can engage, debate, or discuss matters of importance. Japanese media cover politicians all the time, especially the comings and goings of the prime minister and his senior cabinet by press club members (kisha kurabu) who have gentlemen’s agreements about what to say and what to omit. But the most controversial policy debates do not involve the public. If the prime minister and The Diet (Japanese parliament) want to pass some controversial legislation like approving overseas combat missions in violation of the pacifist clause known as Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution, it is often under the cloak of darkness in a middleof-the-night vote, out of the light of public view (Soble, 2015). Then, in the morning, the people wake up to new realities having had no say in the change. Japanese people do not have a system of pluralism whereby diverse political parties have the creative imagination or ability to work out varying priorities such as an alternative system that would prioritize the public good over growth and economics – i.e., ‘GNPism’. The economics ueber alles mantra lost its luster altogether after the Japan Inc. bust of the 1990s, but it maintains its lifeline through media-friendly buzz terms like Abenomics and Womenomics (Oda and Reynolds, 2018), neither of which can overcome Japan’s declining and aging population, inflation, or labor shortage. The real growth has been in a form of managed democracy and inverted totalitarianism, modeled along the lines of its political and security benefactor, the United States (Wollin, 2008), where state power projects upwards to the antithesis of constitutional power. In the Japanese version, the populace remains in a vegetative state of political apathy with the only political expectation to vote – but even voting patterns have started to decline because there is little difference among politicians or political parties and therefore little to vote for.

JAPAN’S SOFT POWER STRATEGY What the Japanese people continue to hang on to in international reputation and status is first and foremost, culture. Japanese culture is not just soft power. It is power. The Soft Power 30 Report (McClory, 2018) ranks Japan fifth among the world’s top 30 and the very top Asian country in terms of soft power attractiveness. As Jonathan Soble (2015: 74) of the Asia Pacific Initiative observes in the report: ‘Wealth, technology, cultural cachet — Japan is blessed with an abundance of soft power assets. And it is fortunate to have them: with a constitution that forbids it from waging war, Japan cannot rely on military might to advance its interests the way some of its allies and rivals can’. In reality, Japan boasts one of the top ten militaries in the world but its abolition of war clause in the Japanese Constitution projects a global image of pacifism and no standing army. Japan’s projected strength is not hard power through a military but soft power through culture. Cultural soft power is a non-threatening approach that plays to its public reputation strengths: a nice and beautiful country that maintains its traditions and offers modern technologies, is safe, clean, and efficient with ample public transportation. One can go from a high-rise, five-star hotel to a remote centuries-old Japanese inn (ryokan). But, as we can see in the example of the comfort women issue, culture can be an Achilles heel in a global information context. It can become the all-encompassing explainer for why the Japanese are different or do not deserve outside criticism that might upset their inside harmony. Wareware Nihonjin (‘We Japanese’) perceive history distinctly. As Karel van Wolferen (1989) revealed in his seminal study, The Enigma of Japanese Power, and Alex Kerr added in Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan (2001), Japan is in the world but not of it. This distinction to brand its uniqueness is intentional, and this explains why tourists are flocking to the country with the weakened yen and relaxed visa regulations. People want to

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see firsthand what makes Japan so different from the rest of the world. Japan, in turn, plays on the mythos of uniqueness. Hugh Cortazzi (2015), who served as Japan’s British Ambassador in the 1980s, observed: It is equally difficult for non-Japanese to understand how intelligent and educated individuals can propagate the concept of Japanese uniqueness as propounded by the ‘Nihonjinron’5 theorists. Japan is no more unique than any other country. There are over 120 million Japanese individuals, all different, and most generalizations about Japan and Japanese characteristics are at best approximations.

What Ambassador Cortazzi is describing as difficult for non-Japanese to believe is not at all difficult for Japanese to believe because it is a mythos that serves the running of the country quite well. It could be seen as the Japanese equivalent of the American diversity ethos; it is the myth of the melting pot in America and the myth of the ‘100 million as one’ myth in Japan. That Japan is an enigma feeds an industry of one-way communication where the world has much more to learn about Japan than Japan needs to understand the world. A Japanese exceptionalism (Nihonjinron) myth perpetuates, but it is not the style of American Exceptionalism, which is more political. Japan’s ‘otherness’ is more cultural and historical, nourished largely by the Japanese themselves who perpetuate exceptionality to the rest of Asia and who are dichotomously in awe of the West, particularly the United States, but do not want to be seen as part of the West or the world. Author Peter N. Dale, a rare critic of the Nihonjinron literature, (The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness) places Nihonjinron exceptionalism in the context of political conformity and nationalism. It is a mythos for political advantage: First, they implicitly assume that the Japanese constitute a culturally and socially homogeneous racial entity, whose essence is virtually unchanged from prehistoric times down to the present day. Secondly, they presuppose that the Japanese differ radically from all other known peoples. Thirdly, they are

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conspicuously nationalistic, displaying a conceptual and procedural hostility to any mode of analysis which might be seen to derive from external, nonJapanese sources. In a general sense then, nihonjinron may be defined as works of cultural nationalism concerned with ostensible ‘uniqueness’ of Japan in any aspect, and which are hostile to both individual experience and the notion of internal sociohistorical diversity. Because of this common currency toward uniqueness, it’s rare that you will hear any discussion in Japan about an East Asian or Northeast Asian identity. The Japanese do not identify with the Koreans or the Chinese, despite having much in common. As Jean-Pierre Lehman writes in The Globalist: On the surface, the Northeast Asian trio should have everything going for close union. China, Japan and Korea are each other’s major trade and investment partners and their economies are highly interdependent. Furthermore, they share a common culture. All three are Confucianist societies for which the most prized value is ‘harmony’. Chinese, Japanese and Koreans not only have significant common interests, they should also be able to understand each other on the basis of a common cultural wavelength.

Japan’s cultural straightjackets binds it to a fixed and often defensive position: ‘You just don’t understand us’ or ‘You will never understand us’. If one reads the entirety of Mayor Yoshimura’s letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, one can draw the conclusion that San Francisco’s error of judgment in placing the comfort woman memorial is because of its lack of understanding the Japan position. There seems to be no room for facts that challenge perceptions of ‘distinctive’ history. Alex Kerr (2001: 104), who has lived and worked in Japan for over 40 years, observes: ‘Traditionally, in Japan, ‘truth has never been sacrosanct, nor do ‘facts’ need to be real, and here we run against one of the great cultural divides between East and West’. That cultural division is to value the ideal above the real. From day-to-day, office-based communication to far afield diplomatic discourse, Japanese people uphold the tatemae (official stated position) over the honne (real or private intent) in pursuit of social harmony. The tatemae is what pulls people to consider visiting Japan; it is what gives Japan the flavor of being like no other place in the world. Much

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communication takes place nonverbally and with reserve, in the proverbial manner of ‘the nail that sticks out must be hammered down’. People give up their individual opinion or stated position in exchange for things running smoothly. You will not find the Japanese public expressing any views on the comfort women memorial statue or the comfort women movement. Too much honne is like a white slip showing beneath a black dress. It is out of place. Too much tatemae is worrisome when applied to political communication. As Kerr (2001: 106) explains: ‘Tatemae is a charming attitude when it means that everyone should look the other way at a guest’s faux pas in the tearoom; it has dangerous and unpredictable results when applied to corporate balance sheets, drug testing and nuclear power safety results’. Consider the tatemae in overdrive by TEPCO that took five years to admit to covering up the seriousness of the Fukushima-Daichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster associated with the Earthquake on March 11, 2011 or the years-long tatemae of the Tokyo-based Takata Corporation that had to pay a total of $1 billion in criminal penalties in the United States following the company’s misconduct in revelations about its defective airbag inflators (Department of Justice, U.S., 2017). A longtime critique of Japan, Debito Arudo (2011) explains the delays and foot-dragging surrounding the truth of Fukushima-Daichi radiation: What is considered the most untrustworthy of professions? Politics, of course. Because politicians are seen as personalities who, for their own survival, appeal to people by saying what they want to hear, regardless of their own true feelings. That is precisely what tatemae does to Japanese society. It makes everyone into a politician, changing the truth to suit their audience, garner support or deflect criticism and responsibility…Post-Fukushima Japan must realize that public acceptance of lying got us into this radioactive mess in the first place.

Japan’s closest relation internationally is the United States, but this is not a partnership of equals. Japan is the dependent to the patron in

an ill-defined ‘special relationship’. What this dependency provides is a US shield against Japan asserting a separate political or security narrative in international relations. The shield is not just one of military and diplomatic protection, but also a suppression of points of view that challenge the special relationship. The defenders of Japan and the Japan-US relationship are known aptly as ‘Japan Hands’, exemplified by soft power guru and Harvard dean and professor emeritus Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage, author of three high-profile briefs on US-Japan relations. The latest, More Important than Ever: Renewing the U.S.-Japan Alliance for the 21st Century (Nye and Armitage, 2018), calls for Japan to increase its military spending and expand military bases to accommodate threatening neighbors like China and North Korea. The proposed collective defensive posture, a combined joint task force for the Western Pacific, is currently prohibited in Japan’s peace constitution but is needed to counter China’s maritime advances (Sonoda, 2018). Historian and former diplomat Ivan P. Hall (1987, 1997) describes the system as a mind cartel: Unlike the flow of ideas between the US and Europe, the Japan-US discourse is determined largely by a small group of Japanese and American experts on each other’s countries who have bridged the great linguistic and cultural gap. Ostensibly dedicated to mutual friendship, this narrow channel of scholars, journalists, and diplomats serves increasingly to skew the dialogue in Japan’s favor. It does this through cultural excuses and other special pleading; by fending off critical analyses; by glossing over sensitive issues in Japan; by assuming adequate Japanese knowledge of the US, and by failing to protest Japan’s restrictions on foreign academics and journalists.

The United States can take more of the global public opinion’s opposition to its military interventions and culture of violence, while Japan stands above the fray as the nation-state of peace and a culture superpower (Watanabe and McConnell, 2008; Watanabe, 2013). In lieu of political

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and security leadership internationally, what strategic narrative does Japan have in its toolbox? The University of Tokyo international security professor, Chiyuki Aoi, whose background includes working on behalf of Japan at the United Nations, says that Japan’s strategic communication relies heavily on ‘messaging via deeds’ and the Abe administration’s slogan of the nation-state as a ‘proactive contributor to peace’ that is ready to ‘embrace a more active role in international security’ (Aoi, 2017).

JAPAN’S MEDIA SLIP IS SHOWING Japan’s media system acts like a housebroken pet in subservience to the man of the house, in this case, the emboldened and much more media-savvy, second term Shinzo Abe administration. At first blush, the Japanese media appear free and independent from state intervention. Upon closer inspection, Japan’s press continues to slide down global indices of media freedom. In 2018, Reporters Without Borders ranked Japan 67 out of 180 countries based on journalists’ complaints that there has been a ‘climate of mistrust toward them ever since Shinzo Abe became prime minister again in 2012’.6 Adding to the drop is an ill-defined and journalistically unpopular state secrets law that the press watchdog referred to as ‘draconian’ in 2015 (Sekiguchi, 2015). The State Secrets Law took effect two years into Abe’s second term. It gives power to the Japanese government to jail any person who violates broadly defined state secrets to up to ten years in jail. Japan’s press ranking improved slightly from 72 in 2016 and 2017, but it is still a double digit drop from 53 when Abe took office for a second time. The newly rebranded NHK World-Japan (from NHK World),7 dubbed ‘Japan to the world’, is the international broadcasting service of NHK (Nippon H¯os¯o Ky¯okai – Japan Broadcasting Corporation). Its target audience

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is global, operating much like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in financing and intent. It employs 10,300 in 54 domestic stations and 30 overseas offices with an operating budget of 716.8 Billion Yen, 98 percent of which comes from receiver fees. NHK WorldJapan cannot withstand state power entanglement. The sin, as noted, is one of omission, which is harder to track than commission. It is also knowing who to invite or not to speak on its network. In its corporate profile literature, NHK highlights six core public values that reinforce NHK’s profile as Japan’s public diplomacy broadcaster: (1) Provide accurate, fair, impartial information; (2) Promote safety and security; (3) Create high-quality cultural experiences; (4) Contribute to local communities; (5) Strengthen Japan’s global connections; and (6) Contribute to education and public welfare.8 For anyone who studies the structure and content of this international broadcasting organization, its core values are subject more to the political leadership than to the tastes of the public. As Krauss (2017: 69) observes: NHK and the state are less two creatures eyeing each other warily, occasionally coming into conflict – as the ‘watchdog’ metaphor of the democratic press would have it – than two octopi, constantly locked in a multi-tentacle embrace jockeying with each other, but in which the state/ LDP is the larger and more powerful of the two and usually prevails.

Despite its high media profile in Japan and regional recognition in Asia, NHK has neither the global visibility nor global credibility of the BBC on which NHK is modeled. It is known for its aseptic newscasts bereft of interpretive- or opinion-driven commentary. Bland is its news brand. This style is conducive to an organization that has been under the watchful eyes of its government overseers from one party that has ruled Japan, with few exceptions, since 1955. In contrast, the Bostonbased Reputation Institute ranks the BBC, on which NHK is modeled, among the Top 50 global brands with the best reputation in the

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world and the top for news. BBC ‘continues to be seen as the most trusted and objective international news provider’9 and leads the world in global breaking news. The BBC is the world’s most popular news source on Twitter.10 Domestically, NHK, as part of the media establishment, maintains a declining reputation among the Japanese people, despite it being at one time the most trusted institution in Japanese society.11 As pointed out by Edelman Japan’s CEO Ross Rowbury (2018), the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that in Japan only one out of three Japanese in the general public has trust in media (32 percent), with just a slight tilt in trust in government (37 percent). Despite the declining trust overall in social institutions, NHK World-Japan, along with the Abe administration, are part of the face and nation brand image of Japan in the world, specifically with regards to the 2020 Summer Olympics and Summer Paralympics. NHK, along with the prime minister, are attracting the attention of the global publics and media more than Japan has experienced since the economic bubble years of the last century. This media spotlight and public attention on Japan is carrying with it questions about the country’s declining press freedom ranking that places Japan last among the Group of Seven industrialized nations. A chorus of international observers such as Reporters Without Borders, think tanks like the German-based Bertelsmann Stiftung (Pascha and Köllner, 2018), and a 2017 report by United Nations Special Rapporteur David Kaye on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in Japan (Kaye, 2017) agree that Japan’s media system is weakening and concentrating as the LDP Party under Abe grows in strength. The Bertelsmann Japan Report (Pascha and Köllner, 2018: 24–25) notes that Japan’s media structure is oligopolistic, consisting of five conglomerates (Asahi, Fuji Sankei, Mainichi, Yomiuri, and Nihon Keizai Group) that control the leading national newspapers and the major TV networks. The sole

public broadcaster NHK ‘rarely criticizes the status quo to any significant degree’, and Japan’s media system ‘does not capture the pluralism of opinions in Japan’. The major dailies do not expose scandals and investigative ‘gotcha’ journalism occurs more in the weekly or monthly tabloid periodicals that operate outside the press club system. Their exposés, including those that alleged a shady land deal and charges of a coverup by the Prime Minister and Mrs. Abe, blew over in time (Fifield, 2017). The foreign press provides more pressure, and since 3/11 is raising concerns about its ability to do its job properly against a more assertive LDP-led coalition that is countering critical reporting.

THE OPEN LETTER As the author first accounted in Japan’s Information War (Snow, 2016a), much criticism of the Abe administration is coming from the Western press, particularly reporters from Europe and the United States who reside in Japan. A shot across the bow came from Carsten Germis (2015), foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who exposed how he was treated differently by the Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Abe: ‘The country I’m leaving is different from the one I arrived in back in January 2010’. Germis (2015) published his sayonara piece in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan journal, Number 1 Shimbun. The FCCJ is noteworthy for having been black-listed by the second Abe administration. The title of the article commanded attention with a title related to the often unspoken relationship dynamic between the state and media: ‘Confessions of a foreign correspondent after a half-decade of reporting from Tokyo to his German readers’. It reached well beyond his German readers. It was a shot across the bow to warn global publics about Japanese government intervention of the free press (and

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by government in Japan we usually mean the LDP and its party head, Shinzo Abe). The article was forwarded widely on social media and translated into Japanese because its source was credible. He is no wild-eyed soul who regularly harangues the powers that be. He writes for the German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a politically conservative and economically liberal (pro-capitalistic) newspaper like the Wall Street Journal. He is also not accused of being an ‘FOB’ (Fresh Off the Boat), a name-calling device used in Japan to cut off anyone with whom you disagree in general or to silence someone who is considered particularly ignorant about Japanese ways and norms. The open letter from Germis (2015) reads like a rallying cry for Japan’s media slippage: There is a growing gap between the perceptions of the Japanese elites and what is reported in the foreign media, and I worry that it could become a problem for journalists working here…there is a clear shift that is taking place under the leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – a move by the right to whitewash history. It could become a problem because Japan’s new elites have a hard time dealing with opposing views or criticism, which is very likely to continue in the foreign media.

What allowed Carsten Germis to write such a critical piece with less risk was because he was leaving Japan. He would not have written such words if he had been trying to gain entry as a foreign correspondent to Japan. He wrote about what he had experienced: a downturn in openness, a closing instead of an opening at a time when Japan is trying very hard to present itself as open and ready for the world to come visit. His experience with the Democratic Party of Japan cast a contrast to the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan under Shinzo Abe. Whereas all three DPJ administrations (2010–2012) were open to explaining their positions to the foreign press, Germis critiqued Abe’s LDP and its suspicious stance as well as its defensiveness against any press criticism, particularly around the administration’s revisionist wartime history views that receive a

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lot of drubbing in the foreign media. This lack of press access corresponds with a new government-led social media outreach platform on Facebook and Twitter (Abe 2.0) to reflect a perception of more outreach on the part of the second administration of Abe that began in December 2012. The government of Japan’s message is to appear more transparent, but in its press handlings, it is coming across as smoke and mirrors. Official communication efforts in Japan are predominantly one-way and centrally controlled. Outliers, that is anyone who is doing investigative reporting or asking too many questions, should not participate, and if they do, they will be under greater scrutiny and pushback. Carsten Germis was pained to have to reveal that the country he knew a few years ago was no more. What he described in his article was a country whose current political leadership is more than just hypersensitive to press criticism – all governments react negatively to negative coverage – and so that is to be expected. What got wide attention was his description of the amateurish behavior of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in trying to intimidate and discredit Germis through ad hominem attacks, the main charge being that he was in the pocket of China. Germis writes, ‘After the appearance of an article I had written that was critical of the Abe administration’s historical revisionism, the paper’s senior foreign policy editor was visited by the Japanese consul general of Frankfurt, who passed on objections from ‘Tokyo’. The Chinese, he complained, had used it for antiJapanese propaganda’. If this is an example of the government’s beefed-up global public relations, then Japan should have cause to worry. One might imagine that the Japanese consul general in Frankfurt has better things to do than worry about Chinese reprints. This astonishing anecdote reveals a core public health problem. Asian studies scholar Jeff Kingston highlights three chronic conditions of Japan’s malodorous communication ‘illness’ that lead to a repeat misdiagnosis of

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ramping up government paranoia and foreign press intimidation: The intolerance towards criticism is based on the erroneous belief that all criticism of Japanese government actions equals anti-Japanese sentiment. There is also a presumption that journalists are ‘guests’ who should be polite to their hosts while scholars who take Japanese research money also risk being labeled traitors if they express critical views. In 21st century Japan, there is far too much official paranoia that all criticism of Japan is aiding and abetting China and Korea.

It is not just foreign reporters that are being singled out. Japanese scholars in Japan are subjected to government pushback. Professor Koichi Nakano, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University, is one of the most cited academics on Japan’s politics but has fallen victim to a smear campaign to discredit him for being reliably critical of the Abe government. Germis, among other foreign reporters, was told by press relations officials in the Abe administration not to use Nakano as a credible expert source (Takeda, 2015). Japan maintains its status as a free press country, but it cannot be held up as any gold standard. Its sheer media market size may be part of the problem since it allows Japan to continue to cater to its own way of doing things. In a Dentsu Public Relations publication, Communicating: A Guide to PR in Japan (Takagi, 2014/2015), the credibility of the Japanese mainstream daily news media is not put to question, but is explained to Western observers as uniquely Japanese: The media organizations generally – and the major dailies specifically – view themselves as intimately intertwined with Japanese culture and society. They seem themselves as bastions against cultural decay and as beacons of light for all that is special and sacred about Japan. Indeed, in their determination to champion the national good, the Japanese media are at odds with Western counterparts that see their role more clearly as independent arbiters and defenders of free speech.

Takashi Inoue (2018), the CEO of Japan’s oldest private public relations firm, explains why Japan’s global public communications

lags behind other countries. The country’s homogeneity and its Confucianism philosophy has impacted Japan’s storytelling, messaging, and relations with the world. Japan ‘developed a unique, high-context form of communications’, that is not useful on the global stage. The Confucian way of thinking ‘requires strict superior-subordinate relations and reticence’ which is not the global way of communicating. While the Japanese remain voracious newspaper readers and honor the power of written over spoken words, more Japanese consume the traditional pencil press and the digital versions available on smartphones. There is not widespread diversity in ownership, but there is editorial and news variety across the political spectrum from right to left, including the Communist perspective. In practice, Japan’s media system as a whole caters to the power elite center and does not engage in investigative longform journalism. Reporters have little choice but to set a tone in their articles that play to their accepted angles. The Asahi Shimbun, the leading liberal newspaper, is expected to lament Japan’s rightwing dominance and argue against changing Japan’s peace constitution in its editorial pages. The Yomiuri Shimbun plays its role as a more conservative counterweight to the liberal Asahi, and the Sankei Shimbun extends the rightward tilt as the newest and most conservative of the five dailies. The Nikkei is the top financial source.

THE DETAINEE On November 19, 2018 a private plane landed at Tokyo International Airport, better known as Haneda, conveniently downtownadjacent to Tokyo. Inside the jet was Carlos Ghosn, the 17-year veteran chairman of Nissan and ‘one of the most romanticized and ruthless chief executives the global business community has ever seen’ (Chozick and Rich, 2018). He is also one of the most admired businesspeople in Japan, at least

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until November 2018. He was in town to attend a board meeting and to have dinner with his daughter and her boyfriend at Jiro, the renowned three-Micheline star restaurant made famous by the award-winning documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. But the board meeting was a ruse and he never had that dinner. Upon deplaning, he was met by Tokyo prosecutors and taken immediately to the same detention center that first imprisoned cult leader Shoko Asahara, mastermind of Tokyo’s deadly 1995 subway sarin gas attack, before his hanging in July. As of this writing, Ghosn is facing charges of ‘significant acts of misconduct’ regarding his handling of personal income and company assets. He is being treated like any accused, with no special privileges, surviving on rice meals and hours-long interrogation with no lawyer present. Putting aside the guilt or innocence of the accused, it is how his case is being covered differently by the Japanese and international press that is revelatory. The international press is covering Japan’s legal system and ‘how the deck is stacked against suspects in a country that boasts a 99 percent conviction rate’ (Greimel and Okamura, 2018). The global press coverage is becoming just as much a defendant in the Ghosn case as the executive himself. NHK alone was tipped off to cover Ghosn’s arrival at Haneda. Since then, NHK’s coverage has towed the prosecutorial line. The prolonged detainment with no formal charges or family visits is designed to wear down suspects to confess to their wrongdoing. As the author shared in a speech to the Public Relations Society of Japan (PRSJ), the Japanese government and Japan Inc. are coming out the losers in the global information and image war vis-à-vis Ghosn. Japan is behind the story as it goes global. Why? Because too often the Japanese press play it safe and play to the home crowd. NHK is the perfect safe and reliable mass media vehicle for this. This is why NHK cannot compete with the BBC as a reliable global international broadcaster. Whether it is NHK or NHK-World Japan, it

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plays to the home crowd in style and content. The longer this Ghosn story goes on without resolution, the longer it goes on as an usversus-them scenario between Japan and France or Japan and Lebanon – even Japan and the world – the more it will favor Ghosn and his sympathizers who will shift this from a finance criminality (‘he’s just a fallen CEO turned criminal’) to a human rights cause celebrity story (‘he’s like a political prisoner’). The renowned Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz (2018) wrote a scathing opinion piece about Japan’s legal system, concluding that he would advise his clients against doing business in Japan because it does not recognize constitutional protections of open societies. There are two ways that Japan might respond to the Dershowitz sentiment: (1) dismiss it as ignorant of the culture of business or the legal system in Japan; or (2) take his critical point of view to heart to learn how others see Japan. Stepping outside its comfort zone isn’t the norm when the system is under the spotlight.

JAPAN’S MEDIA PROPAGANDA ENVIRONMENT FLOURISHES A 2016 Economist editorial began, ‘Japan is not, by nature, a boastful country. Its opportunities for bombast have shrunk along with its population’ (The Economist, 2016). This was in reference to Abe’s much-hyped family name economics program, Abenomics, with its spin-off program to invite women back into the paid economy after marriage and childbirth. Is this self-revelation of humility based on a lack of boasting or an aversion to confrontation and conflict? It depends on who you ask and where you look. At Dentsu Public Relations (2018), boasting goes against the grain of Japan’s culture, with its suggestion that one work within the system as it is and go through a press club for points of contact. Julian Macfarlane (2018), a 40-year resident of Japan who works in the

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Japanese advertising industry, calls the information environment not that of information censorship but rather knowledge scarcity. NHK, the leading news broadcaster, presents information but omits a knowledge context that would make the situation or event understandable or comprehensive. Hearsay is common, for instance, using unnamed sources from the intelligence and government sectors, some of whom are the same sources that lied about the safety of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Perrow, 2013) after 3/11. Macfarlane has observed that no one displays vigorous discussion since this can make one stick out from the crowd. As Westernized as Japan is in convenience and modernity, it is still a place of following the leader. An authority tells one what to think and a respondent feigns agreement. Within that system, everything runs smoothly, until prying eyes (global public opinion) or a vibrant global press intervenes. In the West, you need the semblance of a logical argument because the heterogeneity expects debate and opposition, but Japan plays up its collectivistic and homogenic harmony. There cannot be tolerance for much dissent, outside of the almost daily presence of the ultra-nationalist far right groups (Uyoku dantai) of which any Japanese or foreign resident is aware. These groups, estimated to be in the thousands, cruise the streets in their propaganda vans, trucks, and buses (gaisensha) shouting their screeds through loudspeakers prominently marked with the Imperial Seal of Japan or the Imperial Army flag (Ashcraft, 2012). Newcomers to Japan are often surprised at the lack of diversity not just among the people, which is to be expected, but more so among political parties and political ideas. Japan touts a free and democratic society as the top partner to the United States in the region, but it does not have the give-and-take or diverse representation of points of view that are on display in its patron nation-state. The circulation of ideas is rare. Press clubs ensure homogenized and bland coverage of

the comings and goings of officials, with the largest contingent assigned to the movements of the prime minister. Prevailing wisdom is nurtured by a cozy and closed intelligentsia system of Washington think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Sasakawa Peace Foundation, EastWest Center and elite institutions of higher learning such as Georgetown, Columbia, and Harvard. Everyone seems to know the other and outsiders – that is, those without the right pedigree – are not allowed to join the conversation. The comradery among the Japan hands and those they handle is palpable, as exemplified by these opening remarks of CSIS president John Hamre (CSIS, 2018) in presenting Japan’s Minister of Defense Takeshi Iwaya: I’m so grateful for the Abe administration that is willing to lead at a time when America is kind of in retreat in Asia. Prime Minister Abe and Japan have leaned forward to basically defend and support these Western liberal international values that they’ve embraced in their heart, so I’m very grateful for that. And Iwaya-san is on the front line every day. He’s on the front line every day for Japan, he’s on the front line every day for us, and it’s very important for that reason that he’s here.

On the Japan side, almost anyone one encounters in the government ministries is a graduate of the University of Tokyo (‘Todai’) or two other Tokyo-based elite institutions, Keio and Waseda. The political party system is driven according to this same centralized and controlled hierarchical structure, a Senpai and Kohai system of seniors and mentors to juniors and helpers. It is a vertical and masculine system that maintains dominance and keeps outliers in check. If indeed we accept that Japan is a cultural superpower, we may want to consider the idea that Japan’s cultural DNA is a product of a long history of isolation and skepticism toward foreign, i.e., Western, ideas of free expression and debate. The central government and its ruling party present positions and rarely debate. It is not to the standard in style or substance of the parliamentary style of democracy seen in the

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UK. Japan’s modern society is steeped in the Edo (Tokugawa) period, the final political period of traditional Japan where the shogunate ruled. For over 220 years, from the 1630s until 1867, Japanese subjects were forbidden from leaving Japan (Sakoku period), and, with a few exceptions for isolated traders and missionaries, all foreigners were banned.12 A hierarchical system was put into operation, which has its consequences today with Japan’s continued adherence to control of ideas and media in Tokyo. In the United States, everyone has to accept that a lot of people do not agree with each other. Japan maintains allegiance to its homogeneous and hierarchical background. In the Edo period, consensus about behaviors in every stratum of society was necessary for social order. If you questioned consensus, you threatened everyone at your level of society. They could get into trouble with the people above them. The presence of foreigners with foreign ideas was threatening. According to communications specialist Julian Macfarlane, today we still have the descendants of the Bakufu, the samurai, the peasants, and the artisans, except that everybody believes that they are the same: Wareware nihonjin (‘We Japanese’). This one-unit, one-mind approach to running society requires integration propaganda. In fall 2015, shortly after The Diet voted to relax restrictions on Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, Prime Minister Abe called on the creation of a ‘Society in which all 100 million people can make efforts as one’ (Ichioku so katsuyakua). Ostensibly, the Japanese people were being called upon to be active and contribute to Japan’s economic growth. An Asahi Shimbun editorial called the new slogan ‘unpleasantly pushy’. Its Vox Populi frontpage column added: ‘Abe’s slogan must have reminded many people of similar expressions of the past. A buzz phrase in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II (Demetriou, 2015) was ichi oku so zange (the entire population of 100 million is repentant)’. Tokyo-based Japanese politics professor and writer Michael Cucek (2015) noted

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that there was barely a shrug from Japanese whose memory bank seemed to miss the obvious comparisons between Abe’s 2015 slogan and imperial wartime Japan: Anyone with a passing knowledge of pre-1945 propaganda can rattle off a string of ichi oku phrases, none of which invokes happy memories. There is the commandment for ideological unanimity – Ichi oku isshin (100 Million Persons: One Mind”) – or the encouragement to press forward with the war effort – Susume ichi oku hi no tama da (“Forward The 100 Million Balls of Flame!”). There is the call for to be prepared for extermination of every single Japanese citizen in the final defense of the country: Ichi oku gyokusai (‘100 Million Crushed Jewels’). All for one and one for all makes for a population conditioned to accept a top-down hierarchical status quo.

CONCLUSION In 2013, BBC Two presented a documentary film that called out Japan for being the most sexless nation on the planet. The film, ‘No Sex Please, We’re Japanese’,13 was a take on the 1970s English sex farce, ‘No Sex Please, We’re British’, but that’s where all comparisons ended. The moderator Anita Rani declared that ‘Japan is so different from any other country in the world’. To a great extent, she’s right, but she’s likely not thinking about it along the lines of information, press and politics, as laid out in this chapter. Most parachute observers of Japan, like Rani, are taken in by its cultural traditions or cultural quirkiness. Yes, Japan does pride itself very much on being different from other countries, but that difference isn’t individual so much as sociological. Its uniqueness is conformity. What we have is the probability of a country immersed in its own mythmaking vis-à-vis a very welloiled system of integration propaganda where everyone participates and knows their place in the hierarchy from bottom to top. Such propaganda did not begin with the US occupation of Japan at the end of World War II, an occupation that would last for seven years. Rather, it took off in the 20th century as a form of

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pre-war and wartime imperial propaganda during Japan’s 15-year unsuccessful battle for supremacy in Asia (1931–45). Kushner (2006) notes that propaganda was never confined to the upper echelons of the military and government bureaucracy. The ‘thought war’, as the Japanese called it, was designed to spring up from society ‘or at least was made to appear that way’ (Kushner, 2006: 6). There was no government mandate in force, as the civilian Japanese engaged in reciprocal relationships from the military to the government to civil society. This reciprocity principle reinforced active participation in propaganda manufacturing. There was no need for a Joseph Goebbels-like Minister of Propaganda. There was no Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda single authority. It wasn’t needed. Kushner (2006) notes in The Thought War that while the Americans and British in World War II assiduously tried to avoid using the word propaganda with all its negative connotations, the Japanese ‘employed it. The pursuit of democratic ideals did not hinder Japan’s engagement of propaganda for the simple reason that the Asian nation had little, if any, desire to be democratic’ (Kushner, 2006: 7). After Japan’s defeat, Once the emperor’s demigod sovereignty status was replaced by democratic sovereignty in the new US-authored Constitution, Japan simply transferred over to the democratic totalitarian model that continues to promote process over purpose. Japanese integration propaganda educates the Japanese in how to participate fully in society from the time they are very young. Its goals are stability; it propagates the belief that one cannot be fulfilled on one’s own – only through collective society working together seamlessly. As Ellul (1965, 76) elucidates, ‘it seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth. Here all psychological and opinion analyses must be utilized, as well as the mass media of communication’. The individual should not be left alone in integrated propaganda, just as a journalist, foreign or domestic, should not be left alone to conjure up contradictions in

the system. Similarly, in The Technological Society (Ellul, 1964) we see the consequences of a technological society, where the state is an efficiency-oriented enterprise, not an expression of the will of the people that serves social justice purposes. The historymaking Shinzo Abe administration, Japan’s longest serving prime minister, has now enacted under his watch three controversial decisions that impact freedom and social justice. They are the Secrecy Act (2013), Security Act (2015), and the Conspiracy Bill (2017), all of which aim to enhance the state’s ability to surveil and control its population (Ogasawara, 2017), in many cases through threatening harsh consequences to anyone who seeks out information that runs counter to the state’s objectives. The most recent Conspiracy Bill, renamed by Prime Minister Abe as the bill for ‘Terror and Other Preparation Crimes’, rationalized the legislation as a necessary counterterrorism measure before Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Similar to the Security Act, this bill was passed in the Diet on June 15, 2017 during the early hours of the morning, suspending discussion and debate. The 277 prohibitions run the gamut from banning the plotting of serious crimes such as terrorism as well as lesser offenses such as copying music; conducting sit-ins to protest against the construction of apartment buildings; using forged stamps; to mushroom picking in conservation forests or avoiding paying consumption tax.14 The government argued in part that illegal mushroom picking could potentially fund terror operations, which is why the wide range of domestic acts of disobedience were linked to terror. The Japanese public largely maintains its spectator function in the political process, even as new laws arise in service of the state and against dissent and critique. What is useful and practical to the state predominates. Karel van Wolferen’s (1989: 82) masterful writings on the inner workings of the Japanese model of society illustrate one of the basic tenets in Japan – that people in government and education preserve the status quo

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homogeneity and uniqueness of its people through enforcing rules and norms that prohibit freedom: ‘It may seem perverse to lump schoolchildren, journalists and gangsters together. But Japanese schools, newspapers, and organized crime have in common that they are each highly politicized as servants of the System’. Those who stray outside the margins of acceptable behavior may risk bullying or ostracism, as noted in Straitjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan (1995), a bestselling tell-all by onetime deputy director for Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (commonly known as Korosho), Dr. Masao Miyamoto. Miyamoto was fired by the Ministry for his public revelations. Success is measured in Japan through conceding to the consensus perspective. Nobody fails as long as you work within and never against the system. In turn, the system takes care of you. In exchange, you continue to work for the system. An echo chamber makes up the dominant consensus. Not everyone necessarily believes in it. They have not really thought about it. They do not have to. They believe in what others believe. While some tend toward normative idealism (‘what should be’) the Japanese tend toward situations (‘what should I do’). The nationstate goes to great efforts to protect itself from outside ideas and people; too much foreignness or too much foreign inspection, as we see with the Carlos Ghosn revelations, is never a good thing. Japan wants to protect its own autonomy and follow the lead of the United States in security; in exchange the U.S. elite establishment does not come down hard on Japan’s closed media system or Abe’s state secrets or conspiracies laws. In Japan (De Mooji 2010), belonging is everything, even if it means that one does not get training in individualistic thinking. To behave in an individualistic way is to court the proverbial hammer. This hesitancy to stick out or speak up, coupled with a government and dominant political party that views any press criticism as an obstacle to its own ambitions, reinforces conditions that do not offer proper checks and

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balances on power or build trust between the civil society and its elected officials. A nation that kowtows to political power and does not realize that media power is a necessary check on that power will find it difficult to withstand the watchful eyes of the world in 2020 and beyond. What can be done to help welcome the world? As the author first recommended in 2016, there isn’t enough factual information about Japan in the world. There is a mystery and secrecy surrounding some of what Japan is and does. Information abhors a vacuum. When there is a void, people fill in that space with their own preconceived notions and stereotypes. It is important that Japan redefine itself to the world on its own terms and not play catch up or constantly play defense, attempting to explain things after the fact. Japan needs to build more accessible databases of statistical and other information on its society and do this in a multilanguage platform. In addition, Japan needs to educate, train, and elevate its own Cultural Diplomacy Corps, whose main focus is overcoming perception and perspective myopias related to Japan. We all operate with something called belief perseverance, a strong tendency to hold onto our beliefs despite overwhelming data to the contrary. Stereotypes are particularly vulnerable to belief perseverance, and Japan is a country like no other that has more stereotypes attached to what it is and who its people are. Finally, Japan should be using its ICT technology to increase global connectivity and to promote global transparency: international media, new media, including mobile and social media, can help to demystify Japanese society and encourage more global interest and participation. All of these are cosmetic surgery only to prettify Japan’s public face before the world in 2020. Underlying it is the commodification, ideology, and exploitation of culture. As Karel von Wolferen (1989: 246) warned us more than two and a half decades ago, when culture is used to explain Japan to non-Japanese, e.g., ‘we do this because it is our culture’, it is ‘not perceived as tautology but believed to give a valid

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reason for accepting all manner of practices whose political nature has been lost sight of’. If we continue to pay attention to the overworked cultural motives of the Japanese, then we will continue to lose sight of the powerful, top-down systemic forces that are subsumed by it, and operate above it, beyond scrutiny, debate, or even reproach.

11  Henry Laurence, “NHK and Abe’s Agenda,” The Diplomat, February 8, 2014. https://thediplomat. com/2014/02/nhk-and-abes-agenda/ 12  The Seclusion of Japan documents: Tokugawa Iemitsu, “CLOSED COUNTRY EDICT OF 1635” AND “EXCLUSION OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1639; access at http://users.wfu.edu/watts/w03_Japancl.html 13  https://vimeo.com/80542212 14  Japan passes controversial anti-terror conspiracy law, BBC News, June 15, 2017.

Notes 1  Sister Cities International was created at President Eisenhower’s 1956 White House conference on citizen diplomacy. The city of Osaka was San Francisco’s first and oldest sister city, beginning in 1957. 2  The “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition is a grassroots, multi-ethnic and multi-national group of individuals and organizations that is part of a global “Comfort Women” justice movement. The CWJC led the lobbying effort to install the San Francisco Memorial. Read more at http://remembercomfortwomen.org/ 3  Kim Hak-sun was a Korean human rights activist who campaigned against sex slavery and war rape. During World War Two, Hak-sun was among many young women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. She was the first woman to come forward about the plight of the comfort woman. (Wikipedia) 4  http://www.city.osaka.lg.jp/hodoshiryo/cmsfiles/ contents/0000326/326856/02sityouatekoukaisy okan.pdf 5  Nihonjinron is a genre of texts that focus on issues of Japanese national and cultural identity. Such texts share a general assumption of the uniqueness of Japan, and the term nihonjinron can be employed to refer to this outlook. (Wikipedia) 6  https://rsf.org/en/japan 7  NHK World was rebranded NHK World-Japan in April 2018. An NHK press release said that it was “to establish wider global recognition for the service’s Japanese roots in advance of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” https:// www.nhk.or.jp/corporateinfo/english/press/ pdf/20180222.pdf 8  NHK Corporate Profile, 2018-2019, https://www. nhk.or.jp/corporateinfo/english/publication/pdf/ corporate_profile.pdf. 9  http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/publicpurposes/world.html 10  BBC World News best for global branding news, BBC Media Centre, http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/worldnews/2014/bbc-best-for-globalbreaking-news

REFERENCES Aoi, C. (2017). Japanese Strategic Communication: Its Significance as a Political Tool. Defence Strategic Communications 3 Arudo, D. (2011, November 1). The Costly Fallout of Tatemae and Japan’s Culture of Deceit. Japan Times. Ashcraft, B. (2012). A Collection of Right-Wing Japanese Propaganda Buses. Available at: https://kotaku.com/5884552/a–collectionof-right-wing-japanese-propaganda-buses/ Bentley, J., Ziegler, H. and Streets-Salter, H. (2015). Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, Vol. 2. Sixth edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Choi, S-H. (2015, December 28). Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime ‘Comfort Women’. New York Times. Chozick, A. and Rich, M. (2018). The Rise and Fall of Carlos Ghosn, New York Times, December 30. Cortazzi, H. (2015, April 14). Japan’s prickly revisionists. Japan Times. Cucek, M. (2015, December 1). Mr. Abe and His “100 Million.” Number 1 Shimbun. Demetriou, D. (2015, October 6). Japan’s PM Accused of Echoing Wartime Propaganda with New Slogan. Daily Telegraph. De Mooji, M. (2010). Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes. Third edition. London: Sage. Department of Justice, U.S. (2017, February 27). Takata Corporation Pleads Guilty, Sentenced to Pay $1 Billion in Criminal Penalties for Airbag Scheme. Press Release. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/takatacorporation-pleads-guilty-sentenced-pay1-billion-criminal-penalties-airbag-scheme

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Dershowitz, A. (2018, December 4). Abusive Treatment of Auto Executive Threatens the Japanese Legal System. The Hill. Dower, J. (1986). War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Ellul, J. (1964). The Technological Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Fackler, M. (2015, January 29). U.S. Textbook Skews History, Prime Minister of Japan Says. New York Times. Fackler, M. (2016, May 27). The Silencing of Japan’s Free Press. Foreign Policy. Fifield, A. (2017, February 27). In Japan, a Scandal Over a School Threatens to Entangle Abe. Washington Post. Fortin, J. (2017, November 25). ‘Comfort Women’ Statue in San Francisco Leads a Japanese City to Cut Ties. New York Times. Germis, C. (2015, April 2). On My Watch: Confessions of a Foreign Correspondent After a Half-Decade of Reporting from Tokyo to his German Readers. Number 1 Shimbun. Greimel, H. and Okamura, N. (2018, December 3). Ghosn’s Tokyo Jail no Country Club. Automotive News Europe. Hall, I. (1987, July 6). Stop Making Excuses for Japan’s Insularity. Wall Street Journal. Hall, I. (1997). Cartels of the Mind: Japan’s Intellectual Closed Shop. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Inoue, T. (2018). Public Relations in HyperGlobalization. London and New York: Routledge. Kerr, A. (2001). Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan. New York: Hill and Wang. Kingston, J. (2015, April 16). Testy Team Abe Pressures Media in Japan. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Kingston, J. (2017). Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan. London and New York: Routledge. Kushner, B. (2006). The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Jones, K. (2017, September 28). ‘Comfort Women’ Statue Strains 60-Year San Francisco-Osaka Alliance. Art Wire, KQED. Available at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/

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13809651/comfort-women-statue-strains60-year-san-francisco-osaka-alliance Laurence, H. (2005). Censorship at NHK and PBS. Japan Policy Research Institute Critique Vol. XII, No 3. Available at: http://www.jpri. org/publications/critiques/critique_XII_3.html Macfarlane, J. (2018). December 2018 and January 2019. Email correspondence and phone conversations with the author. McClory, J. (2018). The Soft Power 30. London: Portland Communications. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1993). Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the result of the study on the issue of “comfort women,” August 4. Available at https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/ fund/state9308.html Miyamoto, M. (1995). Straitjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan. Kodansha USA. Nishioka, T. (2007). Behind the Comfort Women Controversy: How Lies Became Truth. Tokyo: Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact. Nye, J. and Armitage, R. (2018). More Important Than Ever: Renewing the U.S.-Japan Alliance for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies. Oda, S. and Reynolds, I. (2018, September 20). What Is Womenomics, and Is It Working for Japan? Bloomberg. Ogasawara, M. (2017). Surveillance at the Roots of Everyday Interactions: Japan’s Conspiracy Bill and its Totalitarian Effects. Surveillance & Society 15(3/4): 477–485. Parlier, S. and Zdanowicz, C. (2018, October 4). San Francisco’s First Sister-City Cuts its Ties Over ‘Comfort Women’ Statue. CNN.com. Pascha, W. and Köllner, P. (2018). Japan Report: Sustainable Government Indicators. BertelsmannStiftung, Germany. Perrow, C. (2013, September 1). Nuclear Denial from Hiroshima to Fukushima. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Rowbury, R. (2018, February 25). 2018 Marked by a Polarization of Trust. Japan Times. Sekiguchi, T. (2015, February 13). Japan Slips in Press Freedom Ranking. Wall Street Journal. Snow, N. (2017, November 30). Mayor Damages Osaka’s Image by Cutting Ties with San Francisco. Japan Times.

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Snow, N. (2016a). Japan’s Information War. CreateSpace. ISBN: 978-1535097970. Snow, N. (2016b). Japan’s Challenges in Public Diplomacy: An American Vision. Paris: French Institute for International Relations (Ifri) Center for Asian Studies Soble, J. (2015, September 18). Japan’s Parliament Approves Overseas Combat Role for Military. New York Times. Sonoda, K. (2018, October 5). Armitage, Nye Urge Japan to Bolster Spending on Defense. Asahi Shimbun. Sugimoto, Y. (2010). An Introduction to Japanese Society. Third edition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tabuchi, H. (2007, March 1). Japan’s Abe: No Proof of WWII Sex Slaves. Associated Press. Takagi, K. (2014/2015). Communicating: A Guide to PR in Japan. Seventh Edition. Tokyo: Dentsu Public Relations. Takagi, K. (2018). Communicating: A Guide to PR in Japan. Eighth Edition. Tokyo: Wiley Publishing Japan.

Takeda, H. (2015, April 28). Ministry Contacts Foreign Correspondent about Source in ‘Comfort Women’ Article. Asahi Shimbun. The Economist. (2016, July 30). Three-Piece Dream Suit. Van Wolferen, K. (1989). The Enigma of Japanese Power. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House. Watanabe, Y. (2013). Bunka to gaiko: Paburikku dipuromashii no jidai [Culture and Diplomacy: The Era of Public Diplomacy]. Tokyo: Chuo Koron Sha. Watanabe, Y. and McConnell, D. (2008). Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States. London and New York: Routledge. Weiss, E. and Bacon, J. (2017, December 12). San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee Dies; 5 Key Contributions he Made. USA Today. Wollin, S. (2008). Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

26 Syria: Propaganda as a Tool in the Arsenal of Information Warfare Greg Simons

INTRODUCTION Taylor (2003: 5) has pointed to the inextricable link between propaganda and war, which has been a constant throughout the ages. He also warned of the effects: ‘once war has broken out, propaganda has proved to be a weapon of no less significance than swords, guns or bombs’ Taylor (2003: 5). This ‘symbiotic’ relationship between war and propaganda is owed in no small part to what Payne (2005) characterises as the key factor of winning modern wars, which are increasingly dictated by political rather than purely military factors. Political and military leaders require a sense of the public holding some measure of legitimacy and belief in their military ventures. This creates the need for governments to engage in information operations (that include the use of propaganda) to support and enable military operations, both before those operations commence and while they are being conducted (Western, 2005; DiMaggio,

2009; Zollmann, 2017a; Simons and Chifu, 2018). This chapter will look at a recent and specific use of propaganda in the Syrian War. While acknowledging that all sides involved in the conflict use propaganda as a communicational means of trying to shape and influence public perception and opinion, the focus of this work will be on the official (government and military) narratives that are present in Western mainstream mass media. In particular, one case study shall look at the chemical weapons event that took place in Douma on the 7 April 2018, with attention paid to the first days of reporting. This chapter will seek to address the question, how are the propaganda frames operationalised in order to attempt the gain of public consent to military intervention? The first section deals with defining and detailing the role played by propaganda and mass media in attempting to influence public opinion and perception, as a means of priming and mobilising global publics in giving

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their consent to a military intervention. In the second section, a background is given to the Syrian conflict, in order to provide the reader with an understanding and appreciation of the very complex nature of this conflict. This all lays the groundwork for the third section, which introduces the case study of media coverage of Douma in April 2018 in selected UK and US newspapers.

THE ROLE OF PROPAGANDA IN OPINION AND PERCEPTION There is not an intention to offer the many and varied definitions of a highly loaded word such as propaganda. Needless to say, there are many definitions, and there are other chapters in this Handbook of propaganda that seek to do this more systematically than I am able to here in this limited space. It is intended for this chapter to begin with some basic characteristics of propaganda, before moving to how propaganda fits into the wider information and cognitive domains and then to briefly examine how these aspects interact during armed conflict. Propaganda is understood to have a persuasive function, intend to reach a sizeable target audience, be representative of a specific group’s agenda and make use of faulty reasoning and/or emotional appeals (Taylor, 2003: 1–16; Shabo, 2008: 5). These aspects are aimed at priming and mobilising a selected target audience, by shaping an emotionally based environment that manufactures their perception and opinion of events. Within the broader realm of information warfare (within which propaganda is situated), there are three domains to be considered: the physical domain, the information domain and the cognitive domain (Alberts et al., 2001: 10).1 In terms of the search for political and military influence, the domain that they seek to influence is the informational one, in order to enable military

operations and foreign policy in the physical domain. A general public’s understanding of a reality and ‘ground truth’ can translate into increasing the possibility of combat or policy effectiveness and dominance. On the intangible side, information exists and is created in the information domain. It is shared and can be subjected to manipulation, which means that it may not accurately reflect the ground truth. This domain concerns the communication of information among and between the various vested actors. The information domain is subject to competition and interference from other actors who are present, which implies offensive and defensive dimensions to communication activities. The objective is to gain information superiority within the information domain, over the adversary or over domestic voices opposed to the government’s chosen policy position. The minds of the participants are found in the cognitive domain, which is ‘where perceptions, awareness, understanding, beliefs, and values reside, and where, as a result of sense making, decisions are made’ (Alberts et al, 2001: 13). This is the domain in which physical battles are actually won or lost, as it involves such crucial intangibles as leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, situational awareness and public opinion. All content in this domain passes through the filtering process of human perception. A distinction needs to be made between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, where information is the raw material communicated within the information domain concerning people, processes and events occurring in the physical domain. Knowledge is when information communicated from the information domain enters the cognitive domain, and an individual has made ‘sense’ of that data, according to their world view and the information supplied. This all concerns the ability of an actor in shaping the perception of others. ‘Perception involves forming a view of something through intuition or interpretation of available knowledge’ (Ministry of Defence,

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2010: 3–14). Efforts directed towards the state of gaining information superiority can be achieved when one actor is able to create a relative information advantage over their adversary, which is a mixture of being able to maximize information efficiency while simultaneously denying the opponent the ability to do the same. The efficiency component involves and concerns an actor’s ability to shape the information space according to the operational requirements and needs (Alberts et al, 2001: 54). Propaganda makes use of deceptive and misleading wording that is designed to be suggestive of another reality, in order to influence the cognitive sphere that is in-line with scripted propaganda. According to Taylor (2003), the ‘golden rule’ of propaganda when making use of a lie is to lie by omission rather than commission. In practical terms, this is a means, for example, to omit the wrongdoings of the ‘good’ side, while emphasizing any wrongdoings of the ‘bad’ side. The intention is to distract public attention from certain acts and instead focus public outrage on others, in order to engineer consent. This raises the question, what exactly is ‘scripted’ propaganda? This is the tendency to script complex processes and events within a simple Hollywood-like propaganda narrative in order to influence the brand and reputation, and therefore manage the public expectations of the primary actors engaged. Thus, actors become scripted and categorised as being ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘saviour’ and ‘spoiler’, ‘victim’ and ‘villain’, ‘aggressor’ and so forth. This can have the effect of creating a simple and subjective façade of a complex social and political environment that can enable the influence of public opinion and perception in order to prime2 and mobilise audiences, according to a manufactured ‘reality’ in the cognitive sphere. In order for an actor to succeed in persuading and influencing others, they need to be able to communicate a compelling massmediated message. It can manifest as an exercise in the masking of interests as values and norms, which in modern warfare is used as a

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means of accumulating a sense of legitimacy through persuading public perception and opinion of a façade of moral and ethical high ground over an opponent. Zollmann (2017a: 219) observes that ‘the politics of intervention manifest as selective human rights shaming. This entails highly dichotomised propaganda campaigns during which “enemy” countries are marked for “humanitarian intervention”’. As such, propaganda is a form of information operation within the framework of the strategic level of information programme that is intended to support the physical political and military goals and objectives within a given area of operations, by shaping and influencing the information space that exists in and around the physical sphere. As noted by Entman (2004), political actors need to ‘sell’ their versions and framings of political events to the news media and public, and the sale determines whether or not the suggested policy is accepted as legitimate or not. To aid in the perceived legitimacy and acceptance, there is a scripted narrative of exaggerated risks and dangers and opposing sets of projected realities of good and evil. The problem is defined in a very simple way, and in emotional terms, within sets of frames.3 These frames are then repeated often to reinforce the unambiguous and emotionally compelling story and to exclude other possible interpretations. The intention is to shape public perception and opinion and ultimately unify public approval (Entman, 2004: 1). The situation described within this section creates a precarious environment for the role of mass media and journalism, which is nominally guided by the principle of a fourth-estate role – a public guardian acting as a check and balance against any excesses of power by the judiciary, executive and legislative branches of government. Research by Zollmann (2017b: 13) proposes that ‘news media allows powerful agents and groups to intentionally manage the news arena and thereby guide journalistic selection and production processes’. One of the more infamous examples of Zollmann’s observation

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is seen in the case of the 2003 Iraq War. This was a major global media event, which the US broadcasting networks framed as Operation Iraqi Freedom (the official Pentagon concept for the military operation) and was a conduit for Bush administration and Pentagon propaganda (Kellner, 2004: 329). Some former journalists take a much less optimistic view of this assumed role. Payne (2005) characterised mass media as being an instrument of war, owing to the fact that coverage of conflict influences public perception and opinion of the event, regardless of the nature of the intentions of individual journalists.

FRAMING THE SYRIAN CONFLICT The Syrian conflict began with protests on 26 January 2011 and rapidly escalated into a full uprising on 15 March of that year, and it has been the bloodiest of the conflicts associated with the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring (Bhardwaj, 2012: 84). The carefully scripted framing of the physical sphere in the information sphere reveals the geopolitical lines of this conflict, which if broken down into the core operational aims involves the task of regime change versus regime stability (that is, to overthrow Bashar al Assad or keep him in power). In 2012, a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report characterised the Syrian conflict as a proxy war with geopolitical dimensions that involved global and regional actors. The report contradicted an important mainstream frame of the time, which suggested that the ‘moderate’ rebels were leading the opposition to Assad by stating categorically that radical Jihadist elements were the main driving force in the opposition ranks. This report also revealed a significant difference how political and military leaders were projecting the conflict in the information sphere and the apparent realities on the ground in the physical sphere (DIA, 2012). Previous research has demonstrated that not all wars and conflicts are covered equally

in the mainstream mass media; a change in the quality of coverage is seen depending on whether an actor is labelled as being an ‘enemy’ or identified as being the ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ actors in a given conflict. Zollmann (2017a) investigated six different cases, including a Syrian case from 2012, and searching through mass media sources in the United States, UK and Germany, he came across bias in the coverage that favoured the official standpoint. There was a concerted propaganda campaign in the opening of the Syrian War that was intended to script the conflict (establish the ‘orthodoxy’ of accepted knowledge), establish the brands and reputations of the primary actors (expectation management) and make other interpretations difficult to communicate (as they would be rejected or the messenger labelled an ‘Assadist’ or ‘stooge of Putin/Iran’; Allday, 2016) (Simons, 2018). Zollmann (2017a: 101) noted that the Houla Incident from May 2015 (in which 116 civilians were killed) ‘constituted a tipping point’ and ‘paved the way for sanctions against Syria’. Zollmann (2017a: 101) notes that ‘Houla had quickly served as a symbol for Syrian [government] villainy. Yet again, the factual record of Houla does not suggest a monolithic picture’. Civilian suffering was highlighted with the use of indignation and moral and ethical judgements in order to generate a sense of outrage among the public. News reports emphasized the villainy of the Syrian government and army, while simultaneously downplaying the activities of the Syrian ‘Opposition’ (Zollmann, 2017a: 115). The nature of the news content demonstrated the propaganda value of news content as a mechanism for driving the militaryintervention agenda. This observation fits with Bernays (1947) proposition that the quality and timing of the news was not accidental, but rather a deliberate strategy intended to engineer public consent. The Syrian conflict is an extremely complex and multi-faceted event, which has been argued by some from an early point

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(Malantowicz, 2013) as having the characteristics of old and new wars, simultaneously. New wars are defined through the basic assumptions concerning actors, methods applied, spread of violence and war economy. Old wars are in reference to the ideological and political background. The conflict is highly scripted along diametrically opposed polar opposites of assumed and projected norms and values assigned to the various actors engaged in the conflict, which in turn affects the framing used in the analysis and reporting of the conflict (Simons, 2016a). Intelligence assessments of Syria have referred to it as a proxy war (DIA, 2012), and there are voices in academic literature that also refer to Syria as an example of a proxy war, where the different sides involved are becoming increasingly reliant on external patrons; they warn of possible longterm negative consequences of actors seeking regime change, as the consequences may prove to be producing an even more dire situation (Hughes, 2014). Although the Syrian conflict is often framed within the context of humanitarian norms and values, the conflicting geopolitical objectives by various actors are another means of framing the war. As early as 2012, a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report was published, which recognised the geopolitical dimensions of the conflict (regional and global) – the negative effects of the war in Libya that limited foreign-policy options (of direct military intervention) – yet tried to frame the ‘inevitability’ of a ‘collision course for intervention’. The US approach was similar in how the conflict was framed. A 2014 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report (Blanchard et al., 2014) outlined the highly complex nature of the conflict and the seemingly contradictory aims – the fight against Islamic State, volatile systems of alliances, the possibility of volatility spreading out from Syria to a wider area, isolating and ‘punishing’ the Syrian government and the train and equip programme for rebels. At the time of an Institute for the Study of War report that emerged on US strategy in

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Syria in March 2017, the frames had not been changed from the 2014 CRS report (Cafarella et al., 2017: 25). But a new threat frame had been added, the influence of Iran and Russia in Syria, which was characterised as a risk and threat to US interests in Syria and the Middle East, but also a threat to the ‘global order’ (Cafarella et al., 2017: 25). Within this context, the US-led coalition sought to recreate the so-called Libya scenario (to invoke the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in a ‘civil war’) in Syria, as the framing of the conflict in its early stages bore a strong resemblance. However, the US opinion and perception of R2P’s application in Libya was controversial and differed markedly from others on the United Nations Security Council, such as those of China and Russia. The memory of Libya and R2P influenced the ability of the attempt to apply this tool in Syria (Morris, 2013; Thakur, 2013). This is a demonstration of the element of unpredictability that occurs in the cognitive processing of material communicated from the information sphere. The information sphere has evolved in terms of the rapidity in disseminating data in order to prime and mobilise audiences. Different groups have been opposing each other on social media, promoting their own version of events and attacking their opponent’s version, such as the role and work of the Syrian Electronic Army (Government aligned) and the Syrian Free Army (Opposition aligned) on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Shehabat, 2013). Thus, on one side, the Assad government seeks to convey messages and images of a brave national leader with the interests of the Syrian people at heart, while on the other side, forces seeking regime change seek to convey an image and reputation of the brutality of Assad and highlight the suffering of civilians (Seo and Ebrahim, 2016). Social media provides a platform to disseminate instant communications to a potentially large audience and, given the format of the medium, it can exert a more powerful emotional response with the use of video material

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as opposed to simply text. The reasoning and logic used can also be selective or faulty in order to meet the political objectives of the propaganda, as explained by Taylor (2003: 1–16) and Shabo (2008: 5). There are also wider discussions on the role of Western governments in Syria that are periodically appearing in the public information space. Periodically, a number of articles appear in mainstream mass media sources, which shed some critical light on aspects of the involvement of Western governments in Syria. These articles normally fall short of questioning whether or not there should be involvement, but rather question the exact nature of a limited range of activities. One such article from 2016 detailed the British government helping rebel groups fighting in Syria to develop and produce communications: ‘In both the foreign and domestic campaigns, the government’s role is often concealed. Messages are put out under the banner of apparently independent groups – community organisations in the UK, and armed groups in Syria’ (Cobain et  al., 2016). But rather than criticise this role, it was justified along the lines of the main official (Government and Ministry of Defence in particular) narratives – promoting moderate values of the revolution to turn public opinion against the Assad government and ISIS. A story that was more critical of the official version of events appeared over one year later, when the BBC programme Panorama alleged that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund may have allowed funds intended for poverty reduction to be directed to an extremist group in Syria (Osamor, 2017). Unlike the previously mentioned article, this opinion article identified a problem and proposed a solution. Norton-Taylor (2015) characterises Syria as a ‘geopolitical earthquake’. The reasons for doing so are made clear in his Guardian article. He states that the world was witnessing a significant turning point in global affairs through events in Syria. Stating that a ‘weary’ West led by the US was following well-rehearsed causes, and that Russia had

put them on the back foot with ‘Putin’s decisive intervention in Syria’ (Norton-Taylor, 2015). This implies that geopolitics are at work in a local/regional and global scale. A situation such as this one has implications for the quality and reliability of information flows, based on Payne’s (2005) characterisation of media as being an instrument of war. A stinging criticism of Western media coverage of Iraq and Syria was given by Cockburn (2017) from the Independent, who stated that the level of fabricated news and on-sided reporting in the news agenda on Syria has not been witnessed since the First World War. An underlying reason for the situation was proposed: ‘The real reason that reporting of the Syrian conflict has been so inadequate is that Western news organisations have almost entirely outsourced their coverage to the rebel side’ (Cockburn, 2017). The effects of mass media reporting on the Syrian conflict have also been the topic of discussion. A March 2018 article in the Atlantic declared that the CNN effect had died in Syria. The CNN effect of the 1990s refers to the notion that vivid coverage of humanitarian crisis by 24-hour news networks influenced government decisions to use military force.4 United Nations expert Richard Gowan suggested that one reason for the death of the CNN effect was ‘the effect of unverified social media posts and slick state propaganda on a civil war wrapped in a proxy war inside a great-power war’ that has resulted in a deluge of information of dubious quality (Friedman, 2018). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR – a media watcher based in the United States) does not refer to mainstream Western media coverage of the Syrian conflict as propaganda, though it is extremely critical of the quality of news, and it notes the various inconsistencies in the narratives and framing: ‘Anglo-American press coverage of the Syrian situation has grossly misled readers about their governments’ role in the catastrophe, and has urged audiences to accept greater Western military intervention in the country without examining the implications

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of such a move’ (Shupak, 2018). Different actors and interests are attempting to compete in an increasingly crowded information marketplace on the Syrian conflict, which is often couched in opposing sets of norms, values and visions. The ability to persuade and influence the cognitive sphere via symbolic representations of the physical sphere through the information sphere is seen as the path to increasing the operational capacity and power of the winners. The dominant frames in Anglo-US media already existed well before the Douma incident, where Assad was the villain and ‘armed opposition’ were the heroes, and the United States and UK positioned themselves as saviours and Russia and Iran as spoilers. A highly subjectively simplified projected reality of good versus evil was prevalent in the mainstream press, which supported official government positions on the policy of regime change (Simons, 2016a, 2018; Zollmann, 2017b). The audience had also been subjected to the false logic that if a chemical weapons attack were to occur, the Syrian government would be the likely culprit (Simons, 2016b).

CASE STUDY: WESTERN MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE SYRIAN CONFLICT AT KEY POINTS Method The approaches to textual analysis shall include content analysis (quantifications of different elements in text), argumentation analysis (the structure of argumentation used) and the qualitative analysis of ideas in the content (with a focus on propaganda) (Boréus and Bergström, 2017: 7–9). The combination of these approaches is expected to yield results on the ontology (what exists) and epistemology (knowledge and how we ‘know’ things) of reactions to mass-mediated textual depictions of the Douma event within the context of the Syrian conflict. The objects

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of study include power, people, policy, oppression and freedom, war and peace and so forth (Boréus and Bergström, 2017: 1–2). The mass media texts then contextualise the relationships according to perceived and projected power in the constructed social world order of mankind, such as justice and injustice, powerful and powerless, legitimate and illegitimate, worthy and unworthy. The analysis of the framing of the empirical material of this case study will follow the method of Entman (2004: 5): • • • •

Defining effects or conditions as problematic; Identifying causes; Conveying a moral judgement; Endorsing remedies and improvements.

The case study involves analysing media reports and coverage from the first four days of the April 2018 chemical weapons event in Douma, Syria. This four-day window is too short a period to launch and conclude an official investigation into the event, let alone to conclusively and objectively assign blame on any guilty party. But, this period is critical in terms of propaganda and communicating one’s version of events through the information sphere in order to shape opinion and perception in the cognitive sphere. In order to do this, in such a short space of time, propaganda seems to be the most effective means to quickly prime and mobilise the audience through the use of emotion, rather than rational logic. It should be noted that UK public opinion was firmly against any military intervention at the time of the incident by a ratio of two to one (Curtis, 2018), and the US polls indicated 50% of respondents approved of the missile strikes (Reinhart, 2018). In terms of the newspapers chosen for analysis, we chose the Guardian, the Independent (UK), the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner (United States) – leading mainstream newspapers in two of the three countries that launched military strikes against Syria (United States, UK and France)

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in the wake of the events in Douma. The reason for choosing these particular newspapers is because they are influential, well-established publications with a large circulation; plus, all of the chosen newspapers have no paywall on content (providing open access for both researcher and other readers). This means these newspapers are able to reach many people globally and therefore are a more likely medium of communication for governmental views on the issue (owing to these papers being able to contact and speak to officials, who understand the communication potential of the outlets). However, as only four newspapers in two countries over a four-day period are being investigated by the author, the results should be considered as being indicative and not generalizable.

Case Study and Sample Background The Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reported an ‘alleged incident’ involving the use of toxic chemicals as a weapon in Douma, Syria at 16:00 on 7 April 2018. Casualties from the incident varied from 40–70 deaths and hundreds of injuries, resulting from exposure to a toxic substance. The initial reports on the nature of the substance were mixed and unclear, with some allegations of sarin, with others stating chlorine and further reports suggesting a mixture of these chemicals. On-line postings were used extensively by various parties to influence opinions and perceptions of the event. A blame game ensued where the ‘armed opposition’ accused the Syrian government of carrying out the attack, and the Syrian government blamed Jaysh al Islam of fabricating the incident in order to incriminate the Syrian government and military (OPCW, 2018: 3). Thus, from the very moment of awareness of the incident, different subjective and politicised accounts of the event in the physical sphere were communicated through the information sphere. The role of the OPCW is

stated as being an independent observer that investigates such events, not an observer that apportions blame (OPCW, 2018: 4). OPCW has been operating in Syria for a number of years in this capacity. Since 2015, the OPCW has held a mandate to investigate such reported incidents in the country. On 10 April, clearance and the necessary formalities were concluded between the OPCW and the Syrian government, which permitted a team of investigators to be dispatched; an advanced team was sent on 12 April, a follow-up team the next day and the full team by 15 April. The team began its investigation work from 18 April at the site of the alleged attack, but they encountered unexploded munitions and small arms fire. This delayed the visit to the first site until 21 April (OPCW, 2018). The OPCW reported the analysis results of the sampling: The results of analysis of the prioritised samples submitted to the designated laboratories were received by the FFM team on 22 May 2018. No organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties. Various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from Locations 2 and 4, along with residues of explosive (OPCW, 2018: 10).

The interim results of the OPCW, which were released in July 2018 (three months after the alleged incident) cast significant doubt on the framing used by mainstream Western politicians and mass media. The significance of the lessons from this event, where mass media reported from 7 April (the day of the event) to 10 April (the day arrangements were made for an OPCW team to visit the site), show that the conclusions in the media and political circles were already reached before any technical investigation had even been initiated. This raises questions as to the exact nature and basis of the ‘evidence’ to support the claims made in the information sphere. In July 2018, a manual search was conducted on the search engines of the four newspapers analysed – the Guardian, the

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Table 26.1  Article sample Country

UK United States

Media outlet

Guardian Independent Washington Post Washington Examiner

Article sample count

Total

7 April

8 April

9 April

10 April

1 1 1 0

5 3 4 6

4 6 12 15

6 6 8 6

Independent, the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner. The search was for content that matched the criterion mentioned earlier: related to the events of 7 April 2018 in Douma and the next three days following the chemical incident. Each search was physically sorted by the author into relevant and irrelevant articles. Table 26.1 summarises the results of this search.

Selected Anglo-United States Media Coverage of Douma The first newspaper to be analysed for content on the events of Douma and the immediate aftermath was the Guardian (UK). There was only one article that was published on the first day of the Douma event. This article notified of a ‘suspected chemical attack’ on the rebel-held part of the area (Guardian, 2018). Although the use of language indicates a certain level of uncertainty that the event happened, there was simultaneously an accusative tone. This was clearly evident in an editorial that appeared on 8 April, which accused Bashar al-Assad of the ‘crime’ and urged world ‘responsibility’ in a heavily emotional rhetoric (Guardian, 2018). There is a heavy use of diametrically opposed sets of values and norms, where Assad and Putin are scripted as the super villains, and the ‘rebels’/’opposition’ are the heroes, the victims are the Syrian people and the possible saviours are the US-led alliance. One of the first articles on Douma set many of the frames that were the foundation

16 16 25 27 84

for the telling of this story: the reference to a ‘suspected chemical attack’ as opposed to a confirmed attack; a great deal of graphic and emotionally charged descriptions of the victims and especially children; references to previous cases of alleged chemical attacks that, in hindsight, revealed serious flaws and errors in the reporting (Simons, 2016b). ‘The incident was the latest in a string of alleged chemical attacks on the enclave of eastern Ghouta’ (Guardian, 2018). The video shown in the article bore the brand of one of the rebel groups, which is in-line with Cockburn’s (2017) criticism of Western mass media ‘outsourcing’ to rebel groups. Follow-up articles maintained the foundation of the selected news frames and added further information and ‘evidence’. There were mentions of a ‘toxic gas attack’ and mentions of the previous events where chlorine and sarin were used. As a possible connection for a possible motive: a breakdown in negotiations to evacuate (term ‘exile’ was used) rebels from the area. Blame was assigned to the Syrian government, Russia and Iran. Different endorsements of condemnation were published, including from Pope Francis, but also from the US State Department who made the ‘demand for an international response if confirmed’ (Shaheen 2018)_. They also put the blame on the Russian government by virtue of the fact that they were supporting the Syrian government. The UK Foreign Office was quick to blame Assad as ‘further proof of Assad’s brutality against innocent civilians and his backers’ callous disregard for international norms’ (Shaheen, 2018). The reporting

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so far has been dedicated to creating the frames and the ‘demand’ for a response. This created the context for introducing possible ‘solutions’ to the crisis situation. A concerted call for military action was made, not for any other options to be considered. ‘The response to a 2017 chemical attack was largely symbolic; this time it could be more comprehensive’ (Chulov, 2018). Different military-operation scenarios were considered along with possible reactions from the Syrian military and Russia. Britain’s options, and more specifically those of the May government, were discussed, most often in a value/ norm basis as opposed to operational matters or in the context of international law (Wintour, 2018). The decision was seemingly already made for military action; reporting was an exercise in attempting to emotionally prime and mobilise the public. The next newspaper to be analysed was the Independent (UK). In terms of the blame game, the Independent is much quicker to assign the blame and to detail alleged events. There is still an implied element of uncertainty in the information though, which is found in the title of the article – ‘Syrian Civil War: Dozens of civilians killed in chemical weapons attack’ (rather than prefixing with ‘alleged’). Different NGOs support the main frame of the human suffering and blame elements, in addition to the US State Department, which is quoted as saying ‘it is monitoring the situation and that Russia should be blamed if chemicals were used’. Specifically, the article mentions that ‘barrel bombs’ containing chemical weapons were dropped by Syrian military aircraft. A ‘rebel’ military spokesman from Jaish alIslam was quoted as blaming the Syrian government (Osbourne, 2018). The blame-game and human-suffering frames were intensified on 8 April, when President Donald Trump is quoted as saying that there may be a ‘big price to pay’, as well as his character-­assassination reference of ‘animal Assad’ (Lusher, 2018). An article went as far as to state that a ‘sarin barrel bomb’ was used in the ‘chemical

weapon attack’ (Lusher, 2018). Although, the article also covered Russia’s warning of the consequences of an intervention being waged under false pretences. Conflicting reports were evident, though with a continued heavy reliance on ‘opposition/rebel’ sources – ‘The pro-opposition Ghouta Media Centre alleged that a helicopter had dropped a barrel bomb containing sarin, and another organisation claimed that a hospital had been hit by a chlorine bomb’ (Lusher, 2018). Just as the Guardian published an editorial, the Independent also ran one that matched the framing of blame and accountability: Assad and Russia are to blame and the ‘international community’ has the duty to hold them to account (Independent, 2018). From 9 April, there was still reporting on the blame and human suffering, but there was a perceptible shift and an addition of the response frame, which was more about what kind of military action should be undertaken. An article claimed through a quote that the pictures of dead children mean nothing to countries like Russia (Buncombe, 2018), which is an emotional assertion based on spurious grounds rather than a concrete and verified fact. A series of articles discussed the various military options available, ruling nothing out, and in a typical example of these frames built the case of guilt and the ‘need to act’ based upon the assertions and assumptions of interested parties. Interestingly, this particular article uses the same term of reference as the Guardian of ‘alleged’. A revealing quote, which alludes to possible geopolitical elements can be found in another article, too: ‘Western allies have looked to increase pressure on the Kremlin for its relationship with Mr Assad, as calls increase for co-ordinated international action over the alleged chemical attack’ (Wilts, 2018). The date of 10 April witnessed articles consolidating the case for war, such as Tony Blair’s statement that there had to be military intervention because without it there would be negative consequences (Kentish, 2018). The general tone of the articles on 10 April projects consensus among

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Western leaders of the necessity for military intervention in Syria. No mention is made of the deception used to initiate the Iraq War in 2003 or the disastrous consequences that followed the Libya intervention in 2011, which was lamented in a House of Commons report (House of Commons, 2016). Washington Post (United States) was the third newspaper to have its content on the Douma event from 7–10 April examined and analysed. The first brief report on 7 April quoted rebel sources stating that the Syrian government had dropped a barrel bomb filled with ‘poisonous chemicals’. Various NGOs and rebel sources were quoted as to the nature and extent of the alleged attack, and it included the official Syrian government denial that was carried by the UK media (Washington Post, 2018). The article was relatively short with the briefest of details, although the frame of the accusations was now set. From 8 April, the reporting became much more emotionally based, though still using the caveats of linguistic uncertainty, and they began under these circumstances to introduce the notion of military retaliation for the alleged attack. ‘Apparent chemical weapons attack’ was the term used to describe the event in the physical domain (Loveluck and Cunningham, 2018). Vivid details and video were used to reinforce the frame of civilian suffering – that of children in particular. It was stated specifically that the likely chemical was chlorine (Loveluck and Cunningham, 2018). Previous actual and alleged chemical attacks were discussed, which gave the impression of a historical context that tended to support the scripted-propaganda frames of the roles of the different actors. An opinion article on 9 April criticised Trump for not using military force on Syria and connected Trump together with Syria, Iran and Russia in an emotional and valuebased argument. ‘The result: another grotesque chemical-weapons attack that reveals the barbarism of the Russian, Iranian and Syrian regimes — and the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Trump regime’ (Boot,

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2018). The geopolitical dimensions of the Syrian conflict were apparent in the reporting too: ‘Russia is expected to stick up for Assad’ (Morello, 2018). Numerous articles appeared on 9 and 10 April (as was the case with the UK newspapers) engaging in the blame game and calling for a stronger military response than the one the year before in Idlib. This was most clearly seen in an editorial opinion with the headline ‘A few cruise missiles from Trump won’t stop Syria’s war crimes’ (Washington Post, 2018). Other articles spoke on behalf of Americans, calling for military action as a ‘humanitarian response’ – ‘Americans feel a moral obligation to help humanitarian victims (like those in Syria) with military force’ (Kreps and Maxey, 2018). One of the final articles to appear chronologically in the selected period announced the planned arrival of chemical inspectors in the area of the alleged attack (Morello, 2018), even though the frames of guilt and retribution had already been decided without any complete technical investigation. The final newspaper in this chapter to be examined and analysed for news content on the April 2018 Douma chemical weapons event was the Washington Examiner. An opinion article appeared very early in the opening coverage of Douma on 8 April; the author laid the blame with Assad but used language that suggested less than complete certainty of the guilty party. ‘Why you can be almost certain Bashar Assad is responsible for the Syrian chemical weapons attack’, and this is based on the presumed content of intelligence briefings delivered to Trump (Rogan, 2018). There is a high degree of assertion and assumption in the logic of this opinion article in assigning the blame that is characterised as being ‘almost certain’ some 24 hours after a remotely occurring event within a conflict that is known for the heavy use of propaganda and deception. Many articles on 8 April called for condemnation and a military response to the alleged event that occurred the day before. These calls were often made with the use of emotionally based

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value and norm lobbying – ‘Trump reacts to “mindless” chemical attack in Syria: “Big price to pay”, Russia, Iran responsible for backing “Animal Assad”’ (an example of scapegoating and character assassination) (Chaitin, 2018); ‘Lindsey Graham: Trump’s response to Syria chemical attack a “defining moment”’ (imploring Trump to use military action) (Cohen, 2018); ‘Paul Ryan: “Responsible nations” cannot tolerate Syria chemical attack’ (an example of bandwagoning propaganda where the speaker uses pathos to try and rally support by joining the ‘moral high ground’) (Cohen, 2018). Although the headlines did not often denote the uncertainty that other newspapers did, there was still a use of wording such as ‘reported chemical attack’ (as opposed to confirmed) (Cohen, 2018). Talking heads in mainstream political circles are used to trying to consolidate the framing through the use of ethos, where the standing of the public figure is used as a confirmation of the articles’ framing. April 9 was a day of reporting that revolved around the frame of what kind of military response was needed, as opposed to a more open debate that could involve something other than a military option. A typical example of this type of framing was seen with an article headlined, ‘The US is drawing up several options for striking Syria after chemical weapons attack, Pentagon sources say’ (McIntyre, 2018). One article proved to be somewhat of an outlier, as it gave voice to Russia’s denial of any culpability in the alleged chemical weapons attack (Gehrke, 2018). There was also some evidence of the use of deflection by the Trump administration, through blaming President Obama for handing Trump the ‘mess’ and Trump for not doing enough in Syria. ‘Vietor’s tweet followed what officials believe was a poison gas attack near Damascus, Syria, on Saturday, which claimed the lives of 40 people and injured 500 more. The U.S. suspects the Syrian government to be behind the incident’ (Lim, 2018). Therefore, between the lines, even at this stage there is no absolute

certainty as to the nature of the event and who is responsible. Coverage of Tucker Carlson’s questioning of the legitimacy of the reported chemical attack (Leach, 2018) points to the Washington Examiner providing some space to contrasting voices. By 10 April, the frames were already in place before the OPCW team’s physical deployment to investigate the claims of chemical weapons being used. Some content, an opinion article, even called for the assassination of President Bashar al-Assad (Rubin, 2018). The US officials continued to try and promote their own independent ability to investigate what had happened (Gehrke, 2018), and the possible Russian backlash against military intervention was downplayed (Rogan, 2018). The same accusations used in the other newspapers are used here too, with many quotations from ‘rebel’ sources, suffering civilians framed with the emphasis on children as a particularly vulnerable group, the assigning of blame and the formation of popular framing that has the effect of creating the conventional wisdom and orthodoxy of knowledge on the issue. This information situation and creation of information dominance made it difficult for alternative views to be expressed.

CONCLUSION This chapter represents an exploratory study into the measure of activity and paths of influence via propaganda within the context of the on-going Syrian conflict. It does not represent a measure of influence of those activities, which would require an additional study into the intended and unintended influence on opinion and perception of specified target audiences. A total of 84 articles were found and analysed across the four newspapers during the period of 7–10 April 2018. All newspapers carried minimal coverage on 7 April, which was the day the story broke, but increased their coverage significantly

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from the next day. Coverage in the two UK-based newspapers followed a similar pattern in terms of the quantity and quality of the coverage of Douma. Both of the Washington DC-based newspapers peaked the quantity of coverage on the same day, on 9 April. There were a number of recurring frames across all four media outlets – civilian suffering (focus on children), use of chemical/nerve agents (chlorine or sarin), villain frame (Syrian government, Russia and Iran), hero frame (‘NGOs’ and rebels), guilt frame (Syrian government and Russia) and need-to-act frame (call for ‘humanitarian intervention’). The media framing closely followed the pattern developed by Entman – defining effects or conditions as problematic; identifying causes; conveying a moral judgement; endorsing remedies and improvements (Entman, 20044: 5). All the media outlets observed defined the problematic effect/condition, which was the presumed use of chemical weapons in Douma, Syria. The identified causes that were reported were the assumed actions of the Syrian government and Russia in this conflict. The moral judgement is that the Syrian government, Russia and sometimes Iran too, are assigned the collective guilt. Without any exception, the media outlets all endorsed the use of military force against the Syrian government as a ‘remedy’ for the situation. Propaganda was defined in this chapter as having a persuasive function, intending to reach a sizeable target audience, being re­presentative of a specific group’s agenda and making use of faulty reasoning and/ or emotional appeals (Taylor, 2003: 1–16; Shabo, 2008: 5). The reporting that was analysed met all of these basic criteria – the newspapers have a sizeable and international readership, there is a very strong persuasive element used in the quality of the news reporting, all of the media outlets carried an overwhelming message of the need for military action against the Syrian government and the reasoning used displayed emotion and faulty reasoning: the heavy emotional use of

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children (in text and video), the faulty logic of assumed guilt and that bombing Syria further would ‘help’ civilians. All of the media outlets observed quoted ‘rebel’ or ‘opposition forces’ frequently, publishing the material at face value, which tends to support Cockburn’s (2017) criticism that mainstream media has outsourced its reporting to the anti-Assad forces. The NGOs that were often quoted, as a means of ‘independent’ sources, also have links, such as the White Helmets that are funded by both the US and UK governments (UK Parliament, 2016). Both of these governments were identified by the Defence Intelligence Agency report (DIA, 2012) as being active participants in a proxy war. The representation of the physical domain in the information domain was crucial in influencing the cognitive domain. Significant gaps between the physical realities and the informational representations were stark at times. The emotionally based logic attempts to use the techniques of bandwagoning and the call for the international community’s ‘moral responsibility’, as a means to prime and mobilise audiences. This is done with a wellprepared information space that makes use of heavily scripted propaganda of the primary actors to establish brands and reputations, and therefore establish public expectations (the ‘good’ side, ‘bad’ side and so forth). The reaching of moral and ethical conclusions, based on assumption and assertion, before an actual physical scientific investigation has begun (let alone concluded) is one of the tell-tale signs of the tactic of propaganda to support a not-so-well-hidden political and/or military agenda. Furthermore, the ‘evidence’ collected and used to build the case against the Syrian government via ‘rebel’ sources was proven to be wrong by the OPCW’s interim report. In reality, there is an alignment between the various frames of propaganda and foreign/military policy – to enable ‘our’ policy and its operational aspects, and to interfere with the opponent’s ability to follow their own choices.

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Notes 1  For more details on these domains please refer to chapter two in Alberts et al., 2001. 2  Media priming is a cognitive psychological concept where coverage of various issues in terms of in terms of the quantity and quality of the coverage sends a signal to content consumers in order for them to subjectively evaluate the given situation to affect their opinion, perception and reactions. For more on priming see https://www. utwente.nl/en/bms/communication-theories/ sorted-by-cluster/Mass-Media/Priming/. 3  Entman (2004: 5) defines his understanding of framing as ‘selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution’. 4  Although the academic debates on the existence or not of the CNN effect were somewhat inconclusive, the arguments and counter-arguments can centre on whether mass media outlets are a power independent actor or a useful tool of legitimisation.

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dourma-chemical-attack-us-un-a8297336. html 10 April 2018 (accessed 12 July 2018). Kreps, S. & Maxey, S. (2018), Americans feel a moral obligation to help humanitarian victims (like those in Syria) with military force, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/10/americansfeel-a-moral-obligation-to-help-humanitarian-victims-like-those-in-syria-with-militaryforce/?utm_term=.19a60d73d2fe Washington Post, 10 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Leach, K. (2018), Tucker Carlson is questioning legitimacy of reported Syrian chemical weapon attacks, Washington Examiner, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ news/tucker-carlson-is-questioning-the-legiti m a c y - o f - re p o r t s - o f - s y r i a n - c h e m i c a l weapon-attacks 9 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Lim, N. (2018), Obama national security spokesman: Trump ‘was handed a mess’ with Syria, Washington Examiner, https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ obama-national-security-spokesman-trumpwas-handed-a-mess-with-syria 9 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Loveluck, L. & Cunningham, E. (2018), Dozens Killed in Apparent Chemical Weapons Attack on Civilians in Syria, Rescue Workers Say, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/dozens-killedin-apparent-chemical-weapons-attack-oncivilians-in-easter n-ghouta–rescueworkers/2018/04/08/231bba18-3ac0-11e8af3c-2123715f78df_story.html?utm_term=. a610510efc65 8 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Lusher, A. (2018), Syrian Government Accused of Using Nerve Agents as Death Toll from Douma ‘Chemical Weapons Attack’ Rises, Independent, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-chemical-weapons-attack-latest-sarin-douma-eastern-ghouta-nerve-agent-chlorine-russia-usuk-a8294741.html 8 April 2018 (accessed 12 July 2018). Malantowicz, A. (2013), Civil War in Syria and the New Wars, Amsterdam Law Forum, 5(3), pp. 52–60. McIntyre, J. (2018), The US is drawing up several options for striking Syria after chemical

weapons attack, Pentagon sources say, Washington Examiner, https://www.washi n g t o n e x a m i n e r. c o m / p o l i c y / d e f e n s e national-security/the-us-is-drawing-upseveral-options-for-striking-syria-after-chemical-weapons-attack-pentagon-sources-say 9 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Ministry of Defence (December 2010), Understanding, No. 4 (JPD04), Shrivenham: Joint Doctrine Publication. Morello, C. (2018b), Chemical weapons inspectors head to Syria as White House mulls response to attack, https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chemical-weapons-watchdog-to-sendinvestigators-to-syria/2018/04/10/fd18a736-3cd611e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story. html?utm_term=.64f0b50fb5d7 Washington Post, 10 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Morello, C. (2018a), U.N. to meet on chemical attack in Syria, though Russia is expected to stick up for Assad, Washington Post, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/nationalsecurity/un-to-meet-on-chemical-attack-insyria-though-russia-is-expected-to-stick-upf o r- a s s a d - g o v e r n m e n t / 2 0 1 8 / 0 4 / 0 9 / f2e18176-3bf4-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_ story.html?utm_term=.f9d6898ae355, 9 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Morris, J. (2013), Libya and Syria: R2P and the Spectre of the Swinging Pendulum, International Affairs, 89(5), pp. 1265–1283. Norton-Taylor, R. (2015), Syria: A Geopolitical Earthquake, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/defence-and-securityblog/2015/oct/06/syria-a-geopoliticalearthquake 6 October 2015 (accessed 29 May 2018). OPCW (6 July 2018), Interim Report of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria Regarding the Incident of Alleged Use of Toxic Chemicals as a Weapon in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018, Technical Secretariat, S/1645/2018. Osamor, K. (2017), Panorama’s Syria Allegations Show the UK’s Aid Needs Greater Transparency, The Guardian, https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ dec/04/panorama-syria-allegations-uk-aidtransparency-bbc 4 December 2017 (accessed 5 December 2017).

Syria: Propaganda as a Tool in the Arsenal of Information Warfare

Osborne, S. (2018), Syria Civil War: ‘Dozens of Civilians Killed in Chemical Weapons Attack’ on Douma in Eastern Ghouta, Says Monitor, Independent, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-chemical-weapons-civilians-killed-douma-easternghouta-damascus-a8294296.html 7 April 2018 (accessed 12 July 2018). Payne, K. (Spring 2005), The Media as an Instrument of War, Parameters, pp. 81–93. Reinhart, R. J. (2018), Snapshot: Half of Americans Approve of Strikes on Syria, Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/232997/snapshot-half-americans-approve-strikes-syria.aspx 24 April 2018 (accessed 18 December 2018). Rogan, T. (2018b), Why Putin probably won’t retaliate against US strikes on Assad in Syria, Washington Examiner, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-putinprobably-wont-retaliate-against-us-strikeson-assad-in-syria 10 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Rogan, T. (2018a), Why you can be almost certain Bashar Assad is responsible for the Syrian chemical weapons attack, Washington Examiner, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-you-can-bealmost-certain-bashar-assad-is-responsiblefor-the-syrian-chemical-weapons-attack 8 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Rubin, M. (2018), It’s Time to assassinate Assad, Washington Examiner, https://www. washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/its-timeto-assassinate-assad 10 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Seo, H. & Ebrahim, H. (2016), Visual Propaganda on Facebook: A Comparative Analysis of Syrian Conflicts, Media, War & Conflict, 9(3), pp. 227–251. Shabo, M. E. (2008), Techniques of Propaganda and Persuasion, Clayton, DE: Prestwick House. Shaheen, K. (2018), Dozens Killed in Suspected Chemical Attack on Syrian Rebel Enclave, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2018/apr/08/syrian-government-accusedof-chemical-attacks-on-civilians-in-easternghouta 8 April 2018 (accessed 12 July 2018). Shehabat, A. (2013), The Social Media CyberWar: The Unfolding Events in the Syrian Revolution 2011, Global Media Journal: Australian Edition, 6(2).

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Shupak, G. (2018), Media Erase US Role in Syria’s Misery, Call for US to Inflict More Misery, FAIR, https://fair.org/home/mediaerase-us-role-in-syrias-misery-call-for-us-toinflict-more-misery/ 7 March 2018 (accessed 10 March 2018). Simons, G. & Chifu, I. (2018), The Changing Face of Warfare in the 21st Century, London: Routledge. Simons, G. (2016a), ‘Good’ Battles and ‘Bad’ Battles: A Comparative Analysis of Western Media Coverage of the Battles of Mosul and Aleppo, Tractus Aevorum, 3(2), pp. 114–138. Simons, G. (2016b), News and Syria: Creating Key Media Moments in the Conflict, Cogent Social Sciences 2(1). Simons, G. (2018), ‘Propaganda and the Information War Against Syria: The Latest War for Peace’ in Simons, G. & Chifu, I. (2018), The Changing Face of Warfare in the 21st Century, London: Routledge, pp. 223–239. Taylor, P. M. (2003), Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day, 3rd Edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thakur, R. (2013), R2P After Libya and Syria: Engaging Emerging Powers, The Washington Quarterly, 36(2), pp. 61–76. UK Parliament (2016), Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, House of Lords Hansard, Column 720, https://hansard.parliament.uk/ lords/2016-11-02/debates/333BB123-CF1941CC-A67F-0D55E3D477A6/ConflictStabilityAndSecurityFund#720 2 November 2016 (accessed 18 July 2018). Washington Post (2018b), A few cruise missiles from Trump won’t stop Syria’s war crimes, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-fewcruise-missiles-from-trump-wont-stop-syriaswar-crimes/2018/04/09/385d3fbe-3c0a11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story. html?utm_term=.2a651d918cf4, 10 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018). Washington Post (2018a), Rebels Assert Chemical Attack by Government, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ national/world-digest-april-7-2018/2018/ 04/07/12df5bb2-3aa9-11e8-8fd249fe3c675a89_story.html?utm_ term=.0ec114fb2851, 7 April 2018 (accessed 17 July 2018).

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27 Cold War Propaganda in Civil War Greece, 1946–1949: From State of Emergency to Normalization Zinovia Lialiouti

INTRODUCTION On March 25, 1949, the day of Greece’s national holiday, US Ambassador Henry Grady celebrated the closing of the so-called ‘Work and Victory Week’ with a speech proclaiming victory over communist propaganda against the Greek civil war regime. He framed the Cold War battle of propaganda as a battle between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ and insisted that ‘world-wide knowledge’ of propaganda ‘technique’ was an indispensable weapon in that battle (Grady, 1949). He traced the origins of communist propaganda back to the practices employed by the totalitarian regimes during WWII and described the current global setting as a transition from the ‘war of explosives’ to the ‘war of nerves’ (Grady, 1949). This framing was in accordance with the US Cold War discourse on propaganda as an entirely negative activity associated with the Soviet Union and communist regimes in general. US propaganda activities, however, were not labeled as such

and were systematically associated in presidential discourse with positive concepts, such as truth and freedom. Truman’s ‘Campaign of Truth’ speech (April 20, 1950) is a typical example of this type of argumentation: The cause of freedom is being challenged throughout the world today by the forces of imperialistic communism. This is a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men. Propaganda is one of the most powerful weapons the Communists have in this struggle. Deceit, distortion, and lies are systematically used by them as a matter of deliberate policy. This propaganda can be overcome by the truth– plain, simple, unvarnished truth presented by the newspapers, radio, newsreels, and other sources that the people trust. (Truman, 1950)

The Greek Civil War was, in many respects, an important propaganda battle for the two blocs. In its full development as an armed conflict from 1946 to 1949, the Greek Civil War was one of the first moments of liquidation of the emerging Cold War into a hot conflict (Jones, 1997). Despite the form and

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the extent to which the two superpowers were actually involved in the conflict, both perceived it as a test case for their appeal to global public opinion. It was the Greek Civil War that triggered the formulation of the Truman Doctrine, one of the founding texts of the Cold War, which interpreted for the first time the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union as a confrontation of two distinct and opposed ‘ways of life’ (Frazier, 1991). Consequently, ideology, culture and propaganda were core and not peripheral elements of the Cold War battlefield. Thus, the various aspects of the civil war – political, military, social, humanitarian, etc. – became objects of competing propagandas both in the West and in the East, as they represented the first, however imperfect, confrontation of the two opposing ‘ways of life’ (Frazier, 1991). From this starting point, this chapter aims to present aspects of the anti-communist propaganda as developed in Greece during the civil war period (1946–1949), and it is structured in two sections: the first presents what is here labeled as the ‘state of emergency propaganda’ in relation to the ‘­liminal’ condition of the Greek state (civil war, post-war reconstruction endeavors, power and hegemony struggles); the second highlights the transformation of anti-communist propaganda into a more comprehensive discourse, with recourse to a detailed overview of the joined (orchestrated by Greek and US ­officials) propaganda activities under the title ‘Work and Victory Week’. Finally, the concluding remarks summarize the main arguments and briefly discuss the legacy and the implications of the trends analyzed in the chapter. This contribution addresses propaganda as an important chapter in the history of the modern world, inextricably linked to the understanding of the evolution of the modern state, mass politics and mass communication. It shares the view that the negative connotations associated with the concept of propaganda prevent a more comprehensive,

analytical approach of its functions and ­features. Thus, an ‘ethically neutral’ perspective could benefit propaganda studies. This chapter adopts Welch’s (2003) definition of propaganda, based on the elaboration by Philip M. Taylor (2003), according to which propaganda is ‘the deliberate attempt to influence public opinion through the transmission of ideas and values for a specific persuasive purpose that has been consciously devised to serve the self-interest of the propagandist, either directly or indirectly’ (Taylor, 2003: 6; Welch, 2003: xix). Nevertheless, it stresses that an overemphasis on the morally neutral and banal approaches to propaganda, leading to arguments such as ‘in all political systems policy must be explained, the public must be convinced’ (Welch: xviii), entails the risk of overshadowing the function of manipulation and coercion, the imbalance of power relationships involved in the process of propaganda as well as the nature of political regimes in the context of which propaganda messages emerge. It should be noted that in the case of civil war Greece – and in many other cases, of course – propaganda resources were exploited in an illiberal public sphere, and their manipulation was influenced by the imbalance of power between the two nationstates and also between the anti-communist regime and the pro-communist bloc. The following account is based on the assumption that propaganda is above all ‘a powerful tool for perpetuating power relationships’ (Taylor: 9). This analysis is based on a critical overview of existing literature and archival material from US and Greek sources. Anti-communist propaganda in Cold War Greece can be perceived as an evolving process s­tarting from a state of emergency and gradually shaping into relative normalization. A striking example of the state-of-emergency phase is the discourse on the prison camp on the island of Makronissos (1947–1954). The factual milestones of this evolving process are the development of the Greek Civil War as a military and political conflict

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and the formulation of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. The latter was a decisive factor in the transformation of anti-communist propaganda in Greece. A significant implication was that anti-communist propaganda acquired a more comprehensive and positive content alongside the negative representation of communism. It was systematically structured on the conceptualization of communism as a two-fold threat: (a) military and (b) ideological. In this line of reasoning, military victory over communist guerillas should be supplemented and secured by economic development. These two axes of anti-communist propaganda are most evidently manifested in the so-called ‘Work and Victory Week’ (March 1949) – a series of propaganda activities hosted in Greece and the United States and orchestrated by US and Greek officials. In terms of theoretical concerns, the focus of the analysis is on the transatlantic aspects of propaganda formulation and, in particular, on the interaction between US and Greek propaganda mechanisms. From this perspective, the Greek case cannot be adequately interpreted based exclusively on national context, as it involves obvious transnational preconditions and implications. On the other hand, a special task of the analysis is to assess the means employed for propaganda purposes based on their historical and cultural grounding. Considering Lasswell’s conceptualization of propaganda as ‘the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols’ (Lasswell, 1927; Lasswell, 1938), the chapter comments on the symbolic content of propaganda. The second theoretical argument of the chapter draws upon the interdependence between ideology and propaganda, at least for this phase of the Cold War. The issue of the relationship between ideology and propaganda is directly linked to the question of the relationship between state and society as far as the establishment of ideological consensus is concerned. This research question has produced significant contributions

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and theoretical elaborations, shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up perspectives based on conceptualizations seeking to capture the complexity of that relationship, e.g. the ‘state-private network’ (Laville and Wilford 2006; Wilford, 2009; Van Dongen et al., 2014). The argument of this chapter is that in the Greek case, due to several historical and political factors, the role of the state – the US and Greek governments – is far more important than private initiatives in the formulation of Cold War ideology and propaganda (Lialiouti, 2018). It would be fair to argue that anti-communist propaganda in Greece was – for the greater part of the Cold War period – highly centralized and – to a significant extent – militarized. This is better understood if we perceive this historical period as a process of legitimization for the emerging social and political order after the war and the civil conflict, which also involves aspects of state-building, especially as far as the role of the US factor is concerned (Voglis, 2014; Rizas, 2008). Anti-communism was an integral element both in the externally driven state-building and in the internal struggle for legitimization and institutional building. It was also interwoven with the variety of nationalism that prevailed at the end of this period. The differentiation between two phases of propaganda based on the means employed and the emphasis attributed in terms of content, serves analytical purposes, although in essence they overlap to some extent.

PHASE 1: STATE OF EMERGENCY PROPAGANDA The shaping of the anti-communist propaganda in civil war Greece was the product of national and transnational currents that converged and interacted but also generated contradictions. The most important elements of these currents were the evolution of the

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ideology of anticommunism in Greece from the interwar period to the Civil war and the  formulation of Western, transatlantic anticommunism in the context of the antitotalitarian paradigm. Alongside were the political and diplomatic developments that led to the consolidation of the Cold War, the renegotiation of Greek national identity after a turbulent period that involved the country’s participation in two world wars, two bitter internal conflicts – the National Schism (1915–1922) and the Civil War – and the ­collapse of the ‘Megali Idea’: the national ideology that had prevailed since the mid  nineteenth century (Skopetea, 1988; Kremmydas, 2010). This process was intertwined with the legitimization of the country’s institutional, political and social setting in the postwar period. Anti-communist propaganda had to serve multiple purposes ­stemming from the above currents. The ideological foundation for civil war anti-communist propaganda was the ideology of ‘national mindedness’ ­(‘ethnikofrosyni’), which crystallized in those years and became hegemonic throughout the postcivil-war period (1949–1974). According to Papadimitriou (2006), the ideological core of national mindedness consisted of nationalism, anti-communism, conservatism centered on the concepts of religion, family, ownership and homeland and pro-Atlanticism, while the endorsement of the monarchy was a peripheral element to the belief system and not a sine qua non for ‘national mindedness’ (Papadimitriou, 2006). In parallel, the notion that adherence to communist ideology was, in essence, a traitorous act against the Greek nation was the ideological precondition for an antiliberal legislation that allowed the criminal persecution of communists (or suspected communists) not on the basis of actions but of beliefs (Alivizatos, 1981). Consequently, the identification of communism with national treason and criminal behavior evolved into cornerstone themes of propaganda. Civil war propaganda is inextricably linked to the antiliberal institutional and legislative context

that sought to contain the appeal of communist ideology. The state-of-emergency term is coined due to the urgencies created by the civil war as an armed conflict, but also as a struggle for social and political hegemony after a period of multi-aspect crisis. The argument this chapter makes is that the form, the content and the means of civil war propaganda were shaped by two decisive factors: the central role of the Greek state as a propaganda agent and orchestrator and the relationship between Greece and the United States, with a considerable degree of dependence during the Civil War period (Stefanidis, 2004; Lialiouti, 2017). The role of these two actors, the Greek and US institutions, is ­perceived here as a continuum. This was sustained by an institutional nexus of bilateral agreements that shaped the context of US aid to Greece, as well as by the links established between the military and the intelligence ­personnel in both countries. As for the US role, the United States, through various institutional channels, orchestrated overt and covert propaganda operations. An important element of continuity can be traced to the legacy of pro-American propaganda associated with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) endeavor to Greece during WWII (Hionidou, 2013). US benevolence in the form of food relief to the war-torn country had been the theme of a well-orchestrated campaign. The United States Information Service (USIS) began its operation in 1947 with its headquarters in Athens and branches in Salonica and Patras. It had an original manpower of 14 employees, which would rise to 170 by 1953. During this initial phase, its operation was administratively interwoven with the Athens Embassy and with the information division of the American Mission for Aid to Greece (AMAG). Consequently, until 1953, USIS served the propaganda needs and goals of the Embassy, the AMAG and the Joint United States Military Aid Group to Greece (JUSMAGG) (Stefanidis, 2004: 12–13). The CIA also became actively involved in

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propaganda operations on Greek soil, after its foundation in 1948, starting from the implementation of psychological-war operations aiming to counter communist propaganda that had been designed by the British secret services before the UK’s withdrawal from the Greek affairs in early 1947 (Papahelas 1997: 21–2). In the early 1950s, the CIA would be the model for the foundation of the Greek intelligence agency (KYP) and would develop many joint propaganda operations with its Greek counterpart (Papahelas, 1997: 23; Rizas, 2008: 138). Concerning the Greek side, Bournazos (2009) argues that the Civil War is a turning point for government propaganda in two respects: ‘on the one hand (it) is intensified and expanded to a degree unknown till that time, on the other hand it acquires the form of counter-propaganda since its principal – if not exclusive – object was to confront communist propaganda… the anticommunist struggle takes the form of a nation-wide rally’. During this historical phase, Bournazos (2009) conceptualizes anti-communist propaganda ­ as a network of multiple ‘nodes’ (monarchy, army, police forces, Church, American Embassy, etc.) that coordinated their actions and interacted with a wide range of organizations, associations and unions (cultural ­foundations, scouts, volunteer groups, etc.). Three aspects of the network are worth commenting upon. First is the ­instrumental role of the army in disseminating and enforcing – if necessary – anti-communism. During the Civil War, the Directorates for Psychological Operations were founded in the Hellenic National Defense General Staff and the Hellenic Army General Staff, and special emphasis was given to the training of officers to meet the needs of the propaganda campaign. Moreover, the army created its own radio stations covering the capital area and the periphery. In collaboration with paramilitary groups and the police forces, the army sought to cement the anti-communist orientation of the rural population by disseminating propaganda films and print material,

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organizing public events – often with the participation of ‘repented’ communists in towns and villages – organizing propaganda exhibitions (e.g. the 1948 exhibition in Salonica under the title ‘Two years of war against the red fascism’) and surveilling the population. In order to fully understand the importance of the army’s activity, one should take into account the extremely high levels of illiteracy (especially in the rural areas) as well as the poor transportation network and infrastructure that meant the army vehicles had privileged access to remote areas. Apart from targeting the general population, the army developed several techniques for discouraging, alluring or terrorizing guerilla groups isolated in remote and mountainous areas (e.g. planes dropping leaflets propagating the advances of the national army and the miseries of the guerillas) (Bournazos, 2009: 23–4). Second, there is the role of ‘militant philanthropy’ with an emphasis on the royal family. A special component in the process of strengthening the Throne was the association of the royals – and particularly of the Queen – with welfare and social work, especially with reference to the consequences of the Civil War. The Queen’s fundraiser evolved into a powerful and far-reaching structure that focused primarily on the so-called Civil War children (Bournazos, 2009: 24–7, 33–4). The issue of the thousands of children who had been driven to the Eastern bloc countries by the communist guerillas, had evolved into a major propaganda battle between the two blocs. The anti-communist bloc denounced the practice of ‘paidomazoma’ (children removal) and sought to ‘safeguard’ the children in the areas affected by the conflict by moving them to ‘children’s towns’, where they received special training under firm supervision (Baerentzen, 1987; Vervenioti, 2005; Hassiotis, 2011). More than 20,000 children were accommodated in 52 children towns in the Civil War. Aside from the structure itself, these children and the treatment they received were an important propaganda theme: against the violent and cruel behavior

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of the guerillas was the protective hand of the Throne (Bournazos, 2009). Third, the social grounding of anti-­ communism served as a means of securing public resources. As a result of the turbulence stemming from a 30-year war period in Greek history (1912–1949), which also involved a major change in the country’s population composition (with the inclusion of 1.5 million refugees from Asia Minor), anti-communist ideology and propaganda cannot easily be discerned from social practices. Interacting with the reorganizing of clientelist and elite networks and the creation of several new civil society organizations, the construction of anti-communist identity was the sine qua non condition for gaining access to public money (through aid grants, compensations, etc.) and public services (Gounaris, 2004). In the discursive realm, elite and popular practices converged in the construction of the communist enemy concept. Following the scheme of the traitorous, anti-Greek orientation of communists and exploiting the supervision of communist parties by the USSR, the Civil War was framed as a battle between Greeks and Slavs. The equation of communism with the Bulgarian/Slavic intruder became powerful not only during the civil war but also in the post-civil-war years (Papadimitriou, 178–87; Panourgia, 2009, 117–23). Selective readings of the history of ethnic antagonisms in the Balkan area were incorporated in this stereotyping process. An important agent in the anti-­communist propaganda was the Greek Orthodox Church, alongside several extra-ecclesiastical organizations that denounced the atheist inclination of communists, but also portrayed them as active enemies of the Christian faith (Bournazos, 2009, 27–33). Moreover, communism was identified in public discourse with crime and violence, with lies and deception and was metaphorically represented as a sneaky disease (Bournazos, 2009, 18–33). A most illustrative example of the stateof-emergency phase in Cold War propaganda is the case of the Makronissos prison camp:

an inhibited island very close to the shores of Attica, that served from 1947 to 19541 as a place of exile and detention. Until 1949, the population of exiles consisted of soldiers and army officers that were suspected of nurturing communist ideology. From the spring of 1949, however, the share of civilians (men and women) increased significantly; thus, in the summer of 1949, 7,500 soldiers and 20,000 civilians were held at Makronissos. The officially declared goal of the prison camps operating on the island was the ‘rehabilitation’ of the prisoners. Following the conceptualization of communism as disease and deception, the ‘rehabilitation’ process would supposedly allow for the ‘recovery’ of those deceived or contaminated, by employing physical torture, psychological violence and propaganda (Voglis and Bournazos 2009). What is perhaps most striking is the fact that the Makronissos project was not covered with silence, but served as a big propaganda campaign – with an embellished presentation of its aspects, addressing both the internal and the foreign audience. In the framing that was employed for the international campaign, the emphasis was on the relevance and the potential imitation of the Greek ‘experiment’ for the Western bloc in general, as well as on its compatibility with liberal-democratic institutions as a ‘programme of civic readaptation’. This mood is captured in the 1949 publication (Figure 27.1) edited by C. Rodocanachi, which presents the Makronissos project to the international community. The iconography selected for the book cover aims to include Makronissos among the moments of national glory going back to the cultural heritage of Ancient Greece (Rodocanachi, 1949). Unsurprisingly, the description of the methods employed at Makronissos could not be further from the truth. According to the publication, the program of ‘readaptation’ involved the following: 1) Cordial welcome to the newcomers 2) Friendly treatment to inspire confidence

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Figure 27.2  Photo from the visit of the Royal Couple to Makronissos, published by the newspaper Kairoi, March 24, 1949

Figure 27.1  The front-cover of the edition: Rodocanachi, C. P. (1949), A Great work of civic readaptation in Greece, Athens, 1949 Source: Digital Museum of Makronissos, ASKI.

3) Residents are informed of the work done to ­influence public opinion in their favour and to induce everybody to receive them with open arms, when they return to their town or village 4) Convincing them that they will be granted a friendly reception wherever they may have to go 5) Creating the impression that it is in the nature of man to make mistakes and that nothing is more honourable than acknowledging own’s errors. This work is done principally in the form of lectures on national, social and religious subjects. (Rodocanachi, 1949: 7–8)

As a tangible proof of the ‘readaptation’, the  Makronisos propaganda insisted on portraying the affection that the reformed ­ population nurtured for the monarchs. Figure  27.2 is a snapshot from the warm welcome that the royal couple supposedly received at Makronisos in March 1949, and it received wide publicity. The Rodocanachi leaflet included the photo with the following

Source: National Library of Greece. The photo headline is the royal emblem: ‘My strength is the love of the people’. The caption reads: ‘A characteristic snapshot from the reception that the royal couple received at yesterday at Makronissos. The men of the battallion in delirious ­enthusiasm grabbed the royals in their arms cheering for Greece and the National Army and cursing the foreigndriven communists.

caption: ‘To show their sentiments and patriotic redemption, these once active communists actually chaired their royal visitors and the Minister of War (Rodocanachi, 1949: 1). A major task for anti-communist propaganda was the disassociation of the Communist party from the National Resistance Movement (1941–1944). The National Liberation Front (EAM) that was created by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in 1941 in Nazioccupied Athens became the largest resistance group during the occupation and contributed, to an extent, to the national prestige of the KKE. However, for the anti-communist political establishment the National Resistance, as the founding myth of post-war Greece, posed an obvious challenge. The difficulties in the elimination of the ties to the KKE, as well as the emerging alliances of the Cold War, led to a ­ certain ‘amnesia’ in public discourse concerning the occupation and the resistance

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(Fleischer, 2009: 508–53; Paschaloudi, 2010). It would be fair to argue that this ‘amnesia’ differentiated official from popular memory of WWII (Lialiouti, 2016). This differentiation, among other things, can be associated with a specific propaganda practice involving the public denunciation of communist ideology through signed letters of repentance that were widely reproduced. The anti-communist state sought to massively obtain such letters of ­repentance, by employing physical- and ­psychological-violence targeting, in particular of the exiled population.

PHASE 2: THE NORMALIZATION PROCESS Work and Victory Week as a Case Study After the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, the Greek problem was perceived by US officials as a ‘test case’ for US leadership of the Free World. In its discursive ­formulation and in terms of policy planning, the doctrine involved both economic and military goals in an evolving balance. For the period 1947–1949, military goals prevailed in the US agenda; since 1949, the goal of economic reconstruction gained prominence (Maier, 1978; Jones, 1992). Among the ideological implications of the doctrine was the conceptualization of the communist threat as twofold: military and ideological (Botsiou, 2009). Thus, any US response to that threat should also maintain this double orientation. In response to the communist vision, the US promise to the post-war world was captured by the slogan ‘peace and prosperity’ (Paterson, 1988: 18–9; Botsiou, 2009). The slogan ‘Work and Victory’, which was coined to term the propaganda activities organized in the last phase of the Greek Civil War, echoes this ideological mood. The naming was an idea of Lucretia Grady,

wife of the American Ambassador to Greece, who had also captured the idea for an event that would involve several activities taking place in the United States and in Greece. The choice of words implied that the Greek nation was fighting communism ­ militarily and through its productive reconstruction. Lucretia Grady was also very actively involved in the Work and Victory Week both publicly and behind the scenes. However, the American Ambassador wanted the celebration to appear as a ‘spontaneous initiative’ of the Greek side to alert global public opinion on the sufferings of civil war Greece. Henry Grady himself assured the Secretary of State that the project would emphasize ‘Greek spontaneity’ and that the appearance of US officials would be kept to a minimum (Grady, 1949). Nevertheless, the ambassadorial ­couple had a key role in orchestrating Work and Victory Week. The planning and implementation of the activities was based on the collaboration between the Greek Government, US Embassy and prominent members of the Greek–American community. An important aspect of this collaboration was the contacts between the Gradys and Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox and one of the most prominent members of the Greek– American community, with personal ties to the White House. Skouras was recruited to help with the preparations of the activities in the United States, but also to provide filming and to ensure US and word-wide coverage of the event. Much of the content for the press and radio coverage for Work and Victory in the United States was provided by the Gradys, while Skouras provided the Gradys with a film crew to cover activities in Greece, following the guidelines of the ambassadorial couple (TPL, 1949a). As far as Greek ceremonial practices are concerned, the festivities were very different from the later post-civil-war public rituals and celebrations, in that they were oriented both to the global and to the national public opinion, and they were also different in their

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temporal orientation: Work and Victory Week was oriented to the present and to the future, while post-civil-war festivities addressed the past (Antoniou, 2013). Another important remark involves the convergence in the discursive practices employed by US and Greek agents; the Greek version of the antitotalitarian, anti-communist discourse, the so-called ‘national-mindedness’, was structured upon similar conceptual and rhetorical patterns. The organizers reserved a special place for the Church in Work and Victory Week. The incorporation of religion in the program was the result of systematic contacts and requests. As early as February, Henry Grady informed the State Department that the Greek Orthodox Church was willing to give for philanthropy all its revenues on March 20, the first day of Work and Victory Week, and would ask Orthodox Churches all over the world to do the same. Moreover, it would ask Greek citizens to skip a meal on that day and to offer the equivalent amount of money to the cause. The Bishop of Gibraltar and the Archbishop of Canterbury would ask their parishes to declare March 25 as a day of prayer. Protestant congregations were asked to make a special reference to Work and Victory in their sermons on March 25, on the basis that the rally was ‘a symbol of the telling blow being struck in all free countries for the support of a common cause’ (TPL, 1949a). Lucretia Grady – who was a catholic  – convinced the Catholic Archbishop in Athens to ask the Pope for a public endorsement of Work and Victory (TPL, 1949a). A similar request was addressed to the Catholic Archbishop of New York by Henry Grady. In his letter to the Archbishop, Grady described ‘Work and Victory’ as ‘a morale b­uilding effort to spur the Greeks on to greater endeavour to end this terrible aggression of the Communists, backed by the Russian satellite countries’ (TPL, 1949b). On the eve of the week, Dean Acheson informed the US Embassy in Athens that

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the official Greek delegation would be received by the President and the First Lady in the White House (TPL, 1949c). President Truman himself gave a message praising the initiative. In Washington, DC, the Greek Ambassador marked the opening of Work and Victory (March 20) in a special ceremony at the Greek Orthodox Church of Aghia Sofia in Washington, claiming that ‘victory over the dark forces of oppression’ had already been achieved (TPL, 1949d: 3). On March 22, the so-called Greek ‘Gratitude Committee’ arrived in the United States. The following day, the committee gave a press conference on Bedloes island, which received extensive coverage from the US press, and its members made several TV appearances during their stay. Moreover, the Committee participated in several social events alongside US and Greek officials. Perhaps the most prestigious was the symposium hosted in New York by organizations of the diaspora, with most participants promising material and moral support to the Greek cause. The next day, a big parade took place on 5th Avenue with members of the Greek Armed Forces, the Royal Guard (Evzones) and women in traditional costumes. Skouras praised the Gradys for their ‘magnificent selection’ of the Evzones. It was reported that one million people watched the parade, among whom was Winston Churchill and Bernard Baruch (TPL, 1949g). After a short visit to Boston, the committee arrived in Washington DC, where they were received by the President, the First Lady and VicePresident Alben Barkley. The President expressed his sympathy for the sufferings of the Greek people and his admiration for their ‘courage’. Finally, the men of the Armed Forces and the Royal Guard participated in the parade for Army Day in DC (April 9) (TPL, 1949e). In his correspondence with Gradys, Skouras appeared certain that the tour of the Gratitude Committee in the United States was decisive in making the American people understand that the Greeks are ‘fighting no

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civil war but for freedom (and) integrity (of) western civilization’ (TPL, 1949f). Skouras’ role was instrumental in securing this understanding. He made personal contacts with the editors of the most important US newspapers to provide publicity for Work and Victory and a favorable presentation of the Greek affair, while he gave several radio interviews stressing that Greece was ‘engaged in no ­ local “cold” war, but in an all-out full-scale war against communism’ (TPL, 1949e). Similar contacts with US journalists, like Elizabeth Wayston and Dorothy Thompson, were also made by Henry and Lucretia Grady to assure positive coverage by the US press (TPL, 1949g). The following account of Work and Victory by Elizabeth Wayston is revealing of the impact of those contacts: Greece’s Week of ‘Work and Victory’, in March, was a mammoth piece of organization planned and carried out as evidence to the world of the Greek people’s determination to restore their land to peace and economic plenty… It was not a holiday week. Workers in factories, everywhere, ­ continued working. It was an enthusiastic, yet sober week of recognition that victory is possible only through work, and that peace can be sustained after the victory only through continued work. It was a period, as well, when more than seventy women’s organizations banded together with a common purpose. It was also a time when the common people of the realm of labor walked with their Ministers who had set their goal for them… It was not only a manifestation by Greeks for Greeks, but also a manifestation that served as an example to the world that no force can destroy freedom, or the principles of human rights, so long as a people believe in that freedom.2

In the weeks preceding the official ceremonies, Greek ministers and other officials campaigned throughout Greece to prepare for the event, but also to stir public support. They were usually followed by Lucretia Grady, who often chose to give public speeches. In one of these public appearances, she made it clear to the Greek public that her initiative was purely polemic, stating that the idea came to her from the fact that she could not fight on the front herself (Speech at

Patras, 12/3/1949) (Kairoi, 1949). Lucretia Grady also had many engagements during Work and Victory, participating daily in official ceremonies, but also meeting with women organizations, charity and educational foundations and factory workers. As Work and Victory coincided with the Greek national holiday of March 25 (day of remembrance for the Greek War of Independence), there was a systematic effort to reinterpret the meaning of the national holiday in relation to the anti-communist ­ struggle. An article in the newspaper Kairoi argued that Work and Victory contributed in ‘widening’ and attributing a ‘­contemporary meaning’ to the anniversary and that ‘the excellent initiative of Mrs Grady gives us the opportunity to show the world that the Greek nation not only fights and wins a war unprecedented in global history, but also labors in every aspect of national energy for the country’s recovery’ (Melas, 1949). The double meaning of the festivities was also stressed by Archbishop Damaskinos in his message to the public (Kairoi, 1949). The common doubleedged goal of military defeat of communism and productive restructuring was reproduced not only in the discursive framing – with columnists underlying that ‘the same hands grasp for the plow and the machine gun’ (Melas, 1949) – but also in the iconography. The frontpage of newspaper Kairoi (Figure 27.3), where a soldier, a farmer and a worker appear in unity, is revealing for the ideological constructions associated with Work and Victory. Among the propaganda priorities in Work and Victory was the legitimization of the emerging institutional status quo that could safeguard the anti-communist consensus with a special place reserved for the monarchy. After a series of political adventures that challenged her survival, the Greek ­monarchy sought to secure its role and maximize her public presence since 1946. As was also evident during Work and Victory, the symbols and rituals that were vested upon the royal couple aimed to present the monarchs as the ‘heads of the national family’

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Figure 27.3  Kairoi frontpage, March 20, 1949 Source: National Library of Greece.

in the context of the renegotiation of Greek national identity  after the war and the Civil War (Karakasidou, 2000). It is also worth commenting on the geographical coverage of Work and Victory. Apart from the symbolical gravity of the

Greek capital, the related activities were intensified in northern Greece (Naoussa, Veroia, Alexandroupolis, etc.), which was the last front of the Civil War. Work and Victory Week was organized into themes, with each day being dedicated to a social group or

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institution (farmers, workers, youth, etc.), aiming to highlight a collaborative spirit in their co-existence. The first day of the celebrations was dedicated to the Church and began with a liturgy at the Orthodox Athens Cathedral – with the presence of the royal couple, government ministers, the ambassadorial couple, General Van Fleet, etc. – and also at the Catholic Cathedral. It is revealing of the impact of anti-communism in the negotiation of national identity that Greek Catholics were described at the time in press reports as ­patriots who fulfilled their national ‘duty’ and honored their ‘struggling’ homeland. On the same day, an exhibition on the ‘reformative’ achievements of the ‘Makronissos Battalion’ was inaugurated at Zappeion (Kairoi, 1949). The second day was designated as ‘agricultural day’ and was meant to ‘demonstrate in the most official way the contribution of the agrarian class to the task of national reconstruction and her gratitude to the national forces that inflict the final blow against banditry’ (Kairoi, 1949). US and Greek officials praised farmers as the ‘nation’s backbone’. The third day was ‘Labor and Industry Day’ and involved symbolic gestures that alluded to the friendly and collaborative relationship between workers and employers; the workers’ families were invited for a tour of the factories, and they all lunched together with the industrialists. Visits to factories throughout the country were made by government ministers and by Mrs Grady, who even danced to Greek folk music at the emblematic Papastratos tobacco industry in Piraeus. The General Confederation of Greek Workers supported Worker’s Day, urging the unions to participate in the activities and to ‘affirm the gratitude of the working class towards the national army who sheds his blood for the crush of the foreigners serving banditry’ (Kairoi, 1949). The confederation also hosted a reception for members of the armed forces and sent a statue of an industrial worker standing next to a fighting soldier, as a gift to President Truman (Kairoi, 1949).

The fourth day of Work and Victory was dedicated to the Greek youth, with emphasis on the beneficial role of the ‘national-minded’ youth and on the role of the monarchy (most notably the Queen) in sustaining this orientation. The youth was at the center of a moralistic discourse structured upon the fear of ‘criminal’ or ‘delinquent’ behavior, with these terms also implying the ideological appeal of communism. The question of control and surveillance over youth was even more critical due to the social implications of the war and the Civil War, which involved a significant number of orphaned or displaced children (Avdela, 2013). Thus, Work and Victory staged children and adolescents in working in publicutility projects and offering volunteer work, to demonstrate that the anti-communist state excelled in the moral education of the youth and secured its productive and benevolent role in society. In this context, students participated in blood donations for soldiers wounded in the civil strife, while children from the Queen’s children’s towns paraded in the capital. On Youth Day, the royal couple visited the island of Markonisos to inspect the prison camps and was supposedly enthusiastically received by the exiles. A key place in Work and Victory was occupied by the association ‘Elliniki Merimna’ (Greek Care), which had operated since 1946 under the Queen’s auspices. On March 22, Greek Care organized a public lecture on the ‘sanctity of labor’, while on Youth Day the association had children from children’s towns and students of night schools repair a road to demonstrate the utility of the training it provided. The fifth day of the celebrations (March 24) was named ‘Day of International Solidarity’ during which emphasis was placed – almost exclusively – on Greek–American ties and, of course, to the effect of the Marshall Plan on Greece. The highlight of the day was the inauguration of the ‘Exhibition on the Reconstruction’, otherwise called ‘Exhibition on the Survival of the Greek People’, with the presence of the monarchs.

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Figure 27.4  Snapshot from “Agricultural Day” published at Kairoi, 22/3/1949 Source: National Library of Greece. The caption reads: EXPLOITATION OF THE GREEK LAND: Immense crowds examine with admiration and gratitude the agricultural machines (tractors, sowing machines etc.) exposed at Syntagma Square which the United States provide to Agrarian Greece to reclaim the land and the sweat of her children

While the exhibition provided information on the aid granted to Greece by the allies, its center of gravity was the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In his opening speech, the Minister of Foreign Affairs argued that the aim of the Marshall Plan was not only the country’s economic recovery but also the restoration of ‘spiritual balance’, stressing that Europe’s spiritual ­decadence after the war was more dangerous than economic chaos (TPL, 1949h). The final day of the week, which coincided with the Greek national holiday, was dedicated to the ‘glory of the warrior’ (Kairoi, 1949). The participation of US marines in the big military parade that took place in Athens was praised by the nationally minded press (Kairoi, 1949). This final day of the week was meant to reaffirm national unity – with the exclusion of communists – and the peaceful coexistence of all social classes.

In his speech, Henry Grady celebrated the closing of Work and Victory as a manifestation of the ‘rebirth of the Greek spirit’ and associated the national holiday not only with past but also with upcoming victory (Grady, 1949). To conclude, Work and Victory is an interesting case of convergence between propaganda tactics and ideology at the transitional phase that marks the ending of the Civil War. An important element in the assessment of its structure and content as a propaganda ­activity is its presupposition of two different ­audiences: a national and a foreign one. In terms of content, it represents an effort to challenge communism both negatively and positively. The positively framed anti-­ communism propaganda was structured upon the concepts of productivity, work ethic, volunteerism and social peace under the ­ ­auspices of a paternalistic monarchy.

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CONCLUSION To the great disappointment of US culturaldiplomacy officials, the Marshall Plan, popularly known as American Aid, had lost much of its prestige among the Greeks by the late 1950s, with only a minority stating in opinion polls that it had benefited the country to a great extent. Moreover, anti-American trends would develop to a generalized ­anti-Americanism after the collapse of the military regime (1967–1974) (Lialiouti 2017; Lialiouti 2015). Could these outcomes be attributed to US foreign policy and propaganda failures? In many respects, yes. However, recent political developments in the country associated with the economic crisis (2010–2018) provoked some surprising transformations in the US image, alongside a positive perception of the Obama presidency (2009–2017). In the context of a highly polarized political debate, emerging Euroskepticism and anti-German attitudes due to public discomfort with the austerity policies, the myth of the American Aid as an unconditional rescue endeavor reappeared in public discourse attesting for the lasting impact of aspects of pro-American propaganda. On the other hand, political and cultural anti-­ Americanism seem to hold their strength as interpretive schemes in Greek political culture. How are these currents trends related to the issues explored in this chapter? A tentative answer to the above question involves the following. US propaganda was structured upon a somewhat misleading understanding of pro-communist trends in post-war Greece. It failed to contextualize them by taking into account the role of the communist party in the resistance movement during WWII and thus the memory practices associated with the post-war negotiation of Greek national identity. Moreover, it failed to interpret opposition to the post-civil war establishment as a quest for political and social modernization. The implementation of propaganda depended upon military and paramilitary networks as well as on extremely

conservative institutions, such as the monarchy, which prevented the identification of the US image with progressive and modernizing elements. US propaganda was somewhat trapped in the aid issue and themes revolving around material goods, thus failing to promote a more comprehensive account of US culture. Moreover, the aid theme functioned as a constant reminder of the inequality in bilateral relations. Nevertheless, anti-communist propaganda conducted in civil war Greece can be studied as an aspect of transatlantic history because of the interdependence between Greek and US agents in its design and implementation, but also because of the conceptual and ideological links between the ruling classes in the two countries at the emergence of the Cold War. Moreover, the study of propaganda as addressed in this chapter sheds light on aspects of social and political history. In this respect, propaganda is examined in the broader political, ideological and social context because this allows for a comprehensive understanding not only of its defined goals but its functions in a given time and place. In the Greek case, anti-communist propaganda is understood as part of the processes taking place at a liminal moment of Greek history involving aspects of state-building, national-identity construction and the question of establishing a social and political hegemony. Under this prism, it is argued that anti-­ communist propaganda of the period 1946–1949 can be broken down into a stateof-emergency phase and a phase of normalization. During the first phase, the emphasis is placed on the enemy-construction propaganda, while the second phase involves efforts to present a positive and comprehensive social vision in response to communist ideology. Nevertheless, during the entire period, anti-communist propaganda was mainly the product of utterly conservative milieus (army and police forces, Church and ecclesiastical organizations, monarchy, etc.). This development, alongside the relative backwardness of the mass media industry in Greece, defined

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the form of propaganda. Finally, despite its  transatlantic influences, anti-communist propaganda in civil war Greece cannot be understood independently from the features of Greek post-war nationalism.

Notes 1  The majority of the political prisoners of Makronissos were removed in 1951. Soldiers ­ that were considered vulnerable to left ideology were being kept until 1954. (Bournazos, 1997). 2  An undated copy of the article is included in the folder Henry F. Grady Papers, Box 3, Folder Greece ‘Work and Victory Week’.

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political refugees of the civil war in Eastern Europe [To oplo para poda. Oi politikoi prosfyges tou emfyliou polemou stiri Anatoliki Evropi] (pp. 101–24). Thessaloniki: University of Macedonia Press. (in Greek). Voglis, P. (2014). The impossible revolution: the  social dynamics of the civil war, [Η Αδύνατη Επανάσταση. Η κοινωνική δυναμική του ɛμφυλίου πολέμου]. Athens: Alexandreia (in Greek). Voglis, P. & Bournazos, S. (2009). Makronissos Camp 1947–1950. Violence and Propaganda [Στρατóπɛδο Μακρονήσου 1947–1950. Βία και προπαγάνδα]. In Chatziiosif, C. (Ed.). ­History of Greece in the 20th century [Əστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ού αιώνα] (Vol. 2) (pp. 51–81). Athens: Vivliorama. Welch, D. (2003). Propaganda in historical perspective. In Cull, N. J., Culbert, D. & ­ Welch, D. (Eds), Propaganda and mass persuasion: a historical encyclopedia, 1500 to the present (pp. xv–xxi). Santa Barbara, DEN. and Oxford: ABC-CLIO. Wilford, H. (2009). The mighty Wurlitzer: how the CIA played America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

28 Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela Daniel Aguirre and Caroline Avila

INTRODUCTION Populist communication in Latin American offers illustrative examples and concepts for a broader understanding of propaganda in our present times. Populism and propaganda are controversial terms with several competing definitions dependent on geographic location, language usage and custom. Generally, citizens and politicians alike reflect upon both critically. Furthermore, a term that is often associated with populism and propaganda in the region is demagoguery and is generally identifiable in politics via speech acts and subsequent policies. The strongest conceptual linkages in the region are most visible among populism and demagoguery, whereas propaganda and demagoguery are not as closely associated in Latin American thought. The semantics of it all is salient when taking into account that, from a communication standpoint, propaganda in the Spanish language remains conceptually entangled with the practice of commercial

advertising and marketing, rather than a sponsored, one-way public information campaign directed toward citizens. Contentious political systems and the president’s role in public affairs as structurally extensive or pervasive (termed by political scientists as hyperpresidentialism) offer another comparative entry point for analysis. In other words, populist politics and communication can equate to a variety of propaganda that can travel, aiding in understanding other contexts – including recent ones in Europe and the United States. This chapter refers to the legacy of populist communication within the Latin American region with the purpose of integrating it deliberately into the study of propaganda. It argues that a corpus of existing research on populism in Latin America – albeit mostly in Spanish – can inform current understandings and notions of propaganda. To do so, it offers a populist communication framework per recent events from the region, namely in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

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In essence, the chapter’s primary aim is to synthesize Latin American thought on populism and situate it within propaganda studies. Consequently, the chapter is divided into two sections. The first one is a historical background of populism in Latin America. In the second one, all three cases are presented as evidence that should justify situating populism within propaganda studies from a regional perspective. Moreover, given the cases examined, the authors propose in the second section a framework that can help illustrate the nexus between populist communication and propaganda beyond Latin America. In the conclusion, we summarize the chapter’s main points, but also envision future pathways for those interested in studying or pursuing further research on Latin American propaganda.

HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ASPECTS OF POPULISM IN LATIN AMERICA Latin American political history is filled with governments categorized as populist, to the extent that within the literature three waves of populist governments are identified. Between the decades of 1930 and 1960, the governments of Perón in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil and Velasco in Ecuador are oft-cited cases of classical populism. Arguably, populism emerged as a response to the differences generated by migration from the countryside to the city, industrialization and other factors that accentuated existing social inequities that continue to plague the region to this day (Weyland, 2001). Authoritarian military governments during the mid-1960s and early 1970s interrupted this process, yet with the return of democracy and free elections in most of the region, populism reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s with the governments of Alan García and Fujimori in Perú, Menem in Argentina and Bucaram in Ecuador. This second wave of populism is

labeled ‘neo-populism’ due to its affinity toward neoliberal economic policies. During the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, analyses classified nationalist rulers of the left as anti-neoliberal. Hence, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, as media savvy populists of a radical and nationalist nature, are considered part of this recent wave (de la Torre, 2010; Hermet, 2003). In other words, the third wave of populism is classified as a radical one, and a manifestation of Latin American populism that coincides with rapid changes regarding media and technology. For explanations of the reasons behind the resurgence of populism, Laclau (2005) points out that populism requires the embodiment of someone who unifies and represents popular demands. Thus, ‘popular will’ can support the rise of that someone based on charismatic traits that they can demonstrate to the people. As a process of symbolic representation, the emergence of populist leaders impelled by their charisma enables a first affront on political institutions in each country1. This symbolic representation is, in essence, part of communication processes and is present in the literature as a prominent aspect of Latin American populism. Concretely, aspects of said processes include the personalization of the charismatic leader, a Manichean and polarizing discursive style, direct appeals to the people bypassing intermediaries, the capacity to mobilize the masses, and multiple public appearances (Conaghan and de la Torre, 2008; de la Torre 2007, 2010; Freidenberg, 2007, 2011). In sum, and as emphasized in this chapter, populist governments are recognized for their prolific use of communication in a variety of forms (Waisbord 2014b). Generally speaking, in Latin America, populist leaders are able to succeed given the fragility of political institutions and media systems that become vulnerable to government interference and market-induced pressures. Populist governments, from Perón to Chávez, are characterized by the presence of

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caudillos (strongmen) that stand out for their extensive and perceptive use of the media. If, in the past, radio and balcony speeches were used in classical populism, in neo-populism and in radical populism2, the development of media technology, television and the Internet allowed for newer forms of messaging by populist leaders (de la Torre, 2008). Populism is a concept plagued with controversy and scholars have yet to agree on a single definition (de la Torre and Arnson, 2013). On the one hand, some refer to it from a structuralist perspective, or as an unintended consequence of the modernization of Latin American societies (Germani, 1964; Shamis, 2013). Another approximation is from a political strategy view, described as leaders seeking to compete and succeed politically – that is, in order to gain and expand power. Hence, the populist leader depends on direct and unmediated support from a large portion of the population. The range of this power is evidenced through electoral processes, referendums, mass demonstrations, and public opinion polls (Jansen, 2015; Weyland, 2001). Within this same political strategy approximation, the rhetorical aspect of populism is key, such as divisive language, identification with the people and accusations against enemies (Freidenberg, 2007; Hawkins, 2009). Additionally, an economics-driven and normative view considers populism (mainly classical and radical) as an irresponsible economic management policy choice characterized by overspending and subsequent hyperinflation. These said practices were replaced by neoliberal economic policies adopted by populist governments in the 1990s, generally politically right leaning and receptive to free-market policies (Mudde and Rovira, 2017; Weyland, 2003). Rovira Kaltwasser (2015) suggests working on a minimalist and ideology-centric concept for comparative analyses on populism to explain the emergence of populisms both in Europe and in the Americas. He proposes considering an ideological approximation based on the concept introduced by Cas

Mudde (2004). Mudde defines populism as an ideology that conceives a society separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the true people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, where politics is the expression of the will of the people. de la Torre and Arnson (2013) agree with Mudde in that some of the main components of populism – whether it is considered a form of government, a rhetorical style, or a political representation – gravitate toward establishing a divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’. This sort of ‘political frontier’ is what Laclau (2005) states is necessary in order to ‘construct a people’ in populism. In this context, personalized and charismatic leadership becomes a driver of populism (Mudde 2004) since direct linkages between the leader and the masses can generally overshadow even the most institutionalized intermediation (political parties and media) – something that has been fundamental in the emergence of populisms, particularly in Latin America (de la Torre and Arnson, 2013; Knight, 1998). In other words, the marginalization, polarization and/or capturing of media organizations benefits populist emergence and consolidation. Furthermore, Mazzoleni (2003) proposes for European cases the need to evaluate the role of the media in the emergence of populisms and, in a similar vein, Krämer (2014) theoretically defines and analyzes populist media. In addition, other studies focus on the contents of the speech acts of populist party leaders found in their public activities and media coverage (Cranmer, 2011; Jagers and Walgrave, 2007). In Latin America, studies on populist communication have focused mainly on examining electoral marketing campaigns (Valdés, 2007), discourse content analysis (Méndez et al., 2008) and evidencing tensions in reference to media and its coverage (Kitzberger, 2009; Waisbord, 2014b). Ironically for Latin American populism, the evolution of political communication in the region means recognizing practices influenced by Western democracies, which has

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created a mixed format for communications management (de la Torre and Conaghan, 2009). For instance, the competition between media and politicians to capture an audience or to determine the agenda has become part of populist communication implemented oftentimes in consultation with political communication strategists from, or trained in, the United States. Examples of commonly used tactics influenced by the Americanization of politics include press conferences, organization of events, news campaigns, advertisements or joint broadcasts to transmit messages, all part of the offerings of communication divisions within public administrations and relied upon by populist rulers (Waisbord, 2014b). To some extent, it seems that the role of political communication in populist governments does not vary from the experiences of the governments in Western democracies described in the literature. As Waisbord (2014b) notes, the common denominator coalesces in the promise to give ‘a voice to those without a voice’, which implies – echoing the words of Laclau – to ratify its quality as an ‘empty signifier’ and as a link through the symbolic representation process. The highly ideological discourse of revolution and social justice is a consequence of the call to the people and the anti-elitist rhetoric of populism. The ruler, as the supreme authority, seizes the word and assumes the power, anointed by the people or constituents, to interpret the truth (Valdés, 2007). Thus, in Latin American populist governments, the proximity with the voter and direct communication without partisan or journalistic intermediation is significant. In other words, the leader speaks directly to his ‘constituents’, embodying the voice of the people, in search of legitimacy and as a form of accountability (Kitzberger, 2009). Kitzberger (2009) notes that populist governments of the 21st century, such as Chávez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia, share common traits in their communication styles:

1 Public appearances that include a highly ideological discourse about the media identified as opposition political actors linked to the privileged class. In the case of populist governments of a nationalist and leftist nature, they identify an opposition elite embodied in certain media outlets who are part of that political frontier that demands populist rhetoric and therefore constitutes the enemy of the people. 2 Deployment of a variety of direct forms of messaging that combines traditional forms of communication and use of newer media technology resources. 3 Establishment of regulations on media ownership, moving towards a more state-owned system (Kitzberger, 2009: 5). This leads to permanent confrontation of these leaders with certain sectors of the media.

From this list, it is worth underscoring that one of the main features refers to direct communication with the people, which allows populist leaders to set the political agenda by circumventing intermediaries (media). The use of nationwide joint broadcasts (cadena nacional), frequent public appearances, trips to communities and weekly radio and television programs are some of the resources used with the intention of avoiding journalists’ ‘interference’, correcting alleged lies originated from the media and imposing a populist agenda. In effect, the ‘saturation of the media sphere with the presidential voice defines populist communication’ (Waisbord, 2014b: 173). However, the imposition of a populist logic is also a consequence of the specifics of media-government relations, altering the way information is produced, accessed and processed by society, falling in line with the evolution of political communication as described by other studies (Bennet and Manheim, 2006; Mazzoleni, 2010). The governments of the most traditional and institutionalized Western democracies often prefer a strong relationship management approach with media organizations, applying theories that originate from public relations. On the other hand, governments such as Venezuela,

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Ecuador and Bolivia have, as a common denominator, intense confrontation with traditional media, which they finger point as political actors that represent the elite opposition. By reducing the debate in binary terms, a good versus evil rhetoric, populists in their messaging justify the imposition of other channels, mainly those favorable to, or owned by, the state (Kitzberger, 2012). As a means to maintain pressure against elites and simultaneously fulfill their role of ‘giving voice to those without a voice’, the governments of Chávez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia enacted laws to regulate media and allow via specific constitutional provisions the right to intervene in the development of the media system. Through the creation of public and community media outlets that counterbalance a private/commercial system, this practice has become prominent and a model often found in the third wave of populism (Avila, 2013; Waisbord, 2014a). Moreover, creating or co-opting media outlets, in effect, oftentimes proves strategic to populist objectives, seeking to literally ‘crowd-out’ competing voices within the country.

LATIN AMERICAN POPULIST COMMUNICATION AND PROPAGANDA: TOWARD A SYNTHESIZED FRAMEWORK In recognizing similarities and differences among Bolivian, Ecuadorian and Venezuelan populist governments, and comparing communication outputs as propaganda, one can observe a specific phenomenon with distinctive characteristics. Although the charismatic and personalistic style is a discernable feature, along with the advisement of professional communication experts, a strategic and organized management of communication is common via the consultation of public opinion polls, public relations tools and political marketing, indistinct of each

particular political context within all three countries. In populist communicative practices, utilizing these tools enables the task of constructing ‘the people’s will’ and generally results in social polarization. As described before, key elements, such as the messianic discourse, the exaltation of the charismatic leader and the ‘saturation of the media sphere with the presidential voice’, are used with the objective to reaffirm the ability to exercise power based on popular support and mobilization (Weyland, 2001). Taking into consideration the literature on populism, political communication and government communication as a whole, a conceptual shift toward propaganda means translating populism’s concepts into a synthesized framework. We have denominated our framework a populist communication framework. Our belief is that this framework helps explicate propaganda in Latin America, as populism and propaganda overlap conceptually (see Table 28.1). Arguably, a main overlapping term in this regard that bridges both bodies of work – in our view – is demagoguery. In effect, demagoguery is the missing link lost in translation between populism and propaganda. Hence, we commence the synthesis with our approximation to this term. Demagoguery, when drilled down for a workable definition, entails examining what is denominated as a civil society and the specifics of its socio-political subcultures in dialogical relation to political leadership. A demagogue does not emerge in a vacuum. Subcultures within a society bring to power demagogic or populist leaders fueled by longstanding grievances such as economic and political inequalities generally exacerbated by crises. To this point, Goldzwig (1989: 211) provides a perspective that is useful for our understanding toward populist communication as a framework of propaganda, particularly on a rhetorical level. The emotionally or economically marginalized are apt to react favorably to the ‘demagogic’ rhetor who voices their frustration and alienation and who invokes a public persona that embodies those

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social tensions and symbolically casts them out. Without consensus renegotiation as a goal, these rhetors are almost exclusively engaged with the pre-rational and pre-dialogical concerns serving as preconditions for functional entrance into a democratic society. As polemicist-prophet, one of the agitator’s main functions in society is to name the Great No; to place it on public display through the unending resources of language. If this causes societal discomfiture, it is because society sees through a glass darkly; in the confrontationalist, society may even discover the dim outlines of itself.

Taking the rhetorical ‘route’ to understand populist communication as akin to propaganda, the evidence regarding leaders in the region embodying subcultures’ grievances is numerous and can be explained thematically via the stagnant economic development of several countries within Latin America. The economic development explanation, as seen through populist leaders’ speech acts, offers a first layer of understanding in our proposed framework. Leaders such as Argentina’s Juan Domingo and Eva Perón are exemplars of populist communications in a crisis-ridden Argentina of the late 1940s and most of the 1950s. From the Peróns’ experience, populist communication via in-person or mediated speech acts (radio broadcasts) refer contentwise and strategy-wise to leadership rhetoric that emphasizes and exploits divisions within the population (among subcultures), aiming electorally to gain power and/or expand power within political institutions by activating well-known grievances and offering solutions which are often grandiose. While, in general, rhetorically divisive strategies target local elites, what is also a common denominator in populist communication in the region is the otherization process of US hegemony. Generally denounced as imperialism and compounded when allegedly conspiring with local elites, otherization in other words deploys rhetorically divisive mechanisms, establishing them vs. us dynamics (i.e. elites, United States vs. the less privileged). Another important dimension to understanding propaganda in Latin America from a populist communication framework

encompasses considering the relationship between political and media systems as they interact within a logic of symbolic meaning production. We term this dimension radically intervened modes of meaning production, alluding to a historical materialist tradition – namely Marxist thought applied to public information and media organizations. The influential work on media and political systems by Hallin and Mancini (2004), and subsequent criticism by de Albuquerque (2012), offer relevant notions to the pressures and relations underpinning the communicative outputs of media organizations when dealing with political actors and forces. Within this dimension, evidence is visible regarding competition between state-owned media and privately owned media, state-co-opted media and overall precariousness of media systems, and are scenario configurations that on the ground become prevalent as populist governments attempt to expand or consolidate power to signify public affairs. Arguably, media systems become vulnerable, especially upon entering these mentioned scenarios as populist governments enact restrictive media legislature, create regulatory entities, establish new media outlets or simply take over bankrupt media organizations via co-option or indirect acquisitions. Cases during the last two decades of media law enactment and intentional media intervention, in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, as described later in the chapter, provide evidence of the relevancy of this level of analysis.

Deploying Rhetorical Divisive Mechanisms during Referendums The cases of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela provide evidence to illustrate the use of a divisive rhetoric within a populist communication framework as articulated by Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela. In general terms, all three leaders have been labeled populist and came into power electorally,

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Table 28.1  A Populist Communication Framework for Comparative Propaganda Analysis Levels

Rhetorical Divisiveness

Radical Intervention of Media Production

Articulated Populist/Propagandist Sensitivities

Leader

Populist/Propagandist Direct Messaging to the People

Direct Appeals to Publics’ Long-Held Grievances

Systems

Adversarial and Elite Controlled Media

Institutional Crowding Out and Marginalizing via Populist/ Propagandist Prerogatives Blurring of State and Private Information Enterprises; Partisan Media, Political Parallelism, Co-optation and Media System Vulnerabilities

Populist/Propagandist Messaging Hybrid or Post-Media Systems

Source: Daniel Aguirre and Caroline Ávila

utilizing antagonistic speeches targeted to what has been mentioned before as an ‘otherization’ divide between the disenfranchised masses vs. privileged elites. In addition, elites are expanded to foreign influence, namely US interests in coordination with local elites. In order to provide a fair comparison of all three countries we examine portions of speeches per the news coverage of referendums held in each country. Since each referendum selected aimed to reform each country’s constitution, it seems relevant to compare discourse focused on this type of event as all three leaders attempted to get the vote out and evaluated voting outcomes. During the first two years (2007–2009) of President Rafael Correa’s administration, Ecuador experienced significant electoral processes that enabled the consolidation of his political leadership, which was scarcely known prior to his election into office. Correa emerged as a product of Ecuadorians’ disappointment with the political system, specifically in respect to the lack of new political leadership, increased corruption and overall instability that country faced during the previous decade. Correa’s leitmotif while campaigning in 2006 was ‘change’, specifically via the establishment of a Constitutional Assembly (a body) that would lead the creation of a new constitution. A referendum that was held in April 2007 was approved with large support by Ecuadorians, thus allowing the Constitutional Assembly to

form. By the end of 2007, Correa’s coalition, Alianza País, possessed a majority within the Constitutional Assembly, thus enabling the drafting of the new constitution in record time. By September 2008, 63.9% of the voting population approved that new constitution. The 2008 referendum, moreover, became a significant milestone in Correa’s presidency. In effect, the administration’s interest was to expand his project, denominated Revolución Ciudadana or Citizen’s Revolution in English. At a rhetorical level, aspects related to antagonism and speaking for the people are present. As reported by the Washington Post (Partlow, J., and Küffner, S., 2008), for instance: ‘Today Ecuador has decided on a new nation. The old structures are defeated’, Correa told cheering supporters in the coastal city of Guayaquil. ‘This confirms the citizens’ revolution’. (Partlow, J., and Küffner, S., 2008, par. 3) The victory, Correa said, gives him the opportunity to effect rapid social change in pursuit of his vision of alleviating poverty and weakening the traditional elite as he implements what he calls ‘21stcentury socialism’. (Partlow, J., and Küffner, S. (2008: par. 4)

These electoral victories enabled Correa to consolidate his political project and, in addition, the new constitution expanded presidential powers, giving Correa opportunities to intervene legally in different spheres of Ecuadorian society,

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Relatedly, in 2015, the Ecuadorian Congress approved a constitutional reform that allowed for presidential reelection and other authorities as of 2021. These radical changes were a characteristic in populist governments providing opportunities to confront political opposition through direct communication and public appeal. The approval of the reform, supported by the Correa administration, generated reactions to it from political opposition and most Ecuadorians. Nevertheless, by means of his personal Twitter account, Correa referred to the reform as documented by The Guardian. We will continue governing for the common good with total democratic legitimacy (…) They [the opposition] want us to go back to the old country dominated by the usurpation of popular representation, immobilise us, impede us from governing (…) We may make mistakes but in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian people are in charge (Collyns, 2015: par. 5–7).

In Chavez’s Venezuela, a key referendum was held with term limits as the centerpiece of a call for reform. Similarly, in the Venezuelan case, Chavez’s bid for indefinite reelection was successful (54.4% voting in favor). As reported by The New York Times (Romero, S., 2009), evidence demonstrating a populist approach when interacting with supporters, and direct appeals in classical and radical populist form, is identifiable. At the risk of polarizing Venezuela’s deeply divided society further, the victory could also strengthen Mr. Chávez’s current mandate as he reacts to a sharp fall in the price of oil, the export commodity that has financed his broadly popular povertyreduction projects. (par. 5) Even as he appears on national television from the balcony of Miraflores Palace before a cheering crowd of supporters, moments after electoral officials announced the results; a palpable fear was setting in among opposition that this former army officer would become their president for life. (par. 6) ‘I am a soldier for the people’, an ebullient Mr. Chávez exclaimed. ‘I will obey the people’s mandate’. (par. 7)

About eight years after the Venezuelan referendum under Chávez, in February 2016 in Bolivia, President Evo Morales called for a similar public vote regarding changing reelection limits. However, unlike Chávez, the outcome was not favorable to Morales who sought a fourth term in office. Yet his polarizing rhetoric was also noticeable as reported by The Guardian (Collyns, D. and Watts, J. (2016 par. 8): Morales said earlier that whatever the result he would not abandon his ‘struggle’ and blamed his disappointing showing on an opposition ‘dirty war’ on social media. (par. 7, 24) We’re anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist; we’ve been formed that way. This struggle will continue whether the yes or the no wins. It will never be abandoned. ( par.7) ‘The president – who won landslides in each of his previous three elections – grudgingly conceded defeat with more than 99% of the results confirmed, but vowed to fight on. ‘We lost a democratic battle but not the war’, he told a news conference, blaming his defeat on an ‘external conspiracy’ and dirty tactics by the opposition’. (par. 5)

In addition to the quotations provided by The Guardian on Morales’ declaration in reference to the outcome of the 2016 referendum, it is also worth underscoring the relational aspect mentioned before, in other words: the embodiment of the people’s will in the following statement as also reported by The Guardian (Collyns, D. and Watts, J., 2016: par. 10). Speaking in the president’s palace in La Paz, Morales claims his latest move to stay in office is a response to popular pressure. ‘Before I promised to stop, but now the communities obliged me to modify the constitution’, he says. ‘I have to respond to the people. It is not the power of the Evo; it is the power of the people’.

As seen in all three cases, the populist communication of all three presidents prior, during and days after each referendum offer evidence of common patterns of rhetorical divisiveness. Indeed, these examples contain

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the embodiment of the people’s voice, antagonizing local opposition and confronting a system considered in the words of Morales: neoliberal, capitalist and imperialist; alluding to foreign interests, mainly the United States. The search for an enemy is a classic resource of populism since it reduces political debate into a friend vs. foe logic. The oversimplification of content is necessary for persuading others through speech acts, both unmediated and mediated communication. While appealing to the friend-foe rhetoric can be found in almost any form of political regimes, in populist ones its use is indispensable, thus making it a key central trait of propaganda. Whereas other forms of political regimes can allow a diverse range of voices within its communication strategies, the populist approximation insists on binary conceptualizations. Moreover, it generally aims to sully the name of its adversaries, ideally negating opposition, which in the Latin American case means labelling them as neoliberal, Yankee imperialists, corrupt press and decaying political parties (or partidocracia). The rhetorical divisive dimension, as part of populist approximation from Latin America to propaganda thought, offers a first level of analysis to begin to understand comparatively other experiences found elsewhere. In the case of Bolivia, Morales became electorally the embodiment of the people’s will, specifically those of indigenous origin enabled his political platform to proceed and expand from a rhetoric of decolonization of Bolivian society (Loayza Bueno, 2011). In the Ecuadorian case, Correa appeals to the masses and mobilizes them to support his proposals through recurrent referendums. The rhetoric of division facilitates this purpose by activating the people through a polarization strategy as a form of propaganda. Lastly, prior to Chávez in Venezuela, the party elite established electoral agreements in order to alternate power in the country, thus making political parties easy targets

for Chávez when speaking to Venezuelans. Common aspects seen in all three countries at the rhetorical level are evident, as attacking elites and those associated with them can be useful in gaining and consolidating power. In addition, embodying the people’s will are those phrases in public discourses that equate to messianic solutions to long-held grievances. The significance of the rhetoric is worthy of further analysis and applied research within propaganda studies can benefit the messaging aspect of populism emanating from presidents in fragile democratic political systems.

Radical Intervention of Media Production – Blurring the Lines between Political and Media Systems When Hallin and Mancini (2004) introduced their work on media systems, they included, among other elements, the personalized pluralist model as a means to synthesize what they termed political parallelism,3 found among media and political parties. Within this model, media systems in Italy, Spain and France are explained. However, de Albuquerque (2012) brought into question whether the model considered political cleavages or the lack thereof into the model vis-à-vis political parallelism. Thus, de Albuquerque argued that when political parties are weak, the so-called ‘intermediation of politics’ falls primarily on media organizations following their own logics and interests. Given this predicament, he suggested incorporating a moderator model of media when media act as political agents. In the Latin American context of fragile democratic institutions and weak party systems, media organizations take on the moderator role usually led by political parties, thus becoming protagonist actors in the political system. This challenges media-political party dynamics and in part explains conflictive relations between media and political leaders,

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particularly in governments of the radical populist variety. Eventually, as witnessed and documented over time, the conflict-ridden, adversarial logics between government and media organizations become evident at a structural level, as media systems in populist governments are captured in a variety of ways. Thus, populists are able to engage in propaganda activities in less competitive media environments or, worse, within coercive ones. The annual global press-freedom reports published by Freedom House, provide a first indication of system-level competing governments and media organization spheres. When observing South American country ranks geographically from Venezuela to Chile, the Bolivian, Ecuadorian and Venezuelan cases over more than a decade have demonstrated a decline in press freedom (see Figure 28.1). Key junctures in legislation, presidential intervention, and acquisition of media organizations become visible to casual observers. During 2007–2017, Venezuela’s low ranking is striking, as expected, within a range of 160 to 176. The lowest year rank for Venezuela

was 2015 and is attributable to a series of actions related to media law (ley resorte) that gave President Nicolas Maduro powers to take over television and radio broadcasts. In 2014, Maduro interrupted broadcasts 103 times according to the 2015 Freedom of the Press Report. Furthermore, the sale of Venezuela’s main newspaper, El Universal, was also a low point in press freedom as with the sale the newspaper’s critical stance was softened. Moreover, according to the Maduro administration, CNN was engaging in a propaganda war and it thus threatened to expel the cable news channel’s staff. In terms of Bolivia and Ecuador ranks, both begin to fall below a South American average from 2010 to 2017 (86 rank). Stunningly, Ecuador had the largest drop over time (-48), whereas Bolivia’s press-freedom rank drops gradually until 2016, where the decline is the sharpest between 2016 and 2017 (-20). In the case of Bolivia, the arrival of Evo Morales into power heralded hope and anticipation within the country and – perhaps more so – internationally. Bolivian politics has historically divided the population between

Figure 28.1  Time-series press-freedom rank in South America

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a minority of European ancestry and a vast majority of indigenous origin. In effect, about 6.9 million (69% of the total population) selfidentify with an indigenous group according to a 2012 census report.4 Thus, individuals claiming an indigenous identification give evidence to the relevance of this segment of society (Loayza Bueno, 2011a, 2011b). Yet, political office remained something unattainable to indigenous leaders, especially the presidency. Moreover, indigenous populations were, by in large, marginalized in many spheres of Bolivian society and were often part of the most historically impoverished section of the country. It did not surprise many that Evo Morales, a leader of the Coca leaf growers’ union in the department of Cochabamba and later leader of a political movement (MAS), would become an attractive candidate for the presidency of Bolivia. Growing turmoil in Bolivia due to an internal crisis related to its natural gas reserves would provide an opportunity for Evo Morales to become known on a national stage and compete for the presidential bid in 2005. In many regards, Evo Morales’ rise is attributable to the popularity he enjoyed in various sectors of Bolivian society but mostly in the indigenous population of the country. Evo Morales garnered media attention both from the Bolivian news media and international media. Once in power, Evo Morales’ favorable coverage began to decline and in response, an already precarious media system gradually (Fuentes, 2014) and directly experienced the pressures of a populist government and propaganda dynamics at play (Molina, 2014; Peñaranda, 2014). In the Ecuadorian case, tensions and pressures faced by media organizations unfolded into an all-out confrontation with the entire media system that, at the beginning of Correa’s presidency, was mainly privately owned. The relations between government and media shifted from being cooperative and of good faith (in the vein of public relations’ excellence theory), toward one of confrontation or contingency. Correa labeled media

organizations as enemies that represented ‘de facto powers’ to justify the necessity of rebalancing the content produced on public affairs. Consequently, Rafael Correa established in Ecuador a public media system with the opening of the television station, Ecuador TV. In addition, Correa restructured the public radio station, Radio Pública, and later his administration acquired the newspaper Diario El Telégrafo. Additionally, Correa’s administration seized media properties of an important financial and banking group. The conglomerate lost two of the largest TV stations, TC Televisión and GamaTV. A number of magazines, radio stations and cable TV channels were also part of the confiscation.5 As a result, the media organizations that were seized became directly aligned with Correa’s government and message. Hence, with the public media outlets established by Correa and the once-private Isaías media properties, the Correa administration was able to wield a larger voice in the Ecuadorian media system as the president aimed to influence public opinion via saturation or crowding out of opposition voices. In the Venezuelan case, a media presidency (Cañizález 2014: 170) was established during Chávez’s time in office (1999–2013) and arguably remains ongoing under President Nicolás Maduro after his predecessor’s demise in 2013. With a combination of presidential actions, legislature and media harassment, under Chávez (and Maduro) Venezuela is an example of a media hegemony (Cañizález, 2014: 172) characterized by the structural underpinnings of populist communication as biased and consequently akin to systemic propaganda. A turning point that speaks to attacks toward independent media with opposing views was the non-renewal of the broadcast license of RCTV in 2007. Chávez’s decision to not renew the broadcast license was justified in his words, given that the TV station favored the US government 2002 coup that ousted him from the presidency for three days. While the RCTV case is a watershed regarding state intervention

Propaganda and Populist Communication in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela 487

within a media system in the region, other forms of action become visible during the Chávez administration such as coercive ways to limit free speech, obstruct access to information, directly via presidential pressure and indirectly by non-compliance with guidelines provided by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, etc. In addition, by overtaking the airwaves in nationwide joint broadcasts each Sunday that would air from 11 a.m. until about 5 p.m., the program titled Aló Presidente (or Hello President), became another space through which Chávez would monopolize the discourse on Venezuelan public affairs and systematically attack political opposition. The pervasiveness of the degree of radically intervened modes of media production in the Venezuelan case during Chávez’s period is documented by press-freedom reports, which help understand the atomization of media organizations within Venezuela and the emergence of new media outlets that amplify the propaganda messaging that Chávez directly articulated and was later channeled by pro-government media. In such an environment, examples of new media organizations such as Telesur (2005) and TVes (2007) were created under the auspices of the Chávez administration. Relevant milestones regarding the decline of Venezuela’s independent media are worth exploring to further understand the extent of the fragmentation (and perhaps annihilation) of diverse views in its media system. Colombian newspaper La República (Montes, S., 2018) highlights some of the worst milestones of both Chávez and Maduro administrations, indicating that more than 60 media organizations were closed between 1998 and 2018. The newspaper reported that independent TV channels in 1998 were estimated to be about 88% of the whole media system, in contrast, by 2014 it decreased to 46%. Other examples of media shutdowns or takeovers include 32 radio stations and two TV stations were intervened during 2009; due to printing restrictions, 22 newspapers

stopped publishing; and in 2017 Maduro ordered the closing of 49 media organizations. Furthermore, a media law was passed in November 2017 targeting journalists, threatening freedom of expression with arrests leading to 20 years of imprisonment if the news reporting instigates hate or violence (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2017). Lately, the extent in which control over content regarding Venzuela’s economic and political crisis under Maduro has reached unprecedented, even international, levels. Specifically, the well-known journalist Jorge Ramos6 and his team from Univision – a US-based Spanish-language media – right after an interview with President Maduro, were held hostage in the Presidential Palace on February 25, 2019 in Caracas to later be deported back to the United States. As noted earlier, Venezuela, under Chávez and Maduro, views CNN as a media organization backed by US interests and with the recent downturn in Venezuelan society, Ramos’ coverage of food shortages in the country provoking Maduro to counter his questioning, evidences message control anticipating further international backlash toward his administration. Arguably, the Ramos’ hostage situation and monitoring/censoring of foreign correspondents’ reporting in Venezuela refers to interventions in media production.

CONCLUSION Latin American populism provides propaganda studies with specific concepts that can prove useful to its study and research. While most publications on Latin American populism are found only in Spanish, theorization and the applicability of concepts from a communication standpoint intersect at the center of propaganda. The chapter examined recent cases of populism in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela and from those contexts, an analytical framework is offered. The framework is comprised of two levels, one rhetorical and

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the other structural. At the rhetorical level, all three cases provide evidence that the otherization/vilification of political and economic elites becomes part of a political communication strategy that can reap benefits for the populist leader as a propagandist. At the structural level, directly or indirectly dismantling media organizations with the purpose of monopolizing the treatment of public affairs in the public discourse meant new media legislation, acquisition or shutdowns of major news organizations and harassment and intimidation of critical voices within the press corps. This chapter focused on a period where digital media tools were incipient; however, it envisions old practices and newer ones within a ‘hybridized’ system (Chadwick, 2017). The digital age that encompasses utilizing web technologies and strategically implements social media campaigns, following examples from presidential elections in the United States such as Howard Dean and Barack Obama, has become the norm in Latin America during recent years. Furthermore, the darkest aspect of political communication via digital means has also become part of the politician’s and/or government’s toolbox, as seen in the election of US president Donald J. Trump, (Tharoor, I. (2017). Alternative facts, or the post-truth phenomenon, is hardly new (Snow, 2019); what is, however, is the recent shift from users’ naive suspension of disbelief of content found on social media, mainly due to the evidence of Russian hacking and targeted social media adverts during key moments in the 2016 US presidential election. Presently higher levels of scrutiny on the contents of political material found on the web are becoming common, and users/voters are now more aware and critical of distorted information supported by computational algorithms within digital platforms. For populists in Latin America, the digital realm is also a new terrain to position, voice views and attack opponents without necessarily engaging in a dialogue with the general population (Waisbord and Amado, 2017).

Attuned with trends of public affairs practices, social media platforms such as Twitter and Whatsapp are also relevant spaces for propaganda, whether utilizing a generic institutional account or speaking via a personal account. The Venezuelan case is perhaps the most prolific one to observe regarding social media use for direct communication, but Correa in Ecuador was another exemplary case for understanding politics, populist communication as propaganda via Twitter. Morales stands out as a latecomer to Twitter in 2016, but his personal account’s exponential growth is worth scrutinizing, given the well-known deceptive tactics recognized today regarding artificial interactive features found on social media (i.e. bots, purchasing followers, and likes). The social media aspect regarding populism is still a moving target, yet evidence such as those mentioned in the U.S. case, and for Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, indicate that research and thought on digital propaganda is a terrain requiring further exploration. Yet, notably, the region’s experience with populism offers empirical argumentation for informing the study of propaganda on a global scale. Indeed, the future will require understanding how populist communication as propaganda translates into the digital sphere, and some of the strategies described in this text and synthesized in the proposed framework provide analytical tools to better understand a resurgent phenomenon. Future pathways might point to reconciling old with emerging practices, such as making sense of computational propaganda. However, the seemingly enduring rhetorical and structural features of populism appear to be constants that transcend legacy or new media logics. Thus, the relevancy of populist communication for propaganda studies might mean that evidence from Latin American history on the phenomena might contribute to scholarly debate and provide prescriptive propositions on to how address its troubling effect on societies. Consequently, the urgency of understanding propaganda from a populist

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communication framework entails addressing the basic fundamentals and values of democratic societies, especially when intentionally polarized by leaders. Ultimately, the long-term effects speak to delegitimizing democratic processes and institutions and become worrisome as divisions are artificially established to win elections and further expand and consolidate power over time.

Notes 1  The discourse of corrupt politicians, political parties and political system are the first to be attacked by populist leaders. 2  The term neo-populism was used to identify populist governments of the 1990s with a strong neoliberal influence (Weyland 2001). Radical populism identifies populist governments of the XXI century (de la Torre, 2007). 3  ‘Political parallelism refers to a pattern or relationship where the structure of the political parties is somewhat reflected by the media organizations’ (de Albuquerque, 2018). 4  Most recent official demographic information can be accessed via http://datos.ine.gob.bo/binb ol/RpWebEngine.exe/Portal?BASE=CPV2012CO M&lang=ESP 5  The Isaias group was involved in one of the darkest political and economic chapters of Ecuador´s recent history. It lost a significant number of companies, including some of its media properties due to debts owed to the Ecuadorian state. 6  Similarly, Jorge Ramos was involved in an incident in 2015 with then presidential candidate Donald Trump during a press conference when Ramos questioned Trump on his views on immigration, eventually being kicked out after a series of difficult exchanges with Trump.

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29 Evaluating Putin’s Propaganda Performance 2000–2018: Stagecraft as Statecraft Tina Burrett

This chapter analyses the evolution of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine since he first became Russian president in 2000. It charts the changing functions, messages and methods of the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus during Putin’s 18-year tenure at the apex of Russian politics. The chapter analyses both Putin’s domestic and foreign propaganda operations. It argues that Putin’s domestic support is predicated on his success in the international arena. Although promulgated through different mediums and aimed at different audiences, Putin’s domestic and international propaganda practices are mutually reinforcing and interdependent. Vladimir Putin is a master political performer, but one forced to rely on an increasingly narrow repertoire as his audience dwindles. Stagecraft is at the heart of his statecraft at home and abroad. Putin’s propaganda performances have become more dramatic over time (Goscilo, 2013). Plucked from the shadows of Russia’s security services to serve as Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister in

August 1999, Putin entered the national political stage as a virtual unknown. Helped by his friends in the Russian media, Putin used his anonymity to craft a public persona with broad appeal that in March 2000 won him the presidency (Zassoursky, 2004; Gessen, 2012). His background as a security operative allowed Putin to present himself as a Russian patriot, attractive to conservative nationalists. But, equally, his decision to quit the KGB in the twilight days of the Soviet Union to work for the pro-democracy mayor of Leningrad enhanced his support among Russian liberals. Putin’s promise to eradicate Chechen terrorism resonated across ideological and class divides. His own propaganda success convinced the new president that to achieve his ambitions to restore the power and prestige of the state, the media must be brought back under Kremlin control. Using a variety of legal and illegal methods, during his first two presidential terms from 2000 to 2008, Putin wrestled Russia’s main media outlets away from their private owners (Burrett, 2011).

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In the process, he lost the support of liberal opinion at home and abroad. Since winning a third presidential term in 2012, following a four-year interlude as prime minister while his protégé Dmitry Medvedev served as president, Putin has come to rely on provincial, conservative voters. As a consequence, his propaganda has taken an increasingly nationalist turn, emphasising traditional symbols such as the military and Orthodox Church (Hutchings and Rulyov 2008). Rather than seeking to woo young, urban liberals as he did at the start of his presidency, Putin’s propaganda machine now casts them as a fifth column, in league with Russia’s enemies abroad (Krastev and Holmes, 2012: 44). In the foreign policy sphere, Putin came to office believing Russia’s international status would be best enhanced through integration with the West. But beginning with the ‘colour revolutions’ that brought to power pro-Western governments in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004) – the latter with assistance from US NGOs – Putin became convinced that Russia would not be accepted into the Western club on equal terms (Sakwa, 2017). His cautious optimism regarding Western relations turned into suspicion and later hostility – changes reflected in Russia’s international propaganda practices (Gusinsky and Tsygankov, 2018; Suslov, 2018). Many features of Putin’s propaganda operations today were present from the start of his presidency. From the beginning, Putin’s Kremlin promoted the president’s personal image as a means of maintaining public support. At the same time as lauding Putin’s leadership, the Kremlin and its accomplices in the Russian media character-assassinated his critics (Burrett, 2011; Zassoursky, 2004). After successfully clearing the stage of competing performers, maintaining public interest in the show has become the Kremlin’s primary propaganda challenge. To sustain interest in Russia’s stage-managed elections, the Kremlin resorts to play fighting with fake

opponents (Financial Times, 2018). Surprise is also a vital element of Putin’s stagecraft. Domestically, his surprise interventions in Ukraine and Syria were PR masterstrokes, stoking patriotic passions and drawing attention away from everyday hardships while at the same time serving Russia’s geopolitical interests (Laruelle, 2016; Suslov, 2015; Teper, 2016). Maintaining the illusion of a strong state and secure society in the face of frequent terrorist attacks, creaking public services and rampant corruption is another key propaganda objective dating from the start of Putin’s presidency. Changes in communication technologies have pushed Putin’s propaganda machine away from its initial dependence on national television into other mediums, including social media (Vartanova et  al., 2016). Developments in online communications since Putin first took office in 2000 provide his administration with greater access to overseas audiences. The Kremlin has used online platforms to overtly and covertly disseminate its propaganda to foreign audiences, especially as relations with the West declined over the 2008 Russian-Georgian war and Russia’s 2014 annexing of Crimea. Russian meddling in US and European elections – a strategy mixing leaks, hacks and misinformation – is a further source of tension. Russia’s state-controlled media denounce Western accusations of Russian political interference as evidence of Russophobia (Burrett 2018). The changes in Putin’s propaganda operations between 2000 and 2018 are summarised in Table 29.1. The chapter that follows has two parts. The first section examines Putin’s domestic propaganda since 2000. This section begins by analysing the propaganda methods and messages Putin employed to attain and consolidate power. It then discusses the PR tactics used to legitimate Putin’s notional transfer of the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev in 2008 and media framing of Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012. The section concludes with analysis of Putin’s campaign for a fourth

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Table 29.1  Putin’s Propaganda Operations in 2000 and 2018 Compared Propaganda 2000

Propaganda 2018

Putin’s Domestic Image

Youthful, fit, energetic Pro-business Patriotic Soviet nostalgia Cautiously pro-West Bulwark against Communists Fighting Chechen terrorism

Target Domestic Audience

Pro-business lobby Moderate nationalists Anti-Communists National state television State & state-friendly press

Macho man of action Defender against foreign enemies & fifth column Support for security services Embodiment of strong state Only viable national leader Support for Orthodox Church Fighting global terrorism Rural & small town conservatives Anti-globalisers

Domestic Mediums

Target International Audience

International Mediums

Western elites & leaders Russian diaspora in former Soviet states Limited influence Interviews with BBC, Guardian Multilingual television broadcast in former Soviet states

Presentation of USA

Russia’s integration with the West Shared concerns, e.g. terrorism Division with Russia over Kosovo

Presentation of China

Illegal immigrants threaten jobs Territorial encroachment Security threat

presidential term in 2018. The second section analyses the Kremlin’s internationally targeted propaganda since 2000. It traces the downward trajectory of Russia’s relations with the West and the corresponding improvement in its diplomatic ties with other parts of the world, most notably with China (Sakwa, 2017). It further analyses how the Russian media frame changing diplomatic relations for domestic audiences and, latterly, the Kremlin’s attempts to frame overseas audiences’ perceptions of international affairs. Finally, the section examines Russian

State television Official websites & social media News websites Non-attributed social media European & US voters International Russian diaspora Russian Today (now RT) Official websites & social media Non-attributed social media Leaking hacked information Civil society organisations Multilingual television broadcast in former Soviet states Russophobic Seeking Russia’s containment Hypocrisy over election meddling Weak democracy Divided, degenerate society Conflict with Russia over Ukraine & Syria Shared values Political and economic partner Building multipolar order

propaganda efforts to influence the internal politics of other states. Although Russia’s current media environment retains more pluralism than is often credited by Western observers, bringing key communication channels under Kremlin control has been essential to building Putin’s propaganda machine (Becker, 2004; Koltsova, 2006; Oates, 2006). Putin’s moves to curtail media freedom are documented throughout this chapter. The findings presented in the chapter draw on analysis of Russian media content and on interviews

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with journalists working in the Moscowbased media. Survey data is also used to examine the impact of Putin’s propaganda on Russian public opinion.

DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA Vladimir Putin first became Russian president following Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation on New Year’s Eve 1999. As prime minister, Putin became acting president, positioning him to win the March 2000 presidential election. Putin’s popularity was boosted by his successful direction of the second war in Chechnya, which began with the Chechen invasion of Dagestan on 7 August 1999. It was the outbreak of war that prompted Yeltsin to promote the littleknown Putin – then head of the Security Council – to the role of prime minister. As prime minister, Putin was able to capitalise on the patriotic emotions engendered by the Chechen conflict. Jingoistic coverage of the war on state-owned television helped Putin build his public image as a shrewd commander and strong leader (Zassoursky, 2004). Prior to his appointment as premier, Putin was a relatively unknown figure outside the political elite. When he took office as prime minister in August 1999, only two percent of Russian voters identified him as their choice to replace Yeltsin (VCIOM, 1999). But Putin’s obscurity was an advantage, allowing him to create his public persona from scratch. Television coverage showing Putin planning tough action against Chechen terrorists, inspecting troops and taking part in martial arts competitions transformed him from a rather colourless state security officer into the strong leader Russians desired (Belin, 2000). Basing his 2000 presidential campaign on the ambiguous slogan ‘Great Russia’, Putin was able to satisfy the competing expectations and interests of diverse domestic constituencies. In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Putin won by a wide margin, gaining

support from neoliberals, post-Soviet communists and Russian nationalists alike. His own meteoric rise taught Putin the power of the media over public opinion; such a powerful tool could not be left in the hands of Russia’s oligarchs. During the Yeltsin era the oligarchs had used their media control to extort favours from the president. Although media-owning oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky backed Putin’s 2000 presidential campaign, after the election they quickly proved unreliable partners. The first test of Putin’s leadership, and of the loyalty of the media barons to his administration, came with the sinking of the Kursk submarine in August 2000. As it became apparent that offers of international assistance had been accepted too late to save the stranded sailors, media indignation became focused on Putin. To his annoyance, news reports in the Berezovsky and Gusinsky media were especially critical of the President (Author’s interview with former NTV presenter Vladimir Kara-Murza, September 2003). The Kursk disaster allowed Putin’s opponents to question his election promises to restore Russia’s national pride and international standing (Sakwa, 2004: 83). Negative media coverage threatened to undermine the president’s authority over Russia’s political and economic elites by weakening the public support on which it was based. Legal loopholes and the oligarchs’ murky financial dealings provided Putin with tools to restructure the media sector. Prosecutions were launched against Berezovsky and Gusinsky, forcing both into exile. In their place, the media became financially beholden to entities close to the Kremlin, with negative consequences for press freedom (Author’s interview with former NTV Director Yevgeny Kiselyov, September 2003). By the end of Putin’s first presidential term in March 2004, all of Russia’s main television channels, and much of its print media, had been brought under either direct or indirect state control (Burrett, 2011).

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As well as placing Russia’s most popular news providers under Kremlin influence, Putin introduced legal and regulatory changes that further stifled independent reporting. The Kremlin branded coverage of the war in Chechnya as unpatriotic, while criticism of the president was condemned for endangering national security (Ryabov, 2004: 189). In September 2000, Putin introduced the ‘Information Security Doctrine’. Identifying Russia’s negative international image as a national security concern, the doctrine contained strategies for improving public diplomacy, including the idea of establishing a state-funded Englishlanguage news channel. Under the terms of the doctrine, freedom of information was subordinated to the needs of national security and to the preservation of Russian moral values. The doctrine endowed state bodies with new powers to keep certain types of information out of the news, including some economic and environmental issues as well as the expected military and security topics (Panfilov, 2005: 10). In 2002, Putin’s government amended the law ‘On Elections’ making it harder for journalists to ask candidates probing questions (Lambroschini, 2003). To reduce unfavourable media coverage of the Chechen war, the Kremlin tightened rules governing the accreditation required to report from the province and set up a designated press service to provide journalists with positive information from the front. Putin has further limited his exposure to unwanted questioning by avoiding unscripted press conferences and interviews. At every election since 2000, Putin has refused to take part in televised presidential debates with rival candidates, declaring himself too busy with his duties (EIM, 2000: 38). Putin prefers set-piece interviews to communicate with voters. Most important in this regard is his annual televised Q&A Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, a cross between a town hall meeting and interview format carefully choreographed to look spontaneous (Schuler, 2015: 142).

Although Putin’s critics at home and abroad condemned his changes to Russia’s media laws and ownership structures, the majority of Russians supported his reforms. Following their information wars with Yeltsin and with each other in the 1990s, media owners Gusinsky and Berezovsky were deeply unpopular with ordinary Russians. The oligarchs’ dubious financial dealings helped Putin convince the public that their crooked behaviour, rather than media freedom, was the target of the state’s legal proceedings. In this endeavour, Putin was helped by the portrayal of the oligarchs on RTR, the only national television channel that remained fully state owned following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. On Putin’s watch RTR, now called Rossiya, has become the state’s most powerful domestic propaganda tool. At the start of Putin’s presidency, the propaganda perpetrated by the channel’s flagship news programme, Vesti, was often subtle. Vesti’s commentators, for example, rarely directly attacked Putin’s opponents, preferring to invite third party ‘experts’ to the programme to do it for them. Vesti and its Sunday edition, Vesti Nedeli, remain important weapons in Putin’s propaganda arsenal. But today, compelled by competition from sensationalist reporting online and by palpable public Putin-fatigue, Vesti’s style is increasingly brash and its claims evermore extreme (The Economist, 2013). Putin spent his first eight years in office neutering political and media opposition to his administration. As the end of his second term approached, competition to replace him was effectively restricted to within his own ruling group.1 In particular, rivalries between different clans within the silovik – members or veterans of the security services – caused a nasty and protracted turf war (Gulko, 2007: 32). The Kremlin’s control over television kept news of the ‘siloviki war’ off the airwaves. But, although television was not the site of the siloviki’s battle, it was through this medium that Putin reasserted his authority to quash the destabilising effects of their war

Evaluating Putin’s Propaganda Performance 2000–2018: Stagecraft as Statecraft 497

and to build support for his chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev (Whitmore, 2007). The biggest obstacle facing the PutinMedvedev tandem in the March 2008 presidential election was voter apathy. Medvedev needed to win significant voter backing to assert his authority over the siloviki. Turnout would be crucial. But with the election looming, there was no obvious threat facing Russia to rally voters behind Putin’s preferred candidate. To mobilise support for Medvedev, the Kremlin created a new ‘enemy’: domestic and international forces bent on overturning Putin’s legacy (Lipman, 2007). Statecontrolled television was used to vilify those who staged public demonstrations against Putin’s government ahead of parliamentary elections in December 2007. Protestors were described as ‘radical opposition’, ‘aggressive extremists’ and as ‘ultra-right and ultra-left radicals’. Only minor broadcasters and the print media reported on the police beating and arresting protestors (Borodina, 2007). At campaign rallies Putin warned cheering crowds to watch out for Russia’s enemies. The president accused Western governments of backing ‘destructive forces’ within Russia that ‘scavenge like jackals for money at foreign embassies’ (Abdullaev, 2007). Aided by state-controlled media, Putin created a vivid picture of Russia as a besieged fortress with a treacherous enemy within its gates. Higher than usual turnout in the 2007 parliamentary vote suggests this tactic played well. But mobilising hatred is a quick fix with long-term consequences. By invoking anger against internal enemies – real or imagined – Putin exacerbated already deep social divisions and distrust. Just days after the parliamentary vote, Putin announced Medvedev as his chosen presidential successor. The following day, Medvedev returned the compliment by asking Putin to serve as his prime minister. Without Putin by his side, it was doubtful that the siloviki would rally behind the relatively liberal Medvedev. State-controlled television was quickly engaged to reassure elite and

mass audiences alike that this change in president would really be no change at all. Putin’s patronage was the key theme of Medvedev’s campaign for the presidency. Like his mentor, Medvedev dodged participation in the presidential debates. The relatively unknown frontrunner’s policies were never probed. Instead, state-controlled television showed an energetic Medvedev jetting around the country, drinking tea with pensioners and cradling babies in gleaming new maternity centres (Arnold, 2007). The strategy succeeded and Medvedev was duly elected with 71 percent of the vote. Following the 2008 global financial crisis – which hit the resource-dependent Russian economy harder than most – public support for the Putin-Medvedev duo began to decline (Osipov, 2012). In response, Putin’s PR rhetoric stepped up its focus on nationalist themes. Putin’s on-going campaign to reinvigorate Russian citizens’ sense of patriotism is anchored around three main pillars: pride in the state, glorification of the military, and respect for the Russian Orthodox Church. Past military achievements are used to promote patriotism across Russia’s diverse citizenry, especially Soviet victory in WW2. Official ceremonies to mark national military holidays and anniversaries have become major media events in Putin’s Russia (Hutchings and Rulyov, 2008; Hutchings, 2008). To maximise his patriotic capital, Putin chose Russia’s annual holiday commemorating victory in WW2 to make his first visit to Crimea after the peninsula joined the Russian Federation in March 2014 (Luhn and Walker, 2014). Putin has similarly used the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as a platform for building support for the Russian state and to promote Russia’s position in other former Soviet states (Admiraal, 2009). On Putin’s watch, the ROC has increased its visibility in schools, the military and at national celebrations. In his Christmas address in 2000, Putin declared Orthodoxy as the ‘unbending spiritual core of the entire people and

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state’ (Malykhina, 2014: 53). If Orthodoxy is the nominal state religion, then everyone within the state – and many outside it – can be considered Russian. Closely identifying ‘Orthodoxy’ with ‘Russian’ allows Putin to justify interference in the ‘near abroad’ – especially in Belarus and Ukraine that share the Orthodox faith (Admiraal, 2009: 209). Promoting the ROC therefore serves both Putin’s domestic propaganda and foreign policy objectives. Putin’s nationalist rhetoric since 2008 also includes attacks against alleged internal and external enemies of the state. His re-election for a third term in March 2012 was met by major public demonstrations. Putin labelled his domestic detractors as a privileged elite, disconnected from the concerns of the majority of Russians outside Moscow. The besteducated elements of the population were portrayed as traitors, perhaps in the pay of the United States (Krastev and Holmes, 2012: 44). Similarly, in a speech in January 2015, Putin asserted that pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine were not just fighting the Ukrainian army but also a NATO-sponsored ‘foreign legion’ (Sperling, 2016: 17). The

Ukraine crisis gave Putin the perfect opportunity to ignite nationalist sentiments on which to build a new base of anti-Western support for his leadership (Treisman, 2014). Putin’s Ukraine strategy worked as intended. Thanks to his role as the embodiment of an internationally resurgent Russia, Putin has managed to improve his popularity during one of the worst economic crises in recent Russian history. Despite tumbling oil prices and Westernled sanctions that sent Russia’s economy into recession in 2014, Putin’s approval rating hovered around 80 percent (Figure 29. 1). Putin’s dalliance in Ukraine is perhaps the best example of the importance of foreign policy achievements to the successful functioning of his domestic propaganda machine. The Kremlin’s influence over Russian television guarantees Putin’s foreign adventurism maximum exposure. Despite the Internet’s growing presence, television remains the most important medium of political communication in contemporary Russia. An August 2018 survey by the Levada Center found that 73 percent of Russians consult television news more than any other information source. Television news is trusted

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by 49 percent of Russians, while only 24 percent trust online publications and 15 percent social media (Levada Center, 2018). Among the young and middle-aged, however, the Internet is making significant progress. Following the 2011 protests against election fraud that were largely coordinated online, Putin’s propaganda team stepped up their own online operations. Special sites have been established to promote Putin and his policies, including Kremlin.ru, the president’s official site, but also unofficial sites like Vladimirvladimirovich.ru. The Kremlin has also set up news sites to control the messages disseminated to Russian voters, including Strana.ru, Vz.ru and Rian.ru (Belousov, 2012, p. 58). The heart of the Kremlin’s online operations is the Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll factory that was unleashed on the US 2016 elections. But before the IRA was unleashed overseas, it perfected its arsenal of disinformation tactics on Russian audiences (Polyankova, 2018). The IRA was instrumental to the Kremlin’s campaign to re-elect Putin for a fourth term in March 2018. Along with state-controlled media, the IRA was engaged in a wellfinanced and coordinated get-out-the-vote campaign. As in every presidential election since 2000, ensuring high turnout to legitimate his mandate was Putin’s main propaganda objective. The Kremlin deployed tactics honed over two decades of information manipulation to entice Russians to the polls. Russian television warned voters that high turnout was the only thing protecting the nation from annihilation by the West. Social media accounts spread rumours of Western government plans to interfere in the election while state news agencies alleged that more than a dozen countries had attempted cyber attacks against Russia (Polyankova, 2018). Unattributed videos promoting the election popped up on YouTube. In one, well-known actor Sergei Burunov plays a character waking up after a Communist victory to find an adopted gay man in his kitchen. In another, an attractive woman breaks off her steamy

encounter with a man in a nightclub after he confesses he failed to vote (Baryshnikov, 2018). The controversial videos got voters talking about an otherwise dull campaign. Straight out of the Kremlin playbook, Putin’s 2018 presidential rivals were subjected to negative PR and harassment. State media accused Communist candidate Pavel Grudinin of stashing US$1 million in a Swiss bank account. Supporters of liberal Ksenia Sobchak were arrested for defaming the president by spraying ‘Against Putin’ on a frozen river (Sharkov, 2018). The daughter of Putin’s late mentor and St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly, Sobchak was accused of being a Kremlin stooge fielded to encourage liberal voters to come to the polls despite calls for a boycott from other prominent Putin opponents (Financial Times, 2018). To further undermine their appeal, the Russian parliament accused those campaigning for a boycott of receiving funds from foreign governments (Interfax, 2018). Again, deploying a tried-and-tested tactic, as election day approached, Putin pressed voters’ patriotic buttons with boasts of a powerful new nuclear-capable underwater drone that would give Russia an edge over Western powers he accused of attempting to ‘contain Russia’ (Wesolowsky, 2018). To further enflame patriotic passions, on the eve of voting state television broadcast a feature film about events in Crimea in 2014, the plot centring on a love story between a Russian boy and Ukrainian girl (Tass, 2018). The Kremlin’s propaganda machine achieved its desired results with turnout reaching a respectable 67.5 percent and Putin winning 76 percent of votes cast.

INTERNATIONAL PROPAGANDA Anti-Western propaganda was at the heart of Putin’s winning message in Russia’s 2018 election. But in 2000, Putin came into office hoping to integrate with the West. At that

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time, Russia’s new president believed that modernisation, economic growth and international revival were all best served by integration into Western-led institutions. Improving Russia’s global image by countering negative Western media stereotypes was a key element of Putin’s strategy (Simons, 2014). Following the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, Putin offered Washington broad support for anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan. Putin successfully wooed US President George W. Bush, who famously claimed to have looked into his Russian counterpart’s soul and found him ‘straightforward and trustworthy’ (Baker, 2013). At home, Kremlin propagandists used his bromance with Bush to herald Putin’s growing global stature and his restoration of Russia’s international prestige. By March 2003, Russian voters considered foreign policy the area in which Putin had made the most progress as president, adding to his high approval ratings that averaged around 70 percent (Public Opinion Foundation, 2003). Russia’s integration with the West was deployed as a propaganda tool to excuse Putin’s domestic policy failures, as well as to praise his foreign policy successes. The 9/11 terrorist attacks gave Putin an opportunity to link Chechen terrorism at home to the global war on terror. Russian television coverage of the horrific hostage taking by Chechen terrorists at a school in Beslan in September 2004, for example, stressed the international dimension of the crisis. On Rossiya, Deputy Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov declared, ‘we know this is international terrorism, wherever it happens—Ingushetia, Ossetia or Chechnya’ (Burrett, 2011: 341). Messages of condolence and support from foreign leaders and international organisations were used to add weight and credibility to claims that this was a global war. Following the Beslan tragedy, the Kremlin moved to expand its control over minor media such as small-audience television channels and, increasingly, the print media

(Lipman, 2006). Minor independent broadcaster Ren-TV did not hold back on reporting shocking facts and figures from Beslan. Contradicting the messages given on statecontrolled channels, Ren-TV’s reporting stressed that the tragedy should not be viewed in geopolitical terms but within the framework of the political situation in Russia. Less than a year later, pressure from the Kremlin brought Ren-TV under new ownership, with links to the state (Coalson, 2008). Even before the end of Putin’s first term, Russian opposition to the US-led war in Iraq began to drive a wedge between Moscow and Washington. US support for Ukraine’s 2004 ‘orange revolution’, which saw Putin’s preferred candidate Viktor Yanukovich beaten by pro-West Viktor Yushchenko, further deepened tensions. Yanukovich’s defeat was also a loss for Putin. The Russian president’s biggest mistake in the Ukrainian election was not that he backed the wrong person, but the fact that he backed anyone at all. By involving himself in the election as a combatant, Putin seriously damaged Russia’s image overseas and, in particular, its relations with Ukraine and the West. The reasons for Putin’s incautious behaviour are rooted in a misunderstanding of the Ukrainian situation, caused in part by the peculiarities of the Russian media system. None of Russia’s main media outlets questioned Putin’s involvement in Ukraine’s democratic process. Taking their lead from the Kremlin, Russian journalists spoke confidently of eventual victory for Yanukovich. In so doing, the media reinforced the authorities’ own mistaken assumption. Its control over state-broadcasters allowed the Kremlin to use television to campaign for Yanukovich, just as it campaigned for Putin. Only, unlike their Russian counterparts, Ukrainian voters had access to a pluralist media and a genuine choice of candidate. Reeling from its loss of influence in Ukraine, in 2005 the Russian government established the English-language news network Russia Today (now RT) to present its own spin on international events.

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The founding of RT was the first signal of Putin’s new information approach to foreign policy. Henceforth, the Kremlin would actively seek to influence foreign audiences, countering one version of the truth with another. From the outset, RT’s overarching narrative has been of the West’s decline (Dowling, 2017). Owing to its blatant propaganda agenda, in the US, RT America has been obliged to register as a foreign agent. In Britain, media regulators have reprimanded RT UK a dozen times for a lack of balance (Smith and Ward, 2017). The channel’s mix of genuine news stories and fringe conspiracy theories has made it a hit on social media where it forms part of the Kremlin’s wider disinformation apparatus. The death knell of Putin’s strategy of integration with the West was struck by his speech at the Munich Security conference in February 2007. In his speech, Putin railed against the United States for ‘forcing its will on the world’, condemning the concept of a unipolar world and accusing Washington of undermining global security. Putin’s speech was designed to position him as leader of a global anti-American resistance, a sentiment growing in states such as China, Iran and North Korea since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The speech was also intended to cement Putin’s domestic legacy as a strong, patriotic leader in the lead up to the 2008 election at which he was scheduled to leave the presidency (Yasmann, 2007). Deployment of US missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic in 2007, US recognition of Kosovo’s independence in 2008 and a NATO commitment to eventual membership for Georgia and Ukraine the same year together convinced Putin that the West did not respect Russia as an equal power. In the context of deteriorating relations with the West over multiple issues – including the 2008 Russo-Georgian war – Putin pivoted to Asia. The West’s relative economic decline – accelerated by the 2008 global financial crisis – provided additional impetus for Putin to strengthen his ties with China,

India and other emerging political and economic centres (Tsygankov, 2009: 348). In pursuit of a strategic partnership with Beijing, in 2008 Putin settled Russia’s last remaining border dispute with China. Bilateral trade has grown enormously from US$21 billion in 2004 to US$95 billion by 2014 (Valdai Club, 2016). The growing importance of ties to Beijing was matched by a change in Moscow’s propaganda messaging. A fraught history and fears of Chinese territorial encroachment in its sparsely populated Far East have fuelled Russian public hostility to China – a mentality previously encouraged by the Kremlin. Russian state-media stoked xenophobic attitudes toward Chinese immigrants, deliberately exaggerating the numbers of those illegally crossing the border, as a distraction from Russia’s real problems (Repnikova and Balzer, 2009: 9–10). But as Russia’s dependence on Chinese trade, investment and loans has grown following Western sanctions against Moscow over Crimea, media talk of a ‘yellow peril’ has disappeared (Hille, 2016). This change in media rhetoric appears to have influenced public attitudes. In April 2014, 57 percent of Russians reported feeling that China was not a threat to Russia, while 19 percent felt it was a threat. This is a remarkable turnaround from October 2009, when 39 percent believed China was a not a threat, compared to 44 percent believing it was (Figure 29. 2). Russia’s pivot to Asia has also extended to Japan. In light of growing bilateral trade and substantial Japanese FDI, the Russian media has dropped its aggressive posturing over Moscow’s Kuril Islands dispute with Tokyo (Burrett, 2014).2 The Kremlin’s more positive propaganda presentation of Japan has borne diplomatic fruit. Although under pressure from Washington, Tokyo has imposed sanctions on Moscow along with the rest of the G7, Japanese leaders have kept their statements on Crimea to a minimum. Despite the sanctions, in December 2017, Japan accepted a visit by Russia’s Chief

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of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, author of the controversial ‘Gerasimov doctrine’ – a security theory focused on non-military means of achieving geopolitical goals (Brown, 2017; Gerasimov, 2013). Emphasizing the importance of informational, economic and political methods of defeating one’s opponents, in the West, Gerasimov’s theories are widely believed to have inspired Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election (Plekhanov, 2017). Following Russia’s 2014 annexing of Crimea, Putin has abandoned any pretence at playing by diplomatic or democratic rules. Increasingly, Russia’s internationallyfocused propaganda aims to create discord by targeting Western hegemony in the global system. In relation to Crimea, for example, Russia manipulated residual anti-colonial resentments in India, Brazil and South Africa to convince all three countries not to back Western-led sanctions against Moscow (Pomerantsev, 2014: 23). In a televised

speech to the Valdai Club in October 2014, Putin accused the United States of imposing a ‘unilateral diktat’ on the rest of the world and shifted blame for the Ukraine crisis onto the West. Over his long tenure in office, Putin’s grudging respect for the West has mutated into just a grudge. Russia’s current rulers see the pillars of the post-cold war order – human rights, democracy and the rule of law – as a Western ploy for undermining the legitimacy of Putinism (Gusinsky and Tsygankov, 2018). As the Putin regime’s popularity has declined at home, it is increasingly willing to take risks abroad to prove it is still among the world’s great powers. Putin’s gloves-off foreign policy has coincided with advances in digital technolo­ gies. Cyber operations are the Kremlin’s prime weapons in its war with the West, perceived in terms of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996). By manipulating their media spaces, the Kremlin aims to turn Western countries’ openness against them. The Kremlin’s strategy leverages the

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anonymity and immediacy of online technologies to divide and disorientate its adversaries. In its clash with the West, Russia’s leaders see their authoritarianism as an advantage. Control of the domestic media allows the Putin regime to bolster national unity and state power at home while stoking divisions abroad. Almost two decades of experience in manipulating the information fed to Russian audiences has honed the techniques Kremlin propagandists now deploy internationally. Leaks from within the Kremlin’s online propaganda agency suggest that the overwhelming majority of its approximately 900 employees remain focused on the domestic information space (Rusyaeva and Zakharov, 2017). The current Russian regime’s primary objective is its own survival, a purpose pursued with renewed urgency as Putin enters his fourth and likely final presidential term. The Kremlin’s international propaganda is aimed at the same objective. It seeks to destabilise Western societies and the alliances between them to reduce the West’s ability to orchestrate regime change in Russia. But the problem with chaos strategies is that they tend to provoke counter measures. In 2015, the EU set up the East StratCom Taskforce to counter Russian disinformation campaigns in Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states on the Union’s periphery (Smith, 2017: 4). In Eastern Europe, the Kremlin deploys a propaganda strategy that leverages shared elements of the post-Soviet experience to erode trust in democratic institutions and to exploit fears of US abandonment. To conduct these campaigns, Russia uses a mix of statefunded multilingual television, Kremlinbacked news sites, Russian-sponsored civil society organisations and a sophisticated social media operation that includes nonattributable comments on webpages, troll and bot Facebook accounts and fake hashtags and Twitter campaigns. Using its social media accounts at crucial moments, such as during the Ukraine revolution in 2014, Russia can flood news websites with tens of thousands of comments a day. The Kremlin has

also sought to manipulate the relatively large Russian-language populations in the former communist bloc who descend from Soviet-era immigrants but who have been denied citizenship in their host countries. Especially in the Baltic States, the Kremlin uses its dominance of regional broadcast media to disseminate pro-Russian propaganda. Russian-speaking social media activists residing in the Baltics also create and distribute their own pro-Russia content without direct support from the Russian state (Helmus et al., 2018: ix–xii). Western Europe is also subject to Russia’s propaganda efforts. In France, Emanuel Macron’s presidential campaign databases were the target of hundreds of cyber attacks originating in Russia. Centre-right candidate Francois Fillon was markedly more pro-Russia than eventual winner Macron (Breeden et  al., 2017). In the UK, 13,000 Twitterbot accounts were active during the 2016 EU referendum campaign and were deactivated after the ballot (Booth et al., 2017). Russia’s Internet Research Agency paid for advertisements related to Brexit on Facebook (CellanJones, 2017). Britain became the target of a huge Russian disinformation campaign following the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in March 2018 – an attack pinned on Moscow by Prime Minister Theresa May. Russian tele­ vision presented the case as a grand antiRussian plot aimed at provoking a scandal ahead of Russia’s imminent presidential election. Kremlin-backed media also claimed that the incident was a British-initiated plot to divert attention from Brexit (Dearden, 2018). Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, including possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, was subject to official investigation. But Russia began escalating its propaganda war against the United States several years before the election. In February 2014, the leaked audio of a phone conversation between America’s Europe Secretary Victoria Nuland and Washington’s ambassador to Kiev, in which the former

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used undiplomatic language about the EU, appeared on YouTube. In the midst of her failed efforts to cajole her European counterparts to do more to avert revolution in Ukraine, Nuland exclaimed ‘F—K the EU’ in exasperation (Glasser, 2018). The Kiev Post first reported the video, leading the Russian media to speculate that the leak came from sources within Ukraine (Miller, 2014; RT, 2014). US suspicion, however, fell on Moscow as a link to the video was quickly posted to Twitter by an aide to Russia’s deputy prime minister (Higgins and Baker, 2014). Whether or not the leak came from Moscow, Russia’s media make frequent reference to the video as evidence of US meddling in Ukraine’s political affairs (Sputnik, 2017). US intelligence agencies knew from 2015 that the Democratic National Committee email servers had been hacked; the emails were later leaked by websites known to be Russian conduits on the eve of the 2016 Democratic National convention nominating Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential candidate. President Obama’s failure to take countermeasures following these incidents may have encouraged Russia to step up its election interference. Analysis of Russian television reporting on the US election suggests the Kremlin’s aim was to discredit American democracy more than to tip the scales in favour of one candidate over another. The Kremlin sought to show that the US system was not as clean as Washington maintained as a way of legitimating Russia’s own flawed electoral system. The Putin administration’s propaganda support for Donald Trump was more a means than an end (Burrett, 2018). Social media was the Kremlin’s main tool for reaching US voters. In September 2017, Facebook revealed that Russian-influenced political advertising had reached 126 million Americans. Over 1,000 videos aiming to enflame disunity among US citizens were posted on YouTube (Isaac and Wakabayashi, 2017). On Twitter, Russian propaganda efforts relied on automation, with 36,746 Russia-linked accounts

generating and disseminating electionrelated content (United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2017: 9). At home, state media portrayed US accusations of Russian election interference as yet more evidence of American hypocrisy, paranoia and Russophobia. Polls show that Russians do not like America. American’s bombing of Serbia in the 1990s and its doctrine of regime change in the 2000s have left Russians deeply distrustful of Washington (Mickiewicz, 2014). In April 2018, 83 percent of Russians believed the United States was unfriendly toward Russia (Public Opinion Foundation, 2018). Meddling in US politics benefits the Russian state, not only by sowing discord within American society, but also by reinforcing domestic narratives of the Putin regime’s vital role in defending Russia’s interests against hostile foreign powers. Furthermore, by playing on Russians’ resentment toward the United States, the Kremlin deflects domestic anger over the economic distress caused by Western sanctions.

CONCLUSION Putin’s domestic and international propaganda performances have been interdependent since the outset of his presidency. Initially, Putin’s propaganda machine proved adept at both creating and meeting public expectations of his leadership, not least in restoring Russia’s position as an important player on the international stage. Putin’s popularity at home, in turn, increased his stature among world leaders. Later, however, as gaps appeared between reality in Russia and what was promised, Putin increasingly drew on dramatic gestures and nationalist rhetoric to distract voters from his shortcomings. The propaganda dividends of Putin’s surprise interventions in Ukraine (2014) and Syria (2015) boosted his flagging domestic support – but at the expense of Russia’s economic stability and diplomatic relations.

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Since the start of his presidency, innovations in communications technologies have allowed Putin to disseminate his propaganda through a growing range of platforms to reach a worldwide audience. But Russia’s meddling in overseas elections leaves Putin increasingly isolated and dependent on a narrow range of allies. As the West wises up to Putin’s act, Russia may be left a mere bit player in the story of China’s rise. Domestically, Putin’s propaganda operation is sophisticated and its mediums of delivery pervasive. By 2018, Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 148 out of 180 for media freedom (Reporters Sans Frontières, n.d.). The Kremlin’s control of Russia’s media landscape and a lack of viable political alternatives means Putin’s eventual successor will likely hail from within the current regime. Unless foreign governments step up their countermeasures, Russia’s current propaganda activities will persist beyond a change in lead actor. Lessons from Germany, where government preparations appear to have deterred expected Russian interference in the September 2017 federal elections, offer security pointers to other states. As early as spring 2017, the German government sent clear and consistent messages to Moscow through multiple channels stating that attempts at interference would be met by punitive actions (Beuth et al., 2017). German political parties pledged not to use leaked information for campaign advantage, while media organisations set up fact-checking teams to verify the authenticity of material (Schwirtz, 2017). Germany’s Federal Returning Officer established a Twitter account to allow swift clarifications of potential fake news (Brattberg and Maurer, 2018). Perhaps most importantly, German politics is not as polarised as in the United States, where partisan enmity provides fertile ground for Russian efforts to create confusion and discord. Putin’s domestic propaganda is predicated on his ability to score foreign policy victories over an internally and internationally divided West.

Even if Putin continues to put in a good performance on the world stage, however, appealing to domestic voters will become increasingly challenging as changes in technology and consumption habits fragment audiences. In line with global trends, Russian media theorists expect domestic audiences to splinter as they seek out niche content, delivered across a range of new mediums, including mobile devices and smart TV. The consumption of news content through social media is also expected to grow as access to Wi-Fi and broadband expands across Russia’s regions (Hess, 2014; Kachkaeva and Kiriya, 2012; Vartanova et  al., 2016). At the same time, it is anticipated that audience share for traditional television will shrink. Future research should focus on how audiences’ changing behaviour impacts the nature and success of the Kremlin’s information strategies. Attention should also focus on changes in Russia’s newsrooms, as audiences’ preferences for niche content encourages the recruitment of non-media professionals into journalism. The increasing role of online information aggregators, big data processing and user-made content in Russian election campaigns are other areas deserving greater research. As the Putin era comes to an end, how his potential successors from within the ruling regime seek to appeal to voters will become an increasingly important avenue for research. A great deal of academic attention is given to how Putin and his government use the media to communicate with Russian voters. More attention should also be given to the information strategies deployed by Putin’s domestic political opponents. Russian international propaganda operations are also subject to intensive investigation. Equal attention should be afforded to foreign governments’ efforts to target Russian audiences. Putin has kept the spotlight on his leadership for nearly two decades. It is likely he still has a few more surprises to deliver before he exits the domestic and world political stage for good.

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Notes 1  Russia’s constitution mandates that the president can serve no more than two terms consecutively. 2  In Japan, the four disputed islands, currently under Russian sovereignty, are called the Northern Territories.

REFERENCES Reporters Sans Frontières. n.d., 2018 World Press Freedom Index, viewed 25 July 2018, . Abdullaev, N. 2007, Lessons Learned for the Presidential Vote, The Moscow Times, viewed 4 June 2018, . Admiraal, B. 2009, A Religion for the Nation or a Nation for the Religion, in Laruelle, M. (ed.), Russian Nationalism and the National Reassertion of Russia, London: Routledge, pp. 203–217. Financial Times. 2018, Alexei Navalny’s Boycott Could Mar Vladimir Putin’s Poll Victory Financial Times, 20 June 2018, . Arnold, C. 2007, Russia: Putin’s “Younger Brother” Takes Center Stage, RFE/RL, viewed 4 June 2018, . Baker, P. 2013, The Seduction of George W. Bush, Foreign Policy, viewed 5 June 2018, . Baryshnikov, V. 2018, Seks-Yavka. Kak Molodezh’ Sotsial’nymi Setyami Tyanut na Vybory [Sex-Appeal: Social Networks Used to Interest Young in Elections], Sloboda.org, viewed 27 June 2018, . Becker, J. 2004, Lessons from Russia. A NeoAuthoritarian Media System., European Journal of Communication, 19(2): 139–163. Belin, L. 2000, Russian Media Empires VI, RFE/ RL, viewed 23 January 2015, . Belousov, A. 2012, Political Propaganda in Contemporary Russia. Russian Politics and Law, 50(3): 56–69.

Beuth, P, Biermann, K, Klingst, M and Stark, H. 2017, Merkel and the Fancy Bear, Die Zeiviewed 25 July 2018, . Booth, R, Weaver, M, Hern, A, Smith, S and Walker, S. 2017, Russia Used Hundreds of Fake Accounts to Tweet about Brexit, Data Shows, The Guardian, viewed 25 July 2018, . Borodina, A. 2007, Netelegenichnyye nesoglasnyye [Non-professional Protestors], Kommersant, viewed 25 July 2018, . Brattberg, E and Maurer, T. 2018, Russian Election Interference: Europe’s Counter to Fake News and Cyber Attacks, Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, viewed 26 July 2018, . Breeden, A, Sewell, C and Perlroth, N 2017, Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of “Massive” Hacking Attack, New York Times, viewed 26 July 2018, . Brown, JJD. 2017, Japan Woos Russia for Its Own Security, Nikkei Asian Review, viewed 26 July 2018, . Burrett, T. 2018, Russian State Television Coverage of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Demokratizatsiya, 26(3): 287–319. Burrett, T. 2014, Reaffirming Russia’s Remote Control: Exploring Kremlin Influence on Television Coverage of Russian-Japanese Relations and the Southern Kuril Islands Territorial Dispute. Demokratizatsiya, 22(3),359–381. Burrett, T. 2011, Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia, London: Routledge. Cellan-Jones, R. 2017, Facebook and Twitter: Nine Russian Brexit Ads Found by Inquiries, BBC News, viewed 10 July 2018, . Coalson, R. 2008, NTV’s Past Points Toward REN-TV’s Future, RFE/RL, viewed 5 June

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2018, . Dearden, L. 2018, Russia Claims it Could Have Been in Interests of Britain to Poison Sergei Skripal, The Independen, viewed 26 July 2018, . Dowling, T. 2017, 24-Hour Putin People: My Week Watching Kremlin “Propaganda Channel” RT, The Guardian, viewed 26 July 2018, . EIM. 2000, Monitoring the Media Coverage of the March 2000 Presidential Elections in Russia: Final Report, Düsseldorf: European Institute for the Media. Gessen, M. 2012, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, New York: Riverhead Boks. Goscilo, H. 2013, Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, London: Routledge. Gerasimov, V. 2013, Tsennost’ nauki v predvidenii [The Value of Scientific Foresight], Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kur’yer [Military Industrial Courier], viewed 10 November 2018, . Glasser, S. 2018, How Top US Diplomat Pushed Back Against Russian Hacking, Politico, viewed 10 July 2018, . Gulko, N. 2007, Chekistskoye Obostreniye [Chekist Escalation], Kommersant Vlast, viewed 26 July 2018, . Gusinsky, S, Tsygankov, A. 2018, The Wilsonian Bias in the Study of Russian Foreign Policy, Problems of Post-Communism, 65(6): 385–393. Helmus, T, Bodine-Baron, E, Radin, A, Magnuson, M, Mendelsohn, J, Marcellino, W, Bega, A and Winkelman, Z. 2018, Russian Social Media Influence: Understanding Russian Propaganda in Eastern Europe, Santa Monica: Rand Corporation.

Hess, T. 2014, What is a Media Company? A Reconceptualization for the Online World, International Journal of Media Management, 16(1): 3–8. Higgins, A and Baker P. 2014, Russia Claims U.S. Is Meddling Over Ukraine, New York Times, viewed 26 November 2018, . Hille, K. 2016, Russia and China: Friends with Benefits, Financial Times, viewed 26 July 2018, . Huntington, S. 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster. Hutchings, S. 2008, St. Petersburg 300: The Invention of a Russian (Media) Tradition, Television and News Media, 9(1): 3–23. Hutchings, S and Rulyov, N. 2008, Commemorating the Past/Performing the Present: Television Coverage of Second World War Victory Celebration and the (De)Construction of Russian Nationhood, in Beumers, B, Hutchings, S and Rulyova, N. (eds), The Post-Soviet Russian Media, London: Routledge, pp. 137–155. Isaac, M and Wakabayashi, D. 2017, Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone, New York Times, viewed 26 July 2018, . Kachkaeva, A and Kiriya, I. 2012, Dolgosrochnye tendentsii razvitiya sektora massovykh kommunikatsiy [Long-Term Trends in the Mass Communication Industry, Foresight Russia, 6(4): 6–18. Koltsova, O. 2006, News Media and Power in Russia, London: Routledge. Krastev, I., Holmes, S., 2012. An Autopsy of Managed Democracy. Journal of Democracy 23(3), 33–45. Lambroschini, S. 2003, Under New Media Laws, Journalists Are Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t, RFE/RL, viewed 22 March 2009, . Laruelle, M. 2016, The Three Colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian Nationalist Mythmaking of the Ukraine Crisis, Post-Soviet Affairs, 32(1): 55–74.

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Levada Center. 2018, From Opinion to Understanding, The Levada Centre, viewed 22 November 2018, . Lipman, M. 2007, A Vote That Putin Fears, The Washington Post, 1 December. Lipman, M. 2006, Russia’s Lid on the Media, The Washington Post, 14 June. Luhn, A and Walker, S. 2014, Vladimir Putin Arrives in Crimea for Victory Day Celebrations, The Guardian, viewed 26 July 2018, . Malykhina, S. 2014, Renaissance of Classical Allusions in Contemporary Russian Media, Maryland: Lexington Books. Mickiewicz, E. 2014, No Illusions: The Voices of Russia’s Future Leaders, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, C. 2014, “Fuck the EU”, Frustrated Nuland Says to Pyatt, In Alleged Leaked Phone Call’, Kiev Post, viewed 7 November 2018, . Oates, S. 2006, Television, Democracy and Elections in Putin’s Russia, London: Routledge. Osipov, I. 2012, Rossiiane ustali ot piara Putina [Russians are Tired of Putin’s PR], Forbes, viewed 7 April 2016, . Panfilov, O. 2005, Putin and the Press, London: Foreign Policy Centre. Plekhanov, I. 2017, “Doktrina Gerasimova” i pugalo “gibridnoy voyny” Rossii [The Germasimov Doctrine and the Scarecrow of Russia’s “Hybrid War”], Ria Novosti, viewed 26 November 2018, . Polyankova, A. 2018, How Russia Meddled in its Own Elections, The Atlantic, viewed 26 July 2018, . Pomerantsev, P. 2014, Yes, Russia Matters, World Affairs, 177(3): 16–23. Repnikova, M and Balzer, H. 2009, Chinese Immigration to Russia: Missed Opportunities,

Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Public Opinion Foundation. 2018, Rossiya: Druz’ya, Vragi, Otnosheniye v Mire [Russia: Friends. Enemies, Attitude to the World] 2018, Public Opinion Foundation, viewed 26 July 2018, . Public Opinion Foundation. 2003, V. Putin Three Years as Russian President, Public Opinion Foundation, 6 March, viewed 4 June 2019, . RT. 2014, Russian Govt Not Complicit in US Diplomat’s ‘F**k the EU’ Call Leak, Official Says, RT.com, viewed 26 November 2018, . Tass. 2018, Pervyy Kanal Pokazhet Film Pimanova “Krym” 17 Marta [First Channel Will Show Pimanov’s Film “Crimea” on 17 March], Tass, viewed 27 June 2018, . The Economist. 2013, Russia’s chief propagandist, The Economist, viewed 26 July 2018, . Rusyaeva, P and Zakharov, A. 2017, Rassledovaniye RBK: Kak “Fabrika Trolley” Porabotala na Vborakh v SSHA [RBC Investigation: How the “Troll Factory” Worked the US Election], RBC, viewed 7 July 2018, . Ryabov, A. 2004, The Mass Media, in McFaul, M, Petrov, N and Ryabov A. (eds), Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian PostCommunist Political Reform, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 83–104. Sakwa, R. 2017, U.S.-Russia Relations in the Trump Era, Insight Turkey, 19(4):13–27. Sakwa, R. 2004, Putin: Russia’s Choice, London: Routledge. Schuler, C. 2015, Performing Democracy PutinStyle, The Drama Review, 59(1): 136–159. Schwirtz, M. 2017, German Election Mystery: Why No Russian Meddling? The New York Times, viewed 26 July 2018, . Sharkov, D. 2018, Russian Activists Spray AntiPutin slogan on Frozen River, Newsweek,

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viewed 26 July 2018, . Simons, G. 2014, Russian Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century: Structure, Means and Message, Public Relations Review, 40(3): 440-449. Smith, B. 2017, Russian Interference in UK Politics and Society, House of Commons Library, viewed 26 July 2018, . Smith, B and Ward, M. 2017, ‘Russia 2017’, House of Commons Library, viewed 26 July 2018, . Sperling, V. 2016, Putin’s Macho Personality Cult, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 49(1): 13–23. Sputnik. 2017, Mission Complete: What the US Really Had in Mind for Ukraine, Sputnik New, viewed 26 November 2018, . Suslov, M. 2018, “Russian World” Concept: Post-Soviet Geopolitical Ideology and the Logic “Spheres of Influences”, Geopolitics, 23(2):330–353. Suslov, M. 2015, “Crimea is Ours!” Russian Popular Geopolitics in the New Media Age. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 55(6): 588–609. Teper, Y. 2016, Official Russian Identity Discourse in Light of the Annexation of Crimea: National or Imperial, Post-Soviet Affairs, 32(4): 378–396. United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 2017, Testimony of Sean J Edgett Acting General Counsel, Twitter, Inc., United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, viewed 26 July 2018, .

Valdai Club. 2016, Trade Between Russia and China, Valdai Club, viewed 7 April 2016, . Treisman, D. 2014, The Two Putins, CNN Opinion, viewed 7 April 2016, . Tsygankov, A. 2009, Russia in the post-western world: The end of the normalization paradigm?, Post-Soviet Affairs, 25(4): 347–369. Interfax. 2018, V Sovfede Zayavili o Roste Finansirovaniya Vnesistemnoy Oppozitsii iz-za Rubezha [Federal Council Announces Increase in Foreign Funding for Extra Parliamentary Opposition, Interfax, viewed 4 July 2018, . Vartanova, E, Vyrkovsky, V, Makeenko, M and Smirnov, S. 2016, The Russian Media Industry in Ten Years: Industrial Forecasts, Westminister Papers in Communication and Culture, 11(1), 65-84. VCIOM. 1999, Presidential Voting Intentions, Russia Votes, viewed 3 September 2015, . Wesolowsky, T. 2018, “Listen To Us Now”: Putin Unveils Weapons, Vows To Raise Living Standards In Fiery Annual Address, RFE/RL, viewed 27 June 2018, . Whitmore, B. 2007, As Elections Near, Rivalries In Putin Circle Heat Up, RFE/RL, viewed 4 June 2018, . Yasmann, V. 2007, Russia: Putin Comes On Strong, RFE/RL, viewed 7 April 2016, . Zassoursky, I. 2004, Media and Power in PostSoviet Russia, London: M.E. Sharp.

30 Trumpaganda1: The War on Facts, Press, and Democracy Mira Sotirovic

INTRODUCTION Propaganda in its original sense, as an organization established in the 17th century by the Catholic church with an objective to spread its doctrine, is not much more controversial or different in its aims than modern corporate communications departments or public relations agencies. As a form of communication, propaganda aims to exert influence in the service of particularistic interests. However, through many historical instances of unscrupulous uses to systematically misinform and deceive, propaganda gained a vicious reputation and a bad name. Professionals in the public relations and advertising industries distanced themselves from the negative connotations of the term by claiming to serve good causes and to provide correct information (Bernays, 1928). Similarly, social science academics gradually abandoned the term propaganda for more sophisticated and nuanced concepts of ‘persuasion’, ‘public opinion’, and ‘strategic

communication’ that recognize the specific conditions of its effectiveness and overall limits to uniformly and directly shape people’s minds. Modern political campaigns, which routinely employ classic techniques of propaganda to manage their candidates’ images and ‘sell’ their messages, substitute the word propaganda with the more respectable word ‘marketing’ in promoting their activities. Oddly, they often stand accused of ‘spin’, but rarely of propaganda. The avoidance of the word propaganda in both professional and academic contexts relegated it to little more than a tired political slur that could be applied to any opinion with which one disagrees (Schumpeter, 1996). Its absence, however, may have contributed to neglecting the appreciation of the social conditions conducive to misuses of propaganda and for creating a situation when propaganda is most effective – when it is subtle, hidden, camouflaged by other forms of communication and undetected.

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One of the most significant achievements of propaganda of the 20th century may be in persuading us that democracies are free from propaganda in the absence of overt coercion. Instead, the freedom to persuade and suggest is proclaimed as the very essence of the democratic process (Bernays, 1947), notwithstanding the ancient associations of persuasion with fallacy and modern connotations of trickery and falseness. In effect, propaganda has been equated with techniques of mass persuasion and defined as ‘mass suggestion or influence through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual’ (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1992: 11). Not all persuasion is propaganda though. Propaganda works by distraction, distortion, and exaggeration. Propaganda suppresses reason or rational will (Stanley, 2015) by triggering emotions and appealing to prejudice. As a ‘mechanism by which ideas are disseminated’ (Bernays, 2005: 48) with every new mass medium, propaganda has the potential to reach more people and operate on a finer-grained but even grander scale. Its works are aided by the proliferations of the media platforms for opinion expression that further blur differences between deliberate deception, catchy self-promotion, clickbaity infotainment, and reliable information. The biggest challenge in studying propaganda still remains to be distinguishing it from other forms of communication (Fellows, 1957). Education may be on the opposite side of the communication spectrum by the feature of reliance on facts, logic, and openended conclusions, but even ‘“education” for one person may be “propaganda” for another’ (Smith, 2010). Individuals bring their own preconceptions and biases to everything they perceive and particularly to those issues on which they have a strong point of view (Kahneman et al., 1982). In that vein, factual news reports for journalists are fake news for Trump and his administration. Trump’s labeling of the mainstream news media as ‘fake news’ is easily recognized as the classic propaganda technique of ‘name calling’

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(Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938) and an ‘ad hominem’ attack to deflect attention from the message argument. Trump used the label to discredit media’s critical reporting of him, but the phrase actually captures the essence of propaganda. Propaganda is communication of misinformation disguised as credible information. Propaganda masqueraded as news robs it of credibility and subverts its purpose of providing an accurate account of reality. Accurate information is a necessary condition for knowledge and truth, and the foundation of decision making in democracy. The news media in democracy are the main source of knowledge, after completing formal education, that helps citizens realize their interests and the interests of their community. Suppression of information, propagation of misinformation, and undermining the news media weaken democracy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The best way to combat propaganda in a democracy is through analyses that reveal how much truth is in it (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938). This chapter examines President Trump and his administration’s ‘running war’ with the mainstream news media and its implications for American democracy and a free press. Whereas Trump’s insults and violation of the norms of presidential behavior attract a lot of attention in the news media, it is his assaults on facts and propagation of falsities that are truly damaging to people’s lives. This chapter goes beyond discussing the classic rhetorical devices to emphasize the news media roles in supplying citizens with essential facts and implications of issues affecting their welfare. When the news media fail in those roles, they themselves become channels for specific propagandas (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938).

BRILLIANT CAMPAIGN At a July 16, 2018 press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, American

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President Donald Trump (2018) said in response to questions about the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for cyberattacks intended to interfere in the presidential contest: That was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily. And, frankly, we beat her – and I’m not even saying from the standpoint – we won that race. And it’s a shame that there could even be a little bit of a cloud over it. People know that, people understand it. But the main thing – and we discussed this also – zero collusion. We ran a ­brilliant campaign, and that’s why I’m President.

Trump’s ‘brilliant’ campaign started in the basement of his Trump Tower building in Manhattan, with a speech promising ‘we are going to make our country great again’ (Diamond, 2015) in reminiscence of the Ronald Reagan 1980 presidential campaign slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’. He came to the stage surrounded by eight American flags after descending from the golden escalator. The opulence of the surroundings was a punctuation mark in a speech in which Trump pointed out his wealth and successful business career as qualifications for being president. In the ‘eccentric’ speech (Neate, 2015), Trump attacked Mexican immigrants, claiming them to consist of many criminals and rapists, and promised to build a great wall along the US southern border. He blamed Barack Obama for letting the country collapse to the level of a third world country and declared scrapping Obamacare and cutting spending on education as his presidential priorities. The news reports provided a full taste of the type of candidate ‘who shoots from the hip and does not care for a script’ Trump represented (Diamond, 2015). Ironically, it was the general election opponent of ‘the First Twitter president of the United States’ (Pilkington, 2018), Hillary Clinton, who officially launched her campaign for president by a Twitter announcement and a two minute and 18 second ad-like polished video posted on social media (Velencia, 2015). The video featured about a dozen ordinary people and families

talking about restarting their lives. The news media quoted Clinton saying in the video she wanted to be the champion of everyday Americans who have fought their way back from tough economic times but for whom the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Reports also included a litany of scandals starting from her role in helping Bill Clinton overcome charges of draft dodging and womanizing in his 1992 presidential election campaign, to using a private server and email for official business as secretary of state and permanently deleting those she considered personal (Fox News, 2015). The harshest response to Clinton’s proclaimed commitment to middle class and working Americans came from Bernie Sanders, her primary election opponent, who attacked Clinton for her connections to Wall Street and support of trade deals that hurt American workers. These charges complimented Trump’s ‘crooked’ Hillary name calling and Republican primary candidates’ narrative of Clinton as representing the worst of Washington machine politics while also masquerading as a voice of the people. The image of Clinton as an elitist, disingenuous candidate who disdained working people was complete when Clinton gave Trump a political gift by saying at a New York City fundraiser that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a ‘basket of deplorables’. Clinton’s gaffe sparked a media frenzy and Twitter storm just two months before election day. Trump won the election by the electoral college vote, and lost by almost 2.9 million popular votes after 303 rallies and speeches (vs. Clinton’s 278), 15 debates including three between the presidential candidates, 22 press conferences (25 for Clinton), $93  million spent on television ads (vs. $253 spent by Clinton) (Smith and Kreutz, 2016), and 35,244 Tweets (vs. 9,887 Clinton’s) (Keegan, 2017). Aggregation of national polls showed him having a lead of 0.9 percentage points at only one time throughout the whole general campaign, in late July, on the heels of the release of almost 20,000 hacked DNC emails.

TRUMPAGANDA: THE WAR ON FACTS, PRESS, AND DEMOCRACY

Can a single gaffe decide the race? Frank Luntz, the famed Republican wordsmith who created phrases such as ‘death tax’ and ‘illegal aliens’ tweeted shortly after Clinton’s comments flashed on social media: ‘If Trump continues his upward climb in polls and wins on November 8th, tonight will be seen as the turning point of the race’ (Luntz, 2016).

NEWS MEDIA COVERAGE OF ELECTION CAMPAIGNS In one of the most important studies in political communication history, The People’s Choice (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948: 1), American presidential campaigns were called ‘a largescale experiment in political propaganda and public opinion’. During this experiment, campaign managers, party workers and partisan leaders of opinion (the newspaper editor, the columnist, the freelance writer and the syndicated cartoonist, the radio ­commentator, and the local sage) unleashed propaganda ‘to control or inform, constrain or tease potential voters into the appropriate decision’ (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948: 120). The mass communication media, filled with reports on conventions and candidates’ speeches, magazine articles, and front-page newspaper stories on elections, were merely considered distributors of campaign political propaganda. These days most journalists would reject such a close association of their roles with propaganda, citing the professional model of journalism with its emphasis on objectivity. This model developed partly in reaction to WWI journalism, characterized as being willing to publish propaganda as facts, accept censorship, and failing to hold power to account (Greenslade, 2014). Despite journalistic aspirations for objectivity, polls show that about 40% think they are performing very poorly, whereas 56% of Americans think that media are performing very well or acceptably in their role of providing objective news reports (Knight Foundation, 2018).

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Similarly, critical views of news media performance are expressed in the perceptions of almost half of Americans that there is a ‘a great deal’ of political bias in news coverage. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who see a great deal of political bias increased by 14 percentage points. This trend is primarily driven by party identification, with 67% of Republicans who see a great deal of political bias and only 26% of Democrats, suggesting confirmation and projection biases rather than an intrinsic media bias. Nevertheless, it weakens the position of news media as an institution whose legitimacy in democracy rests on the support of its citizens. The central role of news media in demo­ cracy is not disputed though. More than 80% of Americans believe that the news media are critical or important to our democracy. Their most important role in making sure Americans have the knowledge they need to be informed about public affairs is on full display during election campaigns. A large majority of Americans (78%) learned about the 2016 presidential election from television news, local, cable, network and comedy shows (Gottfied et al., 2016). Unfortunately, what they were most likely to learn was about candidates’ standings in polls and about various controversies and scandals because the bulk of media coverage was focused on those two topics (Patterson, 2016). The horserace and controversies have traditionally been the dominant themes of election coverage – the 2016 election was no exception with 42% of stories that were about who was winning and 17% of stories about controversies. Candidates’ policy stands were covered in only one out of ten campaign stories. In turn, research has shown that what perceptions people develop and what information they learn from their use of media coverage content is crucial for understanding their electoral behavior (Sotirovic and McLeod, 2008). Presidential campaigns also have been described as ‘national conversations’, and ‘exercises in the creation, recreation, and

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transmission of “significant symbols”’ (Denton, 2017: x). One of the factors identified as contributing to Trump’s victory was his rhetoric (Kirk and Martin, 2017): simple and direct messages that contained epithets that the more ‘politically correct’ politicians Trump was running against typically avoided. The words and symbols that ‘make us mad or glad’ (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938: 111) are the main weapons of propaganda. Trump appealed to his supporters with phrases such as ‘lock her up’, ‘drain the swamp’, ‘build the wall’, ‘rigged system’, ‘fake news’, and ‘America first’. Propaganda symbols feed preexisting prejudice, and Trump’s hallmark ‘fake news’ phrase would not have whipped up his supporters to the same degree if conservative politicians and commentators were not cultivating mistrust and hostility toward the mainstream news media and turning Republican voters against them for decades earlier. Trump sounded genuine with his brash and uncompromising statements about issues his supporters already felt passionate about (Friedersdorf, 2015). He trashed the rules of civic decorum by insulting hundreds of people in his speeches, including the rivals within his own party. The cable news media in particular fed on every juicy bite Trump threw them during his rallies, and every offensive tweet was flashed on the screen and repeated incessantly. Trump received twice as much news coverage as Clinton did, indicating by the frequencies his name was mentioned on a selection of national cable channels, national networks, and their affiliates (2016 Campaign Television Tracker, 2018). However, given that the tone of news coverage of both Trump and Clinton was overwhelmingly negative, almost by a ratio of five to one (Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, 2016), one would expect that Clinton would have benefited from the heavy negative attention that the news media paid to Trump. In hindsight, the media coverage of Trump seemed to prove the proverbial saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES’ RHETORIC Televised debates are one of the regular ­features of presidential campaigns. The first Clinton-Trump debate was the most watched presidential debate ever (Associated Press, 2016) with 84 million Americans tuning in. Their third and final debate had the third largest audience ever of 71.6 million viewers, topped only by the 1980 debate between Carter and Reagan. The first debate was also the second most watched TV broadcast in the United States, exceeded only by the Super Bowl and its post-game show. Debates traditionally attract large audiences because of the conflict and unpredictability of a face-off in which the true character and issue positions are revealed unfiltered by reporters’ immediate interpretations and analyses. Despite some spontaneous exchanges, candidates mostly deliver their carefully prepared and rehearsed remarks and try to drill in several essential points in response to anticipated questions from reporters. Democratic and Republican candidates in their primary debates tend to favor different issues, with Democrats typically prioritizing health care, jobs, gun control, education, ground troops, and criminal justice, whereas Republicans are most often discussing topics of the Islamic State, immigration, taxes, military power, Iran, and anti-Washington sentiments (Keller and Yourish, 2016). Democrats and Republicans also seem to speak different languages when discussing the same topics. For example, Democrats refer to ‘comprehensive health reform’, ‘estate taxes’, ‘undocumented workers’, and ‘tax breaks for the wealthy’, while Republicans talk about a ‘Washington takeover of health care’, ‘death taxes’, ‘illegal aliens’, and ‘tax reform’ (Thomson, 2016). In presidential debates, both party candidates are asked to answer the same questions chosen by the reporters in roughly the same amount of time, somewhat limiting their ability to set their own agenda and avoid certain issues. Under these relatively

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controlled circumstances, there were marked differences between how Clinton and Trump spoke during their three debates in terms of a number of linguistic characteristics. Trump used shorter sentences (11 words on average) and used fewer complex, polysyllabic, words (8%) than Clinton whose sentences consisted of 15 words and 10% of complex words on average. These statistics indicate that Trump’s answers were easier to understand than Clinton’s. He spoke at the level appropriate for fifth graders, whereas Clinton spoke on the level understood by an average student in seventh grade (Readability Test Tool, 2018). Different patterns in the use of words indicated various psychological processes and states such as affect, cognition and drives. Trump used more words that indicated negative emotions, anger, differentiation between ideas and people, and danger than Clinton (Sotirovic and Benson, 2018). Despite moderators who firmly stuck to their questions, demanded answers from both candidates, and enforced time limitations, Trump spoke about 14% more than Clinton, indicated by the number of words. Term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF)2 analyses of the words used by Trump and Clinton revealed that although talking about the same topics, the two candidates projected different world views, priorities, and personas. Trump was much more aggressive than Clinton in presenting his views by consistently contrasting them to what ‘Hillary’ does or says. Among Trump’s most important words were adjectives and adverbs such as ‘tremendous’ and ‘greatest’ whereas for Clinton things were ‘clear’. Among issues, Trump’s standout statements included those containing the words ‘inner’ cities and ‘NAFTA’, whereas Clinton’s emphasis was on ‘affordable’ health care and ‘nuclear’ weapons. Trump talked about his endorsements, whereas Clinton ‘hoped’ she ‘will be able to earn your vote’ and that ‘people out there understand’. Trump’s performance was of a skilled publicist to whom propaganda rhetorical devices identified by

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the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1938) are the currency of the trade.3 All politicians use glittering generalities (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938), a propaganda device by which the propagandist identifies his program with virtue by use of ‘virtue words’ that appeal to their base, but Clinton’s long history in political life exposed her less artful moments. During the first Presidential Debate that featured a segment on racial relationships, Trump called Clinton out for comments she made two decades earlier in discussing crime. She called kids in gangs ‘super predators that should be brought to heel’. She was confronted over those comments by a black student, Ashley Williams, at a fundraiser in Charleston, NC, who demanded an apology to black people. The moment was symbolic of Clinton’s inability to mobilize a demographic that was crucial in pushing Obama to his victory.

TRUMP’S TWITTER Almost half of Americans learned about the election from social media, mostly from Facebook (37%). Only 9% of those who learned about the election from social media learned from Twitter. Twitter, however, became the sensation of the 2016 presidential election because Trump’s bombastic rhetoric was like catnip for campaign reporters. Propagated in the news, his tweets have reached a broader public than just his 13 million followers (Hendricks and Schill, 2017) who were about 3 million stronger than Clinton’s by election day. Although Clinton tweeted about as much as Trump, Trump’s tweets were getting more attention as indicated by the almost four times larger number of retweets (Pew Research Center, 2016). Trump’s own retweeting reaffirmed his antiestablishment campaign message because, in almost 80% of cases, his retweets were of the general public rather than famous people in the news media, government and other

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organizations. In contrast, 80% of the time Clinton retweeted her own campaign ­slogans. The effect of Trump’s tweets beyond the energizing and consolidating of his base is not clear given that the mainstream news media often treated them with incredulity and as a bad joke of the day, but they did function as five-second advertisements that gave Trump control over his messages and an opportunity to attack anyone who opposed him. Free mentions of his tweets have been calculated to earn Trump $4.96 billion in free media, about 50% more than Clinton earned for her tweets (Media Quant, 2016). As Trump used Twitter as primarily a marketing and promotional tool (Gunn, 2017), his tweets contained relatively few references to issues. In comparison to the use of his campaign slogan ‘make America great again’, which appeared in his tweets 320 times, ‘illegal immigration’ was mentioned 52 times, followed by ‘the border’ (34), ‘radical Islam’ (19), ‘foreign policy’ (15), ‘the wall’ (15), ‘the economy’ (13), ‘border security’ (12), ‘national security’ (11), and ‘repeal Obamacare’ (10). Cognitive linguist George Lakoff (2018) wrote that ‘Trump uses social media as a weapon to control the news cycle. It works like a charm. His tweets are tactical rather than substantive’. Trump’s tweets during the election campaign are most noteworthy for insults hurled at his opponents. A New York Times reporter found that 11% of all Trump’s tweets were insults of some kind and, among them, about one third were directed at ‘crooked Hillary’, ‘little Marco’, ‘low-energy Jeb’, and ‘lying Ted’ (Quealy, 2016). Trump’s tweets also often attacked journalists and media organizations that published anything critical of him and for ‘attempting to destroy Donald Trump with lies’ (Trump, 2015). By the end of his campaign the so-called ‘dishonest and biased mainstream media’ CNN and New York Times bore the brunt of Trump’s ire. However, it was only after his election victory, on December 10, 2016, that Trump first used the phrase ‘fake news’ in a tweet and it was in reference

to CNN (Trump, 2016). The phrase was just a zingier reiteration of a long-standing conservative establishment complaint of mainstream news media as a ‘propaganda machine’ (Trump, 2018) with entrenched liberal bias. According to Factbase (2018), CNN, Russia, and NBC are among the most common topics associated with ‘fake news’ phrases in everything that Trump said since that time. ‘Fake news’ became Trump’s signature phrase when he used it 16 times in his January 11, 2017 White House press conference. He told CNN reporter Jim Acosta ‘You are fake news. Go ahead’. What he designated ‘Fake news’ was the CNN media organization’s seemingly inaccurate, mistaken identity reporting on his private lawyer, Michael Cohen’s visit to Prague. Fake news is defined by Science magazine writers (Lazer et  al., 2018: 2) as ‘fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent’. In July 2016, a story with a headline ‘Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement’ that appeared in the Facebook newsfeed registered more than 960,000 comments, shares, and reactions (Ritchie, 2016). Soon after, more stories with explosive claims appeared, such as ‘Donald Trump sent his own plane to transport 200 stranded marines’ and ‘WikiLeaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS’, all damaging to Clinton and helpful to Trump’s campaign, generating millions in Facebook engagements. A Buzzfeed investigation found that all those stories originated on a network of web sites with legitimate-sounding news domains such as WTOE5News.com, kspm33.com, ­ mckenziepost.com, ky6news. com, and km8news.com that together have published more than 750 fake news articles (Silverman, 2016). None of the sites listed an owner of the company, but Buzzfeed found that many were registered in the Macedonian town of Veles. Some Veles residents were making money via ads attached to the stories that produced a lot of Facebook traffic.

TRUMPAGANDA: THE WAR ON FACTS, PRESS, AND DEMOCRACY

The fake news stories propagated through Facebook may not have affected the outcome of the election given that only a minority of US adults (27%) were exposed to them. Fake-news made up only 3% of the overall news use, although their effects could have been disproportionately large within smaller groups crucial for Trump’s victory (Guess et al., 2018). The more important effect may have been the sense of confusion they left among Americans about the basic facts of current issues and events and doubts in their confidence to recognize fake news and identify trustworthy information. About 64% of US adults said fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion and about 60% were less than very confident in their ability to recognize fake news (Barthel et al., 2016). Trump’s labeling of ‘fake news’ of everything that he dislikes, from inconvenient facts to critical reporting, likely added to the difficulties the public had to stay well-informed. A Knight Foundation study found that almost 60% of Americans think that the increase in information available today makes it harder to be well-informed because people have to sort through a lot of information to determine what is true or important (Knight Foundation, 2018).

WAR ON THE MEDIA CAMPAIGN Trump has remained an avid user of Twitter after the election, sending on average seven tweets every day (Trump Twitter Archive, 2018). His favorite Twitter topics are about fake news (174), Fox News or Sean Hannity (164), Making America Great Again (100), Russia (98), Clinton (76), Obamacare (73), deals (67), Obama (58), The New York Times (37), CNN (33), NBC (31), and the NFL (23). While these topics show what is on top of Trump’s mind, the New York Times’ complete list of ‘the 487 people, places, and things Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter’ (Lee and Quealy, 2018) indicates what Trump

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prioritizes and who his true enemies are. Trump’s favorite insults since the beginning of his campaign have been ‘fake news’, ‘crooked’, ‘witch hunt’, ‘weak’, ‘the worst’, ‘disaster’, ‘very dishonest’, ‘rigged’, ‘failing’, ‘totally biased’, ‘bad judgment’, ‘joke’, and ‘terrible’. The post-election ‘enemy’ list (Table 30.1) is topped by the ‘mainstream media’, ‘Democrats’, and the new target of Trump’s anger, ‘allegations of collusion between Russia and members of the Trump campaign’. The New York Times, Hillary Clinton, and CNN remained among Trump’s main detractors, but James Comey replaced his primary election opponents, Cruz, Bush and Rubio. Trump’s attention to Obamacare intensified, and among the new targets are members of Robert Mueller’s team, the FBI, and the US immigration policies. Among all of Trump’s insults, 37% are directed to media organizations and journalists. Trump’s attacks on the news media can be viewed as an attempt to erode public trust and establish the Trump administration as a source of truth (Lakoff, 2018). Ironically, a closer examination of Trump’s tweets accusing the mainstream media of being ‘fake’, ‘dishonest’, ‘corrupt’, ‘phony’, or ‘biased’, revealed that those accusations are false, and that ‘he was himself propagating mis- and disinformation’ (Ross and Rivers, 2018). In  other words, Trump is misrepresenting media reports to spread his own version of reality, and many times what Trump decries as ‘fake news’ turns out to be true (Kessler and Kelly, 2018). Trump’s attacks on the news media came at a low point in a historical trend of decline in American’s trust and confidence in the mass media, among other social institutions, since its Watergate peak in 1976 from 72% to its low of about 40% starting in the mid-2000s (Swift, 2017). During the 2016 election campaign, Republicans’ already traditionally lower trust in media, fueled by conservative rhetoric complaining of a liberal media bias, dropped to a historical low of 14% and remained at that level through 2017. However,

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Table 30.1  People and things Trump insulted on Twitter more than 10 times People and things

Number of insults since election

The ‘mainstream’ media Democrats Allegations of collusion between Russia and members of the Trump campaign The New York Times Hillary Clinton CNN James Comey Obamacare The Washington Post NBC News Chuck Schumer Bob Corker Members of Robert Mueller’s team Barack Obama Doug Jones FBI Jon Ossoff ABC News Jeff Flake US immigration policies Andrew McCabe National Football League Frederica Wilson NBC Richard Blumenthal

Democrats’ trust and confidence in the news media rose to its highest levels (72%) since 2005. Independents also had a rebound to levels similar to that in 2014. The deep partisan divide is also evident in the polls that asked Americans whether they trust more the national media or President Trump’s White House to tell the truth. In mid-2017, 66% of Democrats sided with the national media whereas 65% of Republicans sided with President Trump’s White House in a Morning Consult/ Politico poll (Yokley, 2018). By mid 2018, about the same percentage of Democrats trusted national media and six percentage points more Republicans trusted Trump. Among independents, the percentage of those who said they do not know whom to trust more increased by five percentage

350 167 132 107 72 62 60 42 40 33 24 23 22 17 17 17 15 14 14 14 13 12 11 11 11

points to 44%. The effect of Trump’s daily assaults on mainstream news media since his election seems to be mainly a reinforcement among Republicans, increased confusion among Independents, and no change among Democrats. The broader implications of firing up his most loyal supporters may be increased partisan polarization, and further extremization of the Republican party. Trumps’ fake news cries may have even more serious consequences beyond the United States, especially in countries that have weaker constitutional free speech protections and fewer independent judiciaries. The phrase was used in 2017 by more than 20 political leaders worldwide, in authoritarian regimes and even in European democracies (e.g. Cambodia, China, Egypt, France,

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Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Somalia, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela), to repress critical reporting and intimidate journalists (Lees, 2018). These leaders are emboldened by the knowledge that there will be little condemnation or repercussions for their rhetoric because the leader of the free world is also serving as a commander in chief in the war on the news media. When they say ‘fake news’, it is not just a figure of speech used to dismiss, deny, or malign. In 2018, 28 journalists around the world were imprisoned on charges of false news, more than three times as many as in 2016. Egypt jailed most of them at 19, followed by Cameroon with four, Rwanda with three and China and Morocco with one each (Beiser, 2018). They represent only 11% of all 251 journalists who were jailed in relation to their work, mostly on charges of belonging to or aiding groups that states consider terrorist organizations. On the list of these countries where politicians used the phrase ‘fake news’ are some with the highest number of journalists murdered since 1992 when the Committee to Protect Journalists began keeping records: Philippines, Somalia, Russia, Turkey and Syria. In the name of fighting fake news, a number of countries, including European democracies such as Sweden, Ireland and the Czech Republic, are preparing or passing laws that in the countries already known for restricting free speech – such as Singapore, Turkey, Belarus – can be used to further silence opposition groups and dissenting voices (Henley, 2018). Trump’s indifference toward the plight of journalists was shockingly evident in his reaction to the killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi when he dismissed reports from US intelligence agencies that implicated the Saudi Crown Prince and refused to punish the country (Reichmann, 2018). The reaction signaled to the world that protecting freedom of speech is not an American priority any longer.

FACTS MATTER Politics may be considered a bloody sport where there is no place for thin-skinned people who cannot take an insult, but access to accurate information along with the freedom of opinion expression are bloodlines of effective democracy. While delegitimizing the mainstream media’s central role in insuring the free exchange of information that is ‘accurate, fair and thorough’ (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014), in 558 days of his presidency, Trump has made 4,229 false or misleading claims – 7.6 per day (Kessler et al., 2018). Most of them are on the topic of immigration (12.7%) (Table 30.2), and they are made in the context of various remarks (31.9%) (Table 30.3). Trump’s claims that represent an alternative reality are obstacles to the creation of public knowledge about important issues as a foundation of debates that lead to the formation of coherent opinion and optimal public policies. The lack of public knowledge silences citizen voices, and discussions driven by high levels of misinformation create distorted representations of public opinion that bias individuals’ stands on Table 30.2  Topics of Trump’s false and misleading claims Topics immigration foreign policy economy trade jobs Russia taxes health care terrorism biographical records election environment crime guns education

% 12.7 12.0 10.2 10.2 10.1 8.9 7.9 6.8 5.7 3.0 2.8 2.6 1.5 0.7 0.1

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Table 30.3  Sources of Trump’s false or misleading claims Sources remarks Twitter interview prepared speeches campaign rally Facebook news conference statements leaked transcripts

% 31.9 20.7 14.3 12.8 12.7 9.3 6.4 6.1 5.3

public policies toward the views of the sponsors of the misinformation campaign. By August 2018, Trump made 288 false and misleading claims about health care since he became President. The repeal of Obamacare has been among Trump’s top ten election campaign promises and executive priorities (Qiu, 2016). Obamacare was among the issues Trump most often tweeted about, among the subjects that Trump insulted most often, and among the topics he made false claims about most often. Trump’s agenda was reflected in the news coverage. Health care was the second most often covered domestic issue after immigration in news about Trump and his administration during the first 100 days of his presidency (Mitchell and Weisel, 2017). In the 2018 Congressional elections, the cost of health care emerged as the most important issue for the largest percentage of Americans (40%) (Vandermaas-Peeler, 2018). The issue of the health care reform law, or Obamacare, illustrates how diffusion and learning of accurate information is essential for the processes through which citizens in democracy form their opinions about important social issues. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act commonly called the ‘Affordable Care Act (ACA)’, or ‘Obamacare’, was passed in March 2010 without a single Republican vote, and in six years after its enactment, Republicans in Congress voted 62 times (Riotta, 2017) to fully or partially repeal it because, in their view, the law is ‘a job

killer’, ‘insurance premiums will go up’, and ‘the government is coming between you and your doctor’ (Robertson, 2013). In the four years after its passage, the opposition to the ACA law spent a staggering $445 million for 880,000 negative ads, or 15 times more than what was spent on promoting it (Johnson, 2014). Obamacare became the central focus of advertising in the 2014 Congressional elections campaigns with 85% of all anti-Obama ads also being anti-Obamacare ads. Health care was the top issue mentioned in television ads for 2018 US House races with 61% of pro-Democratic airings and 38% of proRepublican airings (Wesleyan Media Project, 2018). In the eight years since the law passed, public support for the law reached its lowest point in 2013 with only 33% of Americans having a favorable opinion of it. The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll registered for the first time in February of 2018 a slim majority of Americans (54%) with favorable opinions of it despite the eight-year-long propaganda campaign that forecasted the collapse of the health law and the Trump administration’s strategy to undermine it (Pear, 2017), Most curious is that in the eight years since the law passed, the percentage of the public that knew that the ACA provides financial help (i.e. subsidies) to low-and moderateincome Americans who do not get coverage through an employer declined by six percentage points while awareness that the law prohibits insurers from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions declined by four percentage points. These declines in knowledge challenge the assumption that in a democracy knowledge is cumulative and might improve over time because citizens have more opportunities to acquire information. Instead, it seems that cross-currents of propaganda may obstruct accumulation of knowledge and open it up to erosion. Knowledge about provisions in the health care law is the most important determinant of support for the law after political party affiliation, with Republicans having significantly lower levels of knowledge than Democrats.4

TRUMPAGANDA: THE WAR ON FACTS, PRESS, AND DEMOCRACY

Left and right might be drifting further apart in their support of the health care law based on how the health care debate is being framed in their preferred news sources. In 2017, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the House Republican repeal bill would cause 23 million people to lose coverage, Fox News focused on attacking the CBO, Democrats, and media. They repeatedly used Trump’s ‘talking point’ that ‘Obamacare is failing’ (Chang, 2017). News outlets with right-leaning audiences cited fewer types of sources in their reporting, offered more positive evaluations of President Trump and his administration, and were less likely to challenge something the president said compared to other outlets (Mitchell and Weisel, 2017). It is tempting to allocate the blame for low levels of knowledge to the lack of motivation and competence of audiences regarding public affairs and their general hostility to public institutions. Alternatively, low levels of knowledge may be the function of weaknesses in the media coverage of social issues and policies in general which focuses more on conflict and struggles between supporters and opponents at the expense of substantive information of what policies do to citizens’ lives. News outlets, across the platforms and the ideological spectrum, frame their coverage of issues around character and leadership rather than policy (Mitchell and Weisel, 2017). Social media may also have contributed to restricting knowledge, especially in feeding preconceptions and spreading rumors and misinformation. Political information therefore does not necessarily contribute to knowledge and may instead confuse audiences and impede learning. The importance of party affiliation in the opinion of the ACA highlights the role of party propaganda, which may also fuel selective exposure to news that confirm pre-existing positions of the audience members. The selectivity in choice of news sources may be more consequential than ever before because of a deeply polarized media

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landscape. The segmentation in news media is typically assessed by partisan or ideological preferences for particular news media outlets based on perception of their objectivity or trustworthiness. Among those who can name an objective news source, the majority of Republicans (60%) name Fox News whereas Democrats name CNN (21%) and NPR (15%). Independents name Fox News (16%), CNN (11%) and NPR (12%). In terms of actual news consumption, a similar pattern emerges with those members of the audience who self-identify as left leaning, using a variety of the most popular news sources such as national TV networks, CNN, and The New York Times. However, those on the right rely almost exclusively on Fox News, its cable network, Fox News Channel (FNC), and Breitbart News (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017, 2017). About half of the right-leaning audiences watch Fox News Channel but only 9% of those who identify with the left watch FNC. The audiences of the New York Times are the mirror image of Fox News audiences with only 7% identifying with the right and about 50% with left. Most Americans say they rely on a mix of liberal and conservative news sources, but about 25% admit to getting news from only one perspective (Knight Foundation, 2018). In the project that mapped preferences for news media outlets based on social media network of links, two poles of the media landscape emerged (Faris et  al., 2017). On the partisan left, the Huffington Post, MSNBC, and Vox are most prominent, whereas on the right, Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and the New York Post are popular across platforms. ABC News, The Hill, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg are treated by social media as centrist and less influential. The greater distance between two poles provides the space for politicians and Trump to attack the media establishment without risking alienating their supporters. Trump’s calling the media ‘fake’ at his rally rants became a cue for the crowd to chant ‘CNN sucks’. By encouraging his supporters

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to direct their anger toward the institution whose role is to hold the power accountable, Trump is engaging in a form of information warfare that creates alternative realities and false enemies to distract from learning about real problems that plague him and his administration.

WAG THE DOG Americans generally acknowledge the importance of the news media’s goal to hold leaders in politics, business, and other institutions accountable for their actions, almost as much as their role in keeping them informed about public affairs. About 83% of Americans think that the news media role in holding the powerful accountable is critical or very important, although they disagree on how well they perform in that role. As a function of their watchdog role over government and government officials, the news media have had contentions relationships with previous American administrations. When Nixon compiled a list of his enemies in the press, he had them audited; he also mounted a campaign to revoke the license of a television station owned by the Washington Post (Mattimore, 2018). In addition to other names, Trump called the mainstream media the ‘enemy of the American people’. The Washington Post reported that, in a July 2018 meeting with Trump, New York Times’ publisher A. G. Sulzberger told Trump that although the phrase ‘fake news’ is untrue and harmful, he is more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people’, and warned him that ‘this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence’. The story about the meeting was reported in most major news outlets as part of a pattern in Trump’s presidency in which ‘the media spend too much time talking about themselves and covering issues they think are important to them or that they want the

American public to focus on’ (Conway, 2017). The work or statements by the news media themselves trigger about 20% of stories about the Trump administration. The news media are increasingly violating one of the most fundamental rules given to beginning journalism students: do not become a part of the story. These news media-driven stories become fodder for the Trump supporters who believe that much of the media is ‘out to get him’ and has discarded any pretense of fairness and objectivity. They also take resources away from covering issues that are perhaps more important to most Americans. If Trump’s attacks on media are indeed strategic, to divert, distract and divide, the strategy is working. There is little attention in the media to the Trump administration’s suppression of information it considers inconvenient and about issues that are affected by that practice. The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen lists instances of defunding programs that collect evidence, stopping studies whose results may run contrary to corporate and extremist interests at the expense of public safety, censoring climate change information, making it harder to find out whether workers have been injured or killed on the job, cutting data from an annual crime report, and watering down the rules for collecting statistics on for-profit colleges (Zibel, 2018). When Trump called the mainstream news media ‘the enemy of the American people’, a phrase used in Stalinist regimes as equivalent to giving a death verdict to citizens with any independent thought, Arizona Senator John McCain commented, ‘That’s how dictators get started’ (Democracy Now, 2017). Autocratic leaders repress the independent media to exert total control over their countries’ political and economic life, deny their own citizens opportunity to improve their circumstances, and maintain their monopoly on power (Repucci and Walker, 2005). In February 2017, Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary at the time, barred several news organizations from an off-camera briefing,

TRUMPAGANDA: THE WAR ON FACTS, PRESS, AND DEMOCRACY

and in July 2018, a CNN correspondent was told she could not attend Trump’s openmedia event in the Rose Garden because of her questioning of the president earlier in the day (Rucker et  al., 2018). Despite privately discussing with aides revoking credentials and denying access to upcoming events and other retaliations against individual journalists, as president, Trump has not stripped any news organization of its credentials at the White House. Reporters have been thrown out of Trump’s presidential campaign rallies (Mayo, 2016), and the president continues to use the anti-news media vitriol to rile up his supporters at rallies to the level that reporters covering them worry about being attacked (Timmons, 2018). Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale, describes Trump’s rhetorical tactics as ‘authoritarian propaganda’ (2016) in which a group of people (in this case the news media) is the cause of all the problems in the world and the solution to all those problems is equally simple – elect the leader who will eliminate the group. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have been noted in his demands that the US Postal Service double the rate charged to Amazon as a vendetta against what he calls the ‘Amazon Washington Post’ and suggested that networks’ licenses should be challenged for the broadcasting of fake news. These tendencies evoke realities of managed democracies such as Russia that perfected techniques of state-sanctioned propaganda achieved by the news media operations characterized by a ‘rejection of balance or objectivity, flaws in media law, self-censorship, government interference and harassment of media outlets, the lack of journalistic professionalism, and an atmosphere of violence against journalists (Oates, 2007: 1279). Trump’s efforts to undermine the credibility of the free news media to attain unchecked power, to create alternate reality, and to spread chaos and confusion in the public sphere seem ripped from the Russian propaganda playbook. They also resemble actions by leaders of Turkey and Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Victor

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Orban, who silenced the independent and critical news media by imposing financial pressures and fines that either forced them out of business or into the hands of their allies (Kingsley, 2018). So far, Trump has not been able to enact his wishes, and Congress has not tried to change the First Amendment or pass new libel laws. However, Trump is leaving his mark on courts by appointing a record number of judges (Gramlich, 2018), and the climate he created can influence state legislatures to undermine some of the journalistic protections.

CONCLUSION Trump’s election victory has been widely described as incredible, unexpected, improbable and unlikely. Just ten days before the 2016 presidential election, only 36% of voters thought that as a president Trump would display good judgment in crises or was honest and trustworthy compared to 50% and 32% respectively who thought the same characteristics apply to Clinton (Newport and Smith, 2016). Trump’s image among voters clearly cannot explain his victory, and there has been little change in Americans’ views of Trump since 2016 (Newport, 2018). What explains the success of Trump’s propaganda? Among the reasons for Trump’s victory was his message of retrograde change (to past conditions when America was great) that mobilized anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-Obama, anti-globalization, and antiWashington sentiments (Jacobson, 2017). His message that was delivered in crass |rhetoric exploited the news media’s appetite for the colorful quote that would restart a news cycle. Every Trump tweet was treated as a breaking news story and every insult made for the screaming headline. By the end of his campaign, most Americans remembered reading, seeing or hearing about Clinton’s emails (Newport and Dugan, 2016). News about the FBI investigation of Clinton’s

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email helped keep the scandal in the public eye, and Trump found a way to dominate the public’s mind by a continuous stream of controversial statements. The news media were also accused of balancing many of Trump’s scandals – including accusations of sexual harassment, his refusal to provide his tax returns, his ties to Putin – with Clinton’s email use. For example, ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd tweeted: ‘Either you care both about Trump being a sexual predator & Clinton emails, or u care about neither. But don’t talk about one without the other’ (Wemple, 2016). So-called ‘he said she said’ reporting may have developed a sense of equivalence in candidates’ bad behavior (Kerr, 2016). Balancing is a basic technique used by journalists to convey an impression of objectivity in their reporting. Objectivity in journalism has been one of the most both glorified and contested principles (American Press Institute, 2019). However, neither collecting facts and throwing them together nor neutrality by balancing is sufficient to reveal the truth. Acknowledging objectivity as a goal rather than achievement, sorting through competing claims, identifying and explaining the underlying assumptions, and making judgments about what audiences need to know to understand issues and events may be essential steps in redefining the concept of objectivity and rebuilding journalistic credibility (Cunningham, 2003). In the digital age, when both facts and opinions are plentiful and easily accessible, greater depth and context are sorely missing (Harkin, 2019). Since the 2016 election, the news media have found new preoccupations with defending themselves against Trump’s intensified attacks on the messenger and engaging in counterpropaganda. Unwittingly, the news media are again complicit in distracting audiences from finding the truth by focusing on what Trump says rather than on what business and financial interests that propelled him to his victory do to benefit citizens’ lives. Trump and his administration continue to lie

and misinform the public about their policies, but the coverage of those policies in the news media continues to be sparse and lacking in specifics. As a result, the public may lack necessary knowledge to make informed decisions about important issues. Trump and his administration’s lies are more diligently exposed through the proliferation of various fact checking services, but it is questionable as to how much the oft-repeated lies can be corrected once they enter public consciousness (Fazio et  al., 2015). Mostly affiliated with the mainstream media, the fact-checking industry has the same credibility problem as its sponsoring organizations. Conservative publications allege partisan bias and use negative modifiers to describe fact-checking such as non-factual, whereas liberal publications use them to highlight candidate’s track record, and label them as Pulitzer Prize-winning, independent, and nonpartisan (Iannucci and Adair, 2017). Low and declining levels of public knowledge, and the conflation between knowledge and opinion in the form of ‘alternative’ facts, are much more serious threats to the health of democracy than Trump’s authoritarian tendencies that are ultimately kept in check with the constitutional protections of press rights. Journalists believe that their most important roles are to report things as they are (98%), to educate the audience (93%), to provide information people need to make political decisions (89%), and to monitor and scrutinize political leaders (86%) (Worlds of Journalism Study, 2016), and their priorities closely match public’s views. Their work is often constrained by profit imperatives of news organizations and demands of commercialism (Pickard, 2018). The local TV and newspapers industry revenues that mostly come from advertising are in decline (Barthel, 2017) which causes cutbacks in staff and newsroom operations. Newsroom employment declined by 23% between 2008 and 2017, with the largest decline in the newspaper sector (45%) (Grieco, 2018). Faced with shrinking resources, editors are most

TRUMPAGANDA: THE WAR ON FACTS, PRESS, AND DEMOCRACY

likely to eliminate or reduce costly and timeconsuming investigative projects that have been traditionally directed toward exposing government corruption, illegal business practices, and other wrongdoings. The New York Times announced in 2017 that it was restructuring its copy-editing operations and reducing layers of editing and copy-editing staff. In response, more than 450 employees staged a newsroom walkout (Bloomgarden-Smoke, 2017) in support of copy editors who check facts, grammar and style, and who are seen as reporters’ safety nets. More errors in the news reporting makes news media more vulnerable to accusations of ‘fake news’. About 35% of Americans think that journalists reporting stories before they check all their facts and sources to be sure they are accurate always represent ‘fake news’ (Knight Foundation, 2018). The root cause of many news media weaknesses and failures is structural in nature, and those structures give opportunity for propaganda to exploit and grow.

Notes 1 I thank Dr. Nancy Snow for suggesting the term “Trumpaganda’’. 2  TF-IDF indicates the frequency of a word adjusted for how rarely it is used across a collection of documents, or corpus. It measures how important a word is to a document in a corpus. If the word occurs commonly and equally across documents in the corpus, it is not important. 3  The Institute for Propaganda Analysis identified seven common propaganda devices called ‘name calling’, ‘glittering generalities’, ‘transfer’, ‘testimonial’, ‘plain folks’, ‘card stacking’, and ‘band wagon’. 4  The results are based on Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll conducted March 6 to 12, 2017. The strong positive relationships between levels of knowledge and support for the law persists after the person’s party identification, age, gender, education, and income are accounted for. Knowledge accounts for 7% of variation in the ACA opinions beyond demographics, a statistically significant amount, but the opinion of the ACA is largely driven by political party affiliation (82%). The importance of party affiliation in the opinion of the ACA highlights the role of party propaganda. Republicans are likely to have lower levels of knowledge about the ACA compared to Democrats.

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Women and more educated people are more likely to have favorable opinions of the ACA, whereas high income, older people, and Republicans are more likely to have unfavorable opinions of the ACA.The results are based on multiple regression analyses that are not shown but are available upon request. After simultaneously controlling for all six variables in regression equation, only the effects of Party ID and knowledge remained significant.

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31 LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes Emma L Briant

INTRODUCTION In the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) on 23rd June 2016, a small majority (52%) of eligible voters voted to leave, confounding expectations of most pollsters and political commentators. It was a dirty fight. Public inquiries, academic research and journalists raised concerns about the strategic use of misleading and provocative racist messaging, data misuse and improper and undeclared funding by the official ‘Vote Leave’ (VL) and unofficial ‘Leave.EU’ (L.EU) campaigns. This was accompanied by a worrying rise in hate crime (de FreytasTamura, 2017) including a Far-right terrorist attack, mobilization of the far right within the Brexit movement also paralleled and provided momentum for similar rightwing populist movements taking place in the United States and Europe. Attempts to explain these events largely focus on leave voters: public opinion, voting behaviour and

demographics. But the centrality of highprofile, extreme-right figures, their relationship to wealthy international elites, their interrelated propaganda and economic strategies which aimed to influence Britain’s economic policy and relationship with Europe by leveraging anti-immigration and racist or nativist narratives and the failure of mainstream politicians and media to adequately challenge their rise need fuller examination. Far-right figures, enabled by those seeking greater economic liberalization, obtained more mainstream platforms and made their priorities an important public issue in Britain amid mainstream policymakers’ convergent interests and complacency. This chapter will give important background on economic and socio-­political drivers underlying the Brexit vote and analyse how Far-right-led L.EU campaign strategy success was underpinned by free market elites and aided by the services of a ­company linked to white nationalist Steve Bannon: Cambridge Analytica (CA). The chapter,

LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes

after a brief explanation of the economic and socio-political backdrop, examines underlying motivations behind campaign leaders and their rule breaking, alliances and misleading, coldly calculated, antiimmigrant messaging to achieve the leave result by mobilizing racism. This draws on documents and academic interviews conducted with executives from L.EU and CA which I submitted as evidence to the UK Parliament’s Fake News Inquiry (Briant, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). The author was requested to write a chapter on Far-right propaganda and chose to examine its role within the context of ‘Brexit’. The far right were only really on one side of the ‘Brexit’ referendum. A full comparative examination of propaganda by both Remain and Leave campaigns is not this chapter’s intent and would be outside its scope. Far-right involvement was primarily channelled through L.EU, which is therefore its central focus. However, this research revealed common financial interests between key figures involved in L.EU and those behind the mainstream Vote Leave campaign along with strong parallels in themes and strategies of propaganda, which is relevant to understanding L.EU. The chapter argues that financial drivers were central in understanding both campaigns’ motives for anti-immigration propaganda. It argues that the public mythmaking, manipulation, fearmongering and deceits which advanced ethno-nationalist ideology via the L.EU campaign were driven by similar patterns of economic self-interest and free market ideologies seeking a tax environment which favours the wealthy. The author rejects dry, detached academic language in this chapter as it is felt that this would hedge away from the important facts presented: that the Leave campaigns committed criminal acts and actively, serially and demonstrably lied; and that, thus, Britain’s exit from Europe, the most significant event shaping Britain’s future since World War Two, was achieved using illicit means.

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AUSTERITY AND MIGRANT SCAPEGOATS Europe was hit hard by the global recession in 2008, particularly Greece, Spain and Portugal. The significance of that financial crisis in shaping the landscape for Brexit is notable. While many economists emphasized a need for Keynesian responses (Stiglitz, 2008; Whitham, 2017; Wolf, 2008), the UK Conservative-led Coalition implemented austerity cuts instead. Despite unprecedented transfer to the wealthiest citizens and bonuses to the banks (Bennett, 2014), the OECD solutions to what was characterized as a ‘growing welfare burden’ were imposing new financial regimes based in neo-liberal economics targeting society’s poorest, who were blamed for impeding the global recovery. Austerity compounded the effects of globalization, which exacerbated regional disparities in wealth and productivity within OECD countries during a time when the gap between the rich and poor increased (The Economist, 2017). From 2013, increasing numbers of refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan were risking dangers to travel across the Mediterranean, leading to repeated highprofile tragedies as overcrowded boats capsized. The refugee crisis reached 63.91M forced migrants including refugees and asylum seekers by 2015 according to UNHCR catastrophic proportions, though the majority of refugees (around 80%) still remained in developing countries (Beauchamp, 2017). Categories of migrants are frequently conflated in the mass media and differences are poorly understood by the public (Philo et al., 2013). In Blinder and Richards’ (2019) public opinion surveys, between 2001 and 2016, ‘immigration’ is repeatedly reported as Britain’s ‘most important issue’. EU-born individuals were only 5.7% of the population in the UK in 2017 (comprising 8.5% of the British workforce) (Vargas-Silva, 2018), migration became a central issue but one widely misunderstood. While some

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indicators show hostility softening, 58% in 2017 continued to want immigration reduced (Blinder and Richards, 2019). After the financial crisis, resentment from austerity cuts was channelled toward the weakest in society and on BBC broadcast news, discussions of the deficit in 2009 were dominated by political and financial elites retrenching austerity policies despite their limited record of success during recessions (Berry, 2016) and evidence they exacerbate inequality and associated social problems (Thomas et al., 2010; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Unpopular deep cuts to public spending were implemented using stigmatizing rhetoric to mark out a deserving and undeserving poor, the latter including migrants and other marginalized groups (Afoko and Vockins, 2013; Briant et  al., 2013; Philo et al., 2013). In Bad News for Refugees (Philo et al., 2013), we found that in 2011, despite the fact asylum to the UK had actually fallen and remained stable since 2002, press and broadcast media still portrayed those coming to Britain fleeing conflict with hostility, as a threat needing more ‘control’. Media coverage was relentlessly negative to refugees and lacking essential global context: Britain’s responsibility for the foreign policy and economic drivers of migration and refugee hardships and positive stories were rare or absent (Philo et  al., 2013: 121–130). Scapegoats were underscored with misleading statistics and disaster language such as ‘flooding in’ (Philo et al., 2013). While local reporting was more accurate and less hostile (Philo et al 2013), it was declining in the regions where leave won (Seaton, 2016). Berry et al. (2016) compared 2014–2015 press coverage of the refugee crisis from Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the UK and found British coverage the most hostile. This is despite Britain being less directly impacted, taking comparatively low numbers of refugees (Nardelli and Arnett, 2015). The portrayal of refugees as a burden on Britain, likely influenced by the economic crisis, was a heightened theme in our 2011 press sample (Philo

et  al., 2013: 109). The theme of migrant ‘burden’ reflected the agenda-setting role of Government voices and pressure groups and echoes the City of London framing of the problem of the financial crisis with austerity cuts as solution (Berry, 2013, 2016; Manning, 2013, Philo, 2012). During this period of extraordinary economic hardship, the Farright UK Independence Party (UKIP) support increased dramatically (Fetzer, 2018). Support for Far-right populists in addition to economic insecurity reacts ‘against cultural changes that threaten the worldview of once-predominant sectors of the population’ by harnessing racism (Inglehart and Norris, 2016). UKIP’s power was its founder Nigel Farage’s ‘bloke you can have a pint with’ faux everyman authenticity, making Far-right extremists more acceptable for TV. Academic literature suggests that leave supporting areas and voters were those most acutely affected by austerity – areas with weaker economic structure, deprivation, limited employment prospects and lower levels of educational attainment, income and life satisfaction, combined with ageing demographics (Becker et al., 2017; Goodwin and Heath, 2016; Hobolt, 2016). Examining the impact of austerity on support for UKIP and leave voting, Fetzer (2018: 1) found that ‘the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms’ which ‘activated existing economic grievances’ and grew UKIP ‘in areas with significant exposure to specific benefit cuts, after these became effective’ and worsened inequality (Fetzer, 2018: 3). Clarke et al., (2017) show that sovereignty and immigration control arguments were already embedded in public opinion, and people they characterize as ‘left behind’ perceived Brexit as less risky and themselves as having less to lose. Both Leave and Remain had similar levels of knowledge of the EU and were more likely to possess more knowledge ideologically convenient to their view (Carl et  al., 2019). However, there are low levels of overall public

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knowledge of migration; in 2015 British people were shown to have the lowest average knowledge of the EU out of all 28 member states (Hix, 2015). Importantly, ‘news consumption is more unequally distributed in the UK than income is – this is true offline, and even more so online’ (Kalogeropoulos and Kleis Nielsen, 2018). Echo chambers exist across all social media to varying degrees (Nikolov et  al., 2018: 17) but lower socialeconomic-level online media users use significantly fewer online sources on average (Kalogeropoulos and Kleis Nielsen, 2018). Media misrepresentation of an issue is particularly important if such coverage is shaping, rather than reflecting, public opinion given the small margin of the Leave vote and adverse societal costs. Murphy and Devine (2018) show that over time (2004–2017), ‘media coverage drives party support for UKIP’ but no evidence that it was popular support that increased their media coverage. Far-right propaganda campaigns aim to capture mainstream media and political discourse; Ellinas (2010: 32–3) states that their ‘movements might be doomed to political irrelevance and relegated to the margins of political discourse’ without the media. Immigration long received misleading and overwhelmingly hostile mainstream media coverage in the UK driven by an over-reliance on politicians’ and official voices and rightwing pressure groups during a period of economic strain (Berry et al., 2016; Murphy and Devine, 2018; Philo et  al., 2013). Multiple studies (e.g., Davey and Ebner, 2017 and Phillips, 2018) have shown that Far-right groups launder hate speech through mainstream journalism, hijacking coverage and exploiting predictable patterns of reporting. Phillips (2018: 7) found: just by showing up for work and doing their jobs as assigned, journalists covering the Far-right fringe … played directly into these groups’ public relations interests.

Mainstream media over-reporting of UKIP as compared to other similar sized parties

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of the left and right raised leader Nigel Farage’s profile ahead of the referendum (Goodwin and Ford, 2013; Soussi, 2014; Stevenson, 2014). Particularly after 9/11, anti-immigration arguments became prominent in UK media as well policy debates of EU expansion, counter-terror wars, the economic crisis and the resulting migration flows and humanitarian crises, helping increase the strength of UKIP. Fekete (2018) shows how the discourse of Far-right groups has converged with those of mainstream parliamentary politicians, highlighting a relationship between violent racist acts and the rhetoric of the right-wing press. She argues that, from intelligence operations and covert policing to austerity policies, racialized insecurities have been used to enable the progressive collusion and violence of the state. After the Financial crisis, governments placed the burden of economic cuts on the poorest in society, systematically taking advantage of well-worn scapegoats such as migrants. While media impacts on public opinion are important, as right-wing media and campaigns drive fears of immigration, they also press demands for action and ‘control’ from more ‘moderate’ politicians. Policymakers across the political spectrum can be sensitive to such pressure – despite evidence that these demands persist when immigration levels decline (Philo et al., 2013).

THE SWEETENERS Competing interests behind this pressure also demand examination.1 Right-wing politicians and private elites’ efforts to make Eurosceptic and anti-immigration arguments more mainstream preceded the referendum. Yet it is important how those seeking free market-oriented policy stances set agendas and made anti-EU and anti-immigration arguments more convenient, or profitable, even among politicians less convinced by

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Euroscepticism. The significant Eurosceptic influencer Michael Ashcroft (Conservative Party Treasurer 1998–2001, Deputy Chairman 2005–10) is one of the biggest donors to the Conservative Party in the UK and financially supported Cameron’s Prime Ministerial campaign, before pressuring his Coalition to move policies on Europe, welfare, taxation and education to the right (Oborne, 2012). With a net worth of $1.7Bn, he remained resident in Belize for tax purposes and sought to ensure Conservative politicians benefited from maintaining a friendly tax environment. Ashcroft is skilled not only in the fields of business, finance and politics, but also in the process of moving money from companies in ways that obscure donations. As he implemented austerity policies, Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) was happy to use anti-immigration rhetoric (declaring that ‘For too long, immigration has been too high’, blaming immigrants for failing to integrate and damaging communities). Confident of pressuring the EU into giving Britain an advantageous position, and expecting a Remain win, Cameron announced the referendum in 2013. Current Prime Minister Theresa May, though she argued for Remain, as Home Secretary, took stances against migrants and refugees, adopting the ‘hostile environment’ policy and ultimately took the country toward Brexit (Kirkup, 2012). Ellinas (2010) argues Far-right strength depends both on how much space mainstream parties allow them and how the media respond – particularly whether they confer them legitimacy. I would argue both are influenced by how successfully extreme influencers are able to economically capture mainstream politics. Even L.EU faux ‘everyman’ populists like Farage and funder Arron Banks sought above all else to enhance their economic power, using immigration and racism as a tool. A referendum ensures unholy alliances of elites, with varied motivations – working an issue-driven campaign necessitates unusual operational alliances between

politicians of left, centre and right. While the interests of key Conservative Party elites were central in VL and L.EU, politicians across the political spectrum endorsed leave. VL – the official Leave campaign – were primarily right-wing Conservative leaders including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox and Daniel Hannan and a lone UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell. A few Labour MPs, including Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart and Frank Field, were also part of the campaign. While some leaders were ideological ‘believers’ in Far-right nationalisms, the referendum created circumstances for their interests to coincide with those of enablers: ideological or pragmatic attempts to further extend free trade, roll back the state and benefit from self-interested economic advancement, to a greater or lesser extent all endorsing or complicit in deeply divisive tactics to sway the vote to leave. Efforts to create a political environment conducive to ‘Brexit’ not only extended austerity policies but also reinforced the elites’ economic foundations. For example, the US sugar industry lobbies for free trade and Euroscepticism. Tate and Lyle, owned by American Sugar Refining (ASR), was one of the biggest Leave supporting companies, it enjoys ‘indulgent tax benefits offered by [Michael] Ashcroft’s Bank of Belize’ (Cohen, 2000). The L.EU campaign was fronted by Nigel Farage and founded by Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore (then a trade emissary for the Belize High Commission in London) and Richard Tice during a meeting with Ashcroft in Belize in July 2015. ASR hoped Brexit would remove EU protections afforded to its rival British Sugar, so Tate and Lyle financially sponsored the Conservative Party conference in 2016. David Davis MP, previously Senior Executive for Tate and Lyle, became a Leave campaigner and then Brexit secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet between 2016 and 2018. The UK has no tariffs on Belizean sugar so Brexit benefits American Sugar and Conservative Party members, not Belizean farmers. Furthermore, Arron Banks’ father

LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes

was awarded an OBE in 2002 for running African sugar plantations (The Guardian, 2002), and Gerry Gunster, L.EU strategist, has strong PR and lobbying business relationships to the US sugar industry. Steve Bannon met Farage in 2013, becoming friends as he extended Breitbart News (white nationalist news network) across the United States and Europe and drove new digital analytics company CA. CA’s largest shareholder was American billionaire Robert Mercer (also a major funder of Breitbart News). Their ambitions were a global political movement, seeking CA to work not just with L.EU, but also Aternative fur Deutchland and the Front National. Arron Banks obscures his finances (Harding, 2016); he ploughed £1M into UKIP in 2014 (Cadwalladr and Jukes, 2018) but questions remain over whether he exaggerated personal wealth and obtained his £9m L.EU donation from foreign sources. He repeatedly met with Russian officials about investments (Cadwalladr and Jukes, 8th July 2018) and passed Trump Team phone numbers to Russian Ambassador Yakovenko (Merrick, 2018). Show Banks attempting to raise what could have potentially been illegal US funding for L.EU. Banks has denied any foreign funding went to the LeaveEU campaign (Geoghegan, 17 November 2018).2 There are presently two investigations by the National Crime Agency (which investigates serious and organized crime), three by the Met police, multiple by the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Serious Fraud Office examining Arron Banks and ties to Russia. The Conservative Party itself has received £3M from Russian-linked oligarchs since 2010 (Busby, 2018) and there have been suggestions that this has influenced policy and advice (Freedland, 2014). Prime Minister Theresa May, whose election was supported by Ashcroft (Bowers, 2016a), avoided questions from MPs about ‘whether she or any other minister had ever declined a request from the security services to conduct an investigation’ into Banks’s money and relationship with Russia while Home Secretary (Sabbagh, 2018).

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Following my evidence, the Electoral Commission (EC) investigated a possible L.EU undeclared receipt of services from CA. Banks was seeking funding from ‘antiGlobalist’ Americans: ‘come up with a strategy for fund raising in the states and engaging companies and special interest groups that might be affected by TTIP’ (Briant, 2018c). Former investment banker Bannon is not just an ideological strategist, he has a ‘reported net worth of about $50m (£40m)’ from media and real estate (Lewis and Rankin, 2018). While he downplayed his role in Brexit (Glancy, 2018), US influence was integral, and Bannon was included in L.EU planning early, in October 2015 (Briant, 2018c). Ashcroft stood also to benefit from Trump’s change of business environment in the United States – when he was blacklisted by US tax authorities in 2015, the value of deposits at his Belize Bank International shrank by 75% in six months (Bowers, 2016b). With CA’s help, Leave.EU and the Trump campaigns parallel strategies reshaped the tax environment markedly. Brexit helped CA initially drive its own business; as CEO of CA’s parent company SCL Group, Nigel Oakes told me business partner Alexander Nix boasted about Brexit because ‘this is what has encouraged people to still come to us’ – capitalizing on the ‘dirty tricks’ image to get unethical contracts (Briant, 16th April 2018a). Ashcroft’s polling system by May 2015 had surveyed more than 252,000 Britons (Hartman, 2015) and L.EU’s team had significant insight into potentialities of data for both propaganda and financial purposes. On election day, Sky News showed a YouGov poll predicting the win for remain while former commodities broker Nigel Farage gave a concession statement. He denied Bloomberg’s claim he had ‘information suggesting his side had actually won’. But Farage’s pollster, advisor and friend Damian Lyons-Lowe’s company, Survation (used by L.EU), sold data showing leave won, placing multiple clients (Farage friends) in a position to short sell – at least 12 hedge funds made ‘hundreds

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of millions of dollars’ (Simpson et al, 2018). Pollsters sold hedge funds ‘critical, advance information’ not available publicly, placing them in a position to ‘earn fortunes by short selling the British pound’, a matter being investigated by the FCA (FT.com, 2018). Arron Banks has told parliament ‘We did not use Cambridge Analytica’ (Banks & Wigmore, 12 June 2018). While the Electoral Commission fined LeaveEU £70k for electoral law breaches, they found no evidence of LeaveEU received donations or paid-for services from CA for the referendum campaign and concluded CA only did ‘initial scoping work’ (Weaver, & Waterson, 11 May 2018). The Met police said they would take no further action for spending offences, despite LeaveEU law-breaking, because they had ‘insufficient evidence’ to investigate further questions (Pegg, 13 September 2019). Britain is left seeking explanation for questions not fully answered, which I argue here require further investigation. Further financial motivations emerged in an interview with L.EU Communication Director Andy Wigmore – he and Banks used Brexit to

build enhanced analytics in the insurance industry. Banks’ Eldon Insurance employees deployed CA’s L.EU twin-pronged plan using insurance company staff (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017). This they later denied. Claiming they couldn’t do CA’s artificial intelligence because they didn’t have an ‘official campaign’ designation, Wigmore said CA’s AI, requires: electoral roll data which you can then use […] Because Cambridge Analytica artificial intelligence requires data – if you don’t have it, you can’t do it. (Interview: Wigmore, 2017)

But L.EU had obtained hundreds of UK Electoral Registers (Geoghegan and Corderoy, 2018). Wigmore also boasted you have a lot of data when you’re an insurer. And that data is, it’s, there’s layers and layers and layers. You know, you have, um, ah, lifestyle data, of course you do. You have, um, credit check data which of course you do. All that data you put that together, the way you can actually then make risk against an individual is incredibly strong. (Interview: Wigmore/Briant, 2017).

Communities affected by Brexit are also ‘high risk’ for insurance, so ‘complementary workstreams’ allowed Banks to develop

Figure 31.1  Taken in the Goddard-Gunster Boardroom ‘Celebration of the 45th Presidential Inauguration with Nigel Farage’ event was ‘Sponsored by LeaveEU’

LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes

algorithms evaluating risk for insurance, then adapt this effort for a new US Health Insurance venture, ‘Big Data Dolphins’: So that in artificial intelligence terms is the holy grail in insurance. So that was a by-product of what we discovered [during Brexit], brilliantly. And that’s all about data. That is all about data. So um, that was- that was the upshot. So we’ve set this up in Mississippi. It’s been going for nine months, we’ve been testing for twelve months now, testing all the insurance against it and it’s extraordinary. (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017)

Insurance was central from the beginning of CA discussions (Briant, 2018c). The ICO (2018: 5) faced obstructiveness in investigating whether British data was moved to Mississippi.3 L.EU were fined for data crimes related to the insurance company, the ICO said they had a ‘disturbing disregard for voters’ personal privacy,’ yet later reduced an already small fine from £135,000 to £120,000 (BBC Politics, 1 February 2019). AI insurance proved to be so lucrative the fine is laughable: ‘Massive. Massive. Our loss ratios have dropped by about 13–14 per cent. And in- in insurance terms that’s millions of pounds. Millions’ (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017). Ultimately Brexit could ‘break-up’ the NHS (the biggest global market for pharmaceuticals); May refused to rule out its inclusion in US trade deals (Embury-Dennis, 2018). A weakened, privatized, post-Brexit NHS could bring lucrative markets for insurance companies.

THE CAMPAIGN This story wouldn’t move the vote. Austerity laid cultural foundations for handy scapegoats that could be deployed by L.EU architects, who fetishized manipulation tools, power and influence, in abstraction. Andy Wigmore, for example, drew a parallel to the Brexit campaign from Goebbels’ propaganda strategy which he thought had value in a ‘pure marketing sense’, if you can forget about the Genocide: ‘the propaganda machine of the …Nazis for instance, if you take away all the hideous horror, all that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way

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they managed to do what they did. In its pure marketing sense you – oh ok! You can see the logic of how they presented things and the imagery’ (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017)

Scholars often argue that ‘fake news’ or propaganda is not new (Bernal, 2018; Coles, 2018; McNair, 2017). More recent is the application of big data behind a cold, racially driven strategy targeting extreme messages at personalities who would find them most triggering. Many companies use ‘psychographic’ targeting based on personality tests, but it is crucial what tests are applied, with what data, in what ways to obtain what effect? CA’s parent company SCL Group had roots in the defense industry developing expertise in applying Human Intelligence to information warfare (Interview: Oakes, 24th November 2017). The ICO (2018: 39) ­concluded that: Dr Kogan and his company GSR were able to harvest the data of up to 87 million people worldwide, without their knowledge… A subset of this data was later shared with other organizations, including CA. We found that the personal information of at least one million UK users was among the harvested data and consequently put at risk of further misuse.

Aleksandr Kogan worked on Russian government grants during this period with business partner Joseph Chancellor, who later worked for Facebook. Kogan researched the utilities of ‘dark triad’ pathologies such as psychopathy for messaging. Their app ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ obtained data fundamental to developing CA and SCL Group tools and training algorithms. Facebook failed to prevent such abuse and repeatedly facilitated it. Its claims to be addressing foreign interference, trolls and fake content (Pietri, 2018; Frier, 2018) were shallow and short-lived, and Facebook hired Republican firm ‘Definers’ to actively aid anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros after his criticism of the company (Facebook, 2018b). The ICO are still investigating AggregateIQ, the Canadian data company who spent $2m on Brexitrelated ads for VL. Chris Vickery (2018) highlighted a possible database link between Aggregate IQ, the company who worked for

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VL, and an individual in Russia who may have ties to Russian mafia.4 CA were introduced to L.EU by their Vice-President Steve Bannon and produced a strategy during what Arron Banks called ‘stage 1’ of L.EU’s two part campaign.5 L.EU Communication Director Andy Wigmore’s statements have been inconsistent, but he told me ‘we copied it’ (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017) and L.EU strategist Gerry Gunster6 confirmed that CA ‘were involved early on, they sort of gave a bit of a backbone on how to do behavioral targeting and microtargeting…’, and ‘they provided some backbone for how to do [psychographic targeting] and then a lot of it was just kind of handed over to the campaign staff’ (Interview: Gunster, 4th October 2017).7 L.EU increasingly copied Bannon’s tactics, Wigmore admitted that, ‘in July, August [2016] we were actually monitoring Trump’; he said: ‘we started sending out some of the most outrageously provocative tweets and they were all immigration-led’. He also said: ‘when it comes to the bad stuff we totally took the Trump rule book and tried to apply it here’… ‘It was literally who are we gonna pick on today?’ (Stourton, 2016). CEO of CA parent company SCL Group, Nigel Oakes glowed about how the Trump campaign had the ‘balls’ to leverage a Muslim ‘artificial enemy’ similar to Hitler’s propaganda against Jews (Briant, 16th April 2018a). Wigmore said they copied Trump tactics to drive mainstream media publicity. Negative or not, amplification was all that mattered: AW: The only way we were going to get – make a noise, was to follow the Trump Doctrine which was, the more outrageous we are, the more attention we get and the more attention we get, the more outrageous we’ll be. And that’s exactly what we did. So our tiles were provocative and they were designed to be provocative and they got the attention. The amount of bollockings that we got. EB: So you were copying Trump campaign? AW: Completely, completely, completely. (Interview: Wigmore, 4th October 2017)

Klein and Muis (2018) observe that the form that Far-right mobilization takes is ‘shaped

by political opportunities’. Examining Facebook, their comparative study shows that the presence of an offline Far-right party, such as UKIP, leads to that party addressing the political establishment and shaping its online discourse around these objectives. Pressure is placed the public, but also on centrist policymakers by media invocations of what ‘public opinion’ is calling for, when in fact the dominance of this narrative may have resulted from mainstream media capture. Policymakers themselves are indirectly targeted by such messaging (Patrick, 2018).

PARALLELS: VOTE LEAVE AND LEAVEEU Cultural and economic anxiety were both important and deliberate Leave campaign levers.8 Virdee and McGeever (2018) note that the Leave campaign leveraged a politicized ‘Englishness’ through parallel visions: firstly, an ‘imperial longing to restore Britain’s place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist subjugation’. Secondly, the ‘narrative of island retreat from a “globalizing” world’ that is not recognized as ‘British’ (Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1802). A full comparison of VL and L.EU is beyond the chapter’s scope, however, there were important commonalities, both in rule-breaking and messaging themes. Arguments were often made, to legitimate the VL campaign, that it emphasized economic arguments or sovereignty, not racism. But these claims are hollow, one TV ad aired in May and June used imagery centring on hospitals overcrowded by foreign patients elbowing an elderly person away. The ad claimed the NHS was at ‘breaking point’. It illustrated influxes of millions of migrants from Balkan countries and Turkey (not an EU member) using arrows (Facebook, 3rd June 2016), a graphic reminiscent of imagery used to ­represent British homeland defence against

LeaveEU: Dark Money, Dark Ads and Data Crimes

Nazi invasion in the popular 1970’s patriotic series, ‘Dad’s Army’ (Jit-a-bugs productions first animation, 24th May 2008). Threatening militaristic graphics and their message appealed to white older British and more socially conservative audiences, audiences L.EU also sought to reach. Content analysis reveals 61 of a total 201 still images of Facebook Ads and videos shared by VL overtly reference immigration (or border control) (Facebook, 27th July 2018). Other themes such as ‘£350 million a week for the NHS’ were also prominent. Immigration was a more central theme than even the VL slogan ‘Take back control’ – ‘control’, mentioned a mere 46 times in this sample (Facebook, 2018a). The term ‘control’ is often present in mainstream media debates of immigration that emphasize threat (See Philo et al., 2013). VL Campaign Director Dominic Cummings later stated, ‘Would we have won without immigration? No’ (Cummings, 2017). He stated the ‘number of ‘impressions’ served by VL digital communications was ‘1.5 billion of which Facebook was about 1B’ and their distribution occurred largely in the final days of the campaign, likely including dark ads.9 A similar sample of 60 screengrabs10 of static ads were taken from the L.EU site

posted during 23rd May to 23rd June 2016, 13 of these static screengrabs discussed immigration, 11 mentioned ‘control’ and one was a critique of George Soros. They included the UKIP ‘breaking point’ billboard, a racialized image depicting Syrian refugees which implied they were marching toward the UK (LeaveEU, 16th June 2016) Fake news shared by L.EU (2016) included a video montage which presents decontextualized violent clips from European protests and riots giving a sense of chaos, leading to the final video centrepiece: a doctored video originally from Tahrir Square in June 30th 2013 (Daily News Egypt, 2013), mis-labelled to induce fear of Europe as ‘Migrants drag women into subway in Germany’ (first identified by Anti-Leave blog ‘BrexitBalls.com’, 5th November 2018). Racism was largely overt and substantial overlaps occur, with themes in L.EU such as with the ‘breaking point’ language also used in a VL video.

CASE STUDY: JO COX A week before the referendum, on 16th June 2016, Thomas Mair, who had links to Farright groups, brutally murdered Labour MP

Figure 31.2  Graph showing VL Daily Total Facebook Ad Impressions Source: Dominic Cummings’ Evidence (9th January 2017)

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Jo Cox. It is hard to know why individuals progress to extreme Far-right beliefs, or from these to violence. Far-right radicalization occurs in different ways, however, internet communities have undoubtedly played an important role and, as is argued on the website Bellingcat, ‘new converts inevitably go online to deepen their beliefs’ – encountering more acceptable and normalized Far-right voices before moving to for example, 4chan or YouTube ideologue Sargon of Akkad (Evans, 2018). Often in contrast with other forms of terrorism, Far-right terrorists are explained away as mentally ill in the media or political discourse. Stampnitzky (2018) argues this ‘is broadly rejected by experts on political violence – so why does it persist? When the perpetrator is right-wing, it distances those politics from violence. When they are ‘other’, it serves to delegitimate any politics they may have at all’.. Considering the increase in hate crimes ‘of nearly 30 percent and the largest year-to-year rise in the five years’ during the Brexit campaign, it is prescient to examine Leave campaign tactics (de Freytas-Tamura, 2017). Andy Wigmore explained that L.EU could see their strategy was having a negative impact and ‘created a wave of hatred and um, racism and all this right movement, empowering all those things’. When Jo Cox MP was stabbed, he saw parallels with the spread of emboldened racism in the US: [Nigel Farage] said, right, if we keep immigration at the top of the debate, his instinct said we would win. And the reason why we polled so much because we were so unsure constantly if we were doing the right thing, particularly when you have horrific incidents like Jo Cox. And you think wahhh that’s too much. And then the blame from the media: immigration, you’ve created a … wave of hatred and um, racism and all this right movement, empowering – all those things, which, you know, Trump’s experienced as well. We were very wahhh, maybe we have gone too far. (Interview: Wigmore/Briant, 4th October 2017).

However, this question did not, for L.EU, become a question of ethics and morality,

personal responsibility, or indeed national security: The only thing we can do to test that is take a look how, what the reaction… The London here is a very different country to the rest of the country. So, out there in the places where, where, you know, people were – had different …reasons to the London – the Jo Cox thing was sad, dreadful, but it didn’t change their views. There was no shift on the dial as they call it. […] So everything was going well up to that point. Even Nigel thought that was it, we’ve lost. And, um. The breaking point poster which remember we cooked up, he put up. Again, everything we did was tested’. (Interview: Wigmore/Briant, 4th October 2017).

The interview shows that although L.EU recognized the negative social impact of their campaign, their actions were to assess only whether it was impacting their popularity with supporters, whether the message was ‘working’ – mobilizing supporters. All that mattered was effectiveness by this metric, knowledge that they were having a negative impact on the country’s domestic security by emboldening racists and the Far-right and stirring up tensions was dismissed. Displaying similar coldness, VL breached an agreement to suspend campaigning during the period out of respect following Jo Cox’s death, continuing their own racist campaign (Cadwalladr and Helm, 2018). L.EU sought to engage emotions, not facts, with the most provocative content and manipulative methods they could harness. They further sought to make the emotions they created seem spontaneous and pre-­ existing in the population. Their interests lay in deflecting away from the actions they took to create and excite those emotions to a level where suppressed racism and implicit bias turned into explicit and expressed racism. An argument which arose several times in interviews was that public desire was given voice through the campaign, giving voters what they already wanted. This framing allowed L.EU to create and reinforce – despite dark money11 and manipulative methods – the illusion of consent, of a fairly won campaign embodying

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democratic will. But evidence from Murphy and Devine (2018) shows such campaigns, and the media amplification of them, drives Far-right membership rather than echoing public sentiment.

CONCLUSION In combination with unaddressed economic inequality, new environmental pressures heighten the scarcity of resources, existing resentments and continuing conflict into our future, not to mention resulting disease, health and poverty-related emergencies. Climate change and its accompanying environmental disasters are compounding the effects of irresponsible foreign policies of our past, of colonialism, economic exploitation, corruption and proxy wars. These ­disasters – our actions – are only expected to worsen the unprecedented forced migration we see. Steve Bannon is now funding ‘The Movement’ – a European operation launched in London to provide nativist and ultra-­ conservative European parties ‘free access to specialized polling data, analytics, social media advice and help with candidate selection’ (Lewis and Rankin, 2018). As the refugee crisis deepens, we are faced with the future threat of economic crises in the UK and EU resulting from Brexit, which the Farright could further exploit to drive their agenda. Government responses are retrenching counter-extremist propaganda and Facebook ad buys as loss of ‘media control’ is lamented (McTague, 2018). Freedman argues that in responding, however, the Farright itself is less important than the conditions for Far-right populism’s success. Freedman suggests a redistributive policy model to address inequality and media policy failures including concentrated ownership, weak regulation of tech companies, failure to protect and nurture the fourth estate and independent public service media. We must challenge the economic environment that

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underpins this current media environment which has been ‘captured by corporate and state elites’ (Freedman, 2018: 12). The focus must be not just exposing online propaganda but tackling corruption behind it, ensuring policy and civil society initiatives make funding, lobbying and ads more transparent, and introduce truly punitive deterrents for electoral law breaches.

Notes 1  Although, a full analysis of funding relationships and conflicts of interest are beyond the scope of this chapter, some central themes and issues are illustrated here. 2 There were multiple investigations into “http://l. eu/”L.EU by different entities, the ICO found them guilty of data misuse and they were fined (Pegg, 2018). 3  This author was a fact witness in the case Fair Vote Project vs Big Data Dolphins (6th June 2018) in which Fair Vote sought to ensure any UK data moved to the United States was not deleted. 4  45,000 Tweets were posted by Russian Internet Research Agency accounts on Brexit ‘in 48 hours…in an apparently co-ordinated attempt to sow discord’ (Mostrous et al., 2017). 5  Several investigations have been exploring whether services were provided by CA in 2015 and undeclared by L.EU – this would be illegal and has been denied by both parties. Alexander Nix testified that CA never did any work, ‘paid or unpaid’, for Leave.EU, and that ‘we were not involved in the referendum’. (Satariano, 2018). 6  The UK’s Electoral Commission are fining L.EU for not declaring services received by Gerry Gunster. 7  I revealed a chain of emails (Briant, 2018c) showing early planning and CA Business Development Director Brittany Kaiser told in testimony about working with L.EU (Kaiser, 2018). Kaiser had not known when I told her that Andy Wigmore continued to deploy the strategy CA designed for them when they lost the designation and parted ways with CA. They took the plan and an invoice was issued for working on UKIP data, the first stage of CA’s Leave.EU proposal – Arron Banks gave UKIP money to pay for it but they didn’t pass it to CA (Cadwalladr, 2018). 8  Inglehart and Norris (2016: 30) note that cultural and economic ‘changes may reinforce each other in part—but the evidence in this study suggests that it would be a mistake to attribute the rise of populism7 directly to economic inequality alone’.

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 9  Dark advertising is a type of online advertising visible only to the advert’s publisher and the intended target group, it remains ‘hidden’ to ­others not only to an opposing campaign, but also to researchers and others who might benefit from transparency and accountability. 10  Both samples of screengrabs include static videos, this study did not include fuller analysis of video content. 11  The phrase ‘Dark Money’ often is used to refer to legal or illegal methods of funding campaigns that obscure the donors or find ways around campaign spending limits for example non-profit organizations can be used legally to make unlimited donations in the US: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-money.asp

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32 ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises L o u i s a Ta r r a s - W a h l b e r g

INTRODUCTION The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has lost considerable influence, as well as territory in the physical realm, but continues to wage a propaganda war online. Official propaganda stemming from ISIS has been paramount in leveraging support for the terrorist organization from around the world (Ingram, 2017). In early 2015, ISIS started disseminating propaganda targeting a female audience. Following this strategic move, women from around the world mobilized in support of the terrorist organization, leaving their countries of origin to join the group in the Levant. This phenomenon has been given noteworthy attention in mainstream media, regrettably often resulting in a reproduction of simplified and gendered understandings of female radicalization and recruitment. The notion of female ISIS-supporters as ‘jihadi brides’, motivated to join the terrorist organization solely for romantic reasons, reflect these biases (Ingram, 2017: 3).

This gendered understanding of female ISIS-recruitment also stems from an academic focus on the social media output of ISIS female supporters. Research on the topic of female ISIS-affiliation has been dominated by studies analyzing social media accounts belonging to Western women living in ISIS-controlled territories (Hoyle et  al., 2015). As decentralized sources producing and reproducing information on life in the socalled Caliphate, these social media accounts create an output of ‘un-official’ propaganda shaping views on life under ISIS-rule. This chapter shifts the dominating focus on social media to concentrating on ISIS official propaganda. It explores how ISIS has sought to attract female recruits by looking for the promises made to women in the key magazine Dabiq and its subsequent replacement Rumiyah. It also briefly touches on the development of the material over time. It argues that seven distinct promises can be found in this vast material that help explain female radicalization and the attraction of

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ISIS: Religious duty, state building, belonging, sisterhood, adventure, romance, and influence are promises given to women. These can be understood as pull factors that seek to attract women to join ISIS. The role of women as combatants for ISIS has been a much-discussed topic (Hoyle et  al., 2015; Rafiq and Malik, 2015; Saltman and Smith, 2015). Though there is little evidence in the analyzed material supporting the notion of women as actual fighters for ISIS, late propaganda indicates a shift might be underway. Studying official ISIS-propaganda targeting women can increase our understanding of the promises made and help us devise genderspecific preventive efforts to counter female radicalization. Such efforts can in the end help limit affiliation with ISIS and similar groups. Understanding the role of women in ISIS is also key from a security perspective. It can help determine the threat of women who return to their countries of origin.

PRIOR RESEARCH Violent extremism can be defined as movements, ideologies or people that reject democratic social order and support the use of ideological violence to further a certain cause (Official Reports of the Swedish Government, 2014: 20–1). It is a broader concept than terrorism and encompasses various ideological movements striving to change the foundation of society. Violent extremism includes direct acts of violence but also the support of them through financial means, verbal backing or other types of endorsements. Violent Islamic extremism narrows the scope to violence furthering the cause of a social order built on Islamic beliefs and Shar¯ı’ah laws (Official Reports of the Swedish Government, 2014: 22). Research on violent extremist and terrorist organizations has long been focusing on male actors, while studies focusing on women are rare (Stump and Dixit, 2013: 56). Existing research has often concentrated on women

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as passive bystanders and targets of such violence (Rafiq and Malik, 2015: 14). Important contributions investigating women as active agents have been made by Mia Bloom (2011), Yoram Schweitzer (2006), Anne Speckhard (2008), Rafia Zakaria (2015) and Naureen Chowdhury Fink et al. (2013). They explore the roles of women in various terrorist groups including violent Islamic extremism. Academic research on ISIS has also focused primarily on male, so-called foreign fighters, individuals leaving their countries of origin to engage in war-making abroad (Hoyle et  al., 2015: 8). Research on ISIS female members is limited. Many studies are based on secondary source material, mostly building on empirics derived from social media accounts tied to female ISIS-migrants. As noted by Laura Huey (2015: 5), comprehensive studies on how official propaganda attracts women are lacking. In Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS, Hoyle et  al., (2015) provide pioneering insights into female ISISmigrants’ lives by examining their reasons for migrating and their lives in ISIS-controlled territories. The report is based on a selection of social media accounts tied to 12 individuals and concludes that these women are not fighters but participants in the state-­building efforts of ISIS through motherhood and recruitment activities (2015: 32). In Till Martyrdom Do Us Part – Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon, Erin Marie Saltman and Melanie Smith (2015) expand on Hoyle et al’s research by using a selection of more than 100 social media accounts tied to Western female ISIS-migrants. Saltman and Smith explore who is being radicalized to join ISIS, why women decide to migrate and how the process can be interrupted. Their conclusion is that there is significant diversity among women being radicalized, that their reasons for migration include various push and pull factors. Their responsibilities within ISIS are being a good wife, bearing children and recruiting other women via social media platforms.

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In Caliphates: Women and the Appeal of Islamic State, Haras Rafiq and Nikita Malik (2015) discuss the appeal ISIS has to women by using material derived from social media and official propaganda. The mix makes it difficult to distinguish official ISIS-discourse from that of its followers. Rafiq and Malik’s (2015:38) conclusion is that there are four main promises made to women: empowerment, deliverance, participation and piety. Existing research has been important in detailing so-called push and pull factors that influence women in particular. By studying official propaganda, we can get a better understanding of what ISIS asks of women and how it attempts to attract them. The following section explores the process of radicalization along with the push and pull factors that drive the process forward. These will provide a framework for analyzing what promises official ISIS propaganda is giving women.

RADICALIZATION Radicalization is defined by Neumann (2008:3) as a process leading a person or a group of people to support or wield ideologically motivated violence to further a specific cause. This is a contested definition (Kühle and Lindekilde, 2010: 22). The main debates concern the contextual dependency of being radical, the actual starting point of radicalization and what level – the personal, the ­collective or the societal – is most important in driving radicalization (Ranstorp and Hyllengren, 2013). Researchers have brought experiences from many fields such as political science, sociology, psychology, religion, law and criminology to the theory. This has resulted in a multitude of frameworks illustrating the process, describing why some individuals turn to violent groups, as transformative. The process consists of several steps that include multiple factors increasing the risk

of radicalization (Ranstorp and Hyllengren, 2013: 80–2; Säkerhetspolisen, 2010: 33–4). In essence, a radical person takes a simplified stance where absolute ideological and religious truths divide the world into a black and white reality of good and evil. Socializing a person into such thinking is called a radicalization process (Ranstorp and Hyllengren, 2013: 59). The spark and maintenance of this process is dependent on external human influence, which is most efficient when made in the real world but is also available online (Swedish Security Services, 2010:36-8, 40-1). The Internet has revolutionized radicalization by shrinking space, allowing for contacts to be made regardless of nationality and borders. A marketplace exists for individuals sympathizing with the same ideologies. They can make new friends and exchange one-sided propaganda information in support of a specific cause (Swedish Security Services, 2015: 46). This propaganda rarely has the power by itself to radicalize or recruit individuals to an organization but plays the crucial role of an incubator. It catalyzes the process of radicalization and consolidates already existing sympathies, creating more active supporters (Rafiq and Malik, 2015:39–40; Schori Liang, 2015:  2; Winter, 2015: 15). The underlying reasons for engaging in violent Islamic extremism are complex, occurring on both an individual and collective level. Research by Ranstorp and Hyllengren (2013:80) highlights the necessity to study the phenomenon of radicalization through four perspectives: 1 The interplay between different types of grievances that push people to engage in extremist groups and how these groups have been portrayed on the local level. 2 The way in which social dynamics, ideology, media and narratives are used to mobilize, indoctrinate and pull individuals towards extremist groups. 3 The capabilities and resources available to extremist groups to market their organizations. 4 The underlying motives for individuals to join groups or networks and the reasons that drive extremists to commit acts of violence.

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The process of radicalization is therefore contextually dependent on various internal and external factors: an individual’s social psychological traits and the dynamics of the violent extremist group itself, for example. Researchers have contributed a long list of factors that drive the process of radicalization forward with individual, social, political and ideological dimensions. Whereas some researchers have focused on macro and mezzo-level factors, such as social alienation or foreign political events, others have employed social psychological theories to identify a wide range of micro level factors influencing radicalization (Horgan, 2008 82–3). In reality, these levels interact, and their relative importance vary from person to person. Radicalization is, in essence, dependent on deep interference between push and pull factors.

Push and Pull Towards Radicalization Individuals who have traveled to ISIS territory in support of the organization have gone through a process where they gradually come to sympathize with the message. Research on factors driving radicalization underlines the interface between individual psychological features, social and political factors, ideological and religious dimensions, cultural identity, traumatic experiences and group dynamics. These factors act in a cumulative process at the micro, mezzo and macro levels simultaneously. They are usually divided into push and pull factors. Push factors make individuals more susceptible to extremist propaganda and relate to the person’s individual and social situation which can increase the risk of radicalization. They often spring from profound dissatisfaction relating to personal or political circumstances. Pull factors draw individuals by incentives (Swedish Security Services, 2010:34-5; Ranstorp and Hyllengren, 2013: 86). Pull factors increase

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the traction of a specific group such as ISIS. Attractive offers can inspire individuals to join, commit acts of violence or provide other types of support (Swedish Security Services, 2010: 34). Push and pull factors should be considered as risk factors or circumstances necessary for the process of radicalization (See Figure 32.1). There is a need for interaction among these factors to initiate the process of radicalization (Sageman, 2004: 135). Scholars welcome more research on push and pull factors to enable an increased understanding of how the process of radicalization affects people. What particular push and pull factor cause the transition from frustration into supporting or using violence? In the 2015 report, Saltman and Smith present specific push and pull factors inspiring women to migrate to ISIS-held territories. The factors are based on how women described their reasons for migrating in their social media accounts. Three push factors identified through social media are: (1) a feeling of being socially or culturally isolated, questioning ones belonging or identity; (2) feeling that the Muslim community is under persecution; and (3) experiencing anger or sadness over international inaction to the perceived persecution. The identified pull factors are: (1) the religious duty of building a utopian Caliphate; (2) the draw of belonging and sisterhood; and (3) the romantic adventure of life in ISISheld territories. In this chapter the three pull factors defined by Saltman and Smith (2015) will be used as a framework for an analysis of ISIS official propaganda. They will be broken down and operationalized in accordance with the graph below and complemented by the additional pull factor of influence and violence. Images circulating in social media have depicted women carrying automatic weapons and participating in gun drills (Huey, 2015: 3; Saltman and Smith, 2015: 1). How does ISIS official propaganda view the role of women in armed jihad?

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Religious duty and building of the Caliphate

Belonging and sisterhood

The romantic adventure of joining ISIS

Influence and violence

Religious duty

Belonging

Romance

Influence

State builder

Sisterhood

Adventure

Violence

Figure 32.1  Push and Pull Factors Towards Radicalisation

THE PROPAGANDA In its inception ISIS set up a tightly run and highly centralized communications strategy managed by an information ministry (Winter, 2015: 12–3). Great effort was put into attaining state like legitimacy. For example, the logotype of the ISIS news agency al-Hayat Media Center resembles that of Al Jazeera. High quality videos, images, speeches and radio shows were distributed from a large number of official news agencies such as al-Hayat Media Center (video content), al-Furqan (news content) and al-Bayan radio content (Schori Liang, 2015: 5–6; Zelin, 2015: 89). An additional media wing named the al-Zora Foundation was created in October 2014 dedicated to producing content directly targeting women. Videos and YouTube posts in Arabic quickly attracted large crowds. In a couple of months, the alZora Foundation had gained over 3,200 followers on Twitter. The centralized, state-provided propaganda was highly dependent on its many followers. ISIS has become well known for its decentralized communications strategy. Thousands of followers have become independent media wings by posting online messages, creating online groups, producing their own content and reposting official propaganda. Social media channels have been widely recognized as important. Members tied to ISIS have used

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Ask.FM, thereby attracting new followers. ISIS’ official propaganda outlets are not very well known to the general public but research by Schori Liang (2015) and Gustafsson (2015) confirm their great importance in leveraging support for the organization and activating followers. Propaganda rarely radicalizes or recruits by itself but instead works as a catalyst of radicalization and consolidation. Two of ISIS’ core official propaganda tools in have been the online-publications of Dabiq and Rumiyah. The online magazine Dabiq, produced by ISIS’ media wing al-Hayat Media Center, was first issued in July 2014, declaring the official view of the organization (Gambhir, 2014). The central role of this publication becomes evident at the first glance. Great effort has been put into composing this thorough and extensive magazine containing well-edited texts and high definition illustrations. Its title refers to a small town in the Northern parts of Aleppo, Syria, of particular importance to ISIS grand strategy. A well-known Hadith – a recount claiming to cite the prophet Muhammad from the Quran – describes ‘Armageddon Dabiq’ as a place for a future clash between Muslims and ‘Rome’, generally interpreted as the West. In all, 15 issues of Dabiq were produced in several languages for a global audience.

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises

When ISIS started losing control over the city of Dabiq, it quickly discontinued the publication in August 2016. Dabiq was replaced by Rumiyah, which appeared one month later. Rumiyah means ‘Rome’ in Arabic and refers to the same prophetic foretelling as Dabiq, that of the fall of the West. Just like Dabiq, this magazine was translated into several languages, but it signaled a shift in ISIS’s strategy. Rumiyah takes the battle against the enemies of ISIS beyond Dabiq and the Middle East into Europe (Mahzam, 2017: 8). A total of 13 issues was published of Rumiyah before the magazine was discontinued in September 2017 and no replacement has appeared. As communications channels, Dabiq and Rumiyah served three main objectives spanning military, political and religious dimensions (Schori Liang, 2015: 4). The magazines report on the military victories achieved by ISIS, life within its territory and its religious teachings. Whereas Dabiq repeatedly encouraged Muslims to make hijrah (Gambhir, 2014), migration to the Caliphate, Rumiyah incites attacks on foreign ground. Under the headline of ‘Just Terror Tactics’, ISIS disseminates step-by-step instructions on how to carry out mortal attacks with different weapons such as knives and trucks (Mahzam, 2017: 9). High profile ISIS-propaganda indicates war on two levels: on the ground and in the digital space. Shocking the world in 2014, the terrorist group produced enormous amounts of high-quality official propaganda in multiple formats. Only after losing the claimed capital of Raqqa in July 2017 did a noticeable decline in media output occur. In November of the same year, for the first time since 2014, an unprecedented 24-hour official propaganda hiatus occurred (BBC Monitoring, 2017). While its output is unlikely to return to previous heights, ISIS propaganda production and activities are not over. Maintaining the reputation of a tech savvy terrorist organization remains of great importance. The loss of its Caliphate make its propaganda presence online more important.

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METHODOLOGY The following analysis is based on a qualitative text analysis of all issues of the English editions of Dabiq and Rumiyah, still available online. This material consists of more than 1,500 pages. The analysis identifies and examines ISIS official propaganda aimed at women specifically by employing Saltman and Smith’s pull factors derived from social media. What emerges in this primary source research material is a number of promises pertaining to women.

THE PROMISES When investigating the promises made to women in official ISIS-propaganda, it becomes apparent that women grew ­increasingly important as a target group for the terrorist organization. In the analyzed material women were initially only addressed as members of the bigger Muslim community. Writings such as ‘all Muslims’ were used often but women were seldom addressed directly (Example: Dabiq, 2014c: 43; Dabiq, 2014b: 4; Dabiq, 2014a: 3). In the seventh issue of Dabiq, a change occurred. The magazine included a section titled To Our Sisters, containing an interview with Umm Bash¯ır al-Muhajir¯ah, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly who participated in the terrorist attacks in Paris in January 2015 (Umm Bash¯ır al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015: 50). To Our Sister later changed its name to From Our Sisters and reoccurred in every Dabiq magazine. Rumiyah continued with a segment titled Sisters. Marriage, the taking of female slaves, family life, female migration and contraception are topics discussed in the section for women. The promises tell us what ISIS expects of women as well as what role they play within the organization. Promises are seldom explicit. The texts rather deliver more implicit promises embedded in, and dependent on, the context of the material. These are often expressed

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in complex, emotional and sometimes lyrical language. As they are riddled with Arabic words and religious terminology referencing the Quran, a brief wordlist is provided below.

WORDLIST D¯arulkufr – land of infidels. Du¯a – religious act of supplication. Duny¯a – this world as opposed to the hereafter. Hijrah – migration. Iman – faith. Jannah – Islamic concept of paradise. Jih¯ad – term referring to the religious duty of Muslims to maintain their religion. Can be interpreted as an internal or an external battle. Khil¯afah – Caliphate. Kufr – heretics. Mahram – male guardian. Muh¯ajirat – female migrant, plural. Muh¯ajirah – female migrant, singular. Muh¯ajirin – male or female migrant, singular. Muj¯ahid – holy warrior in armed jih¯ad, singular. Muj¯ahid¯ın – holy warrior in armed jih¯ad, plural. Mushr¯ık – person practicing polytheism/worship of other Gods than Allah. Shahid – martyr who died fulfilling religious commandments. Shar¯ı’ah – body of Islamic law based on the Quran. Shirk – idolatry or polytheism. Shuhad¯a –Islamic confession of faith. Sunnah – verbally transmitted teachings, records, deeds and sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Takb¯ır – commonly used prayer (Allah Akbar). Ummah – supranational community of Muslim. Uqab banner – ‘the banner of the eagle’ originally flown by the prophet Muhammad now used by multiple violent Islamic extremist groups as flag, among them ISIS.

FULFILL YOUR RELIGIOUS DUTY THROUGH HIJARAH Early official ISIS propaganda promised the possibility of fulfilling one’s religious duty by making hijrah – migrating to the so-called

Islamic State. The deed of migration is portrayed as an obligation for all pious Muslims throughout many editions of Dabiq. In an article by Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, women are portrayed as the ‘twin halves’ of men when it comes to the subject of migration. There is no difference between the sexes in relation to the duty of hijrah. The female author Al-Muhajir¯ah writes: ‘This ruling [of migration] is an obligation upon women just as it is upon men’ (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015c: 33). Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah warns women of the risks of remaining in Western countries: So everyone who lives amongst the mushrik¯ın while being able to perform hijrah and not being able to establish his religion, then he is wronging himself and committing sin. […]’Whoever gathers and lives with the mushrik, then he is like him. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015c: 33)

It is, according to ISIS rhetoric, impossible to live as pious and righteous Muslims in Western countries. They are ridden with sin and good Muslims are thereby alleged to be ‘polluted’ by values that go against the will of Allah. Women living in the West have abandoned their God and their natural given roles, instead trying to emulate men. The only salvation from this moral deterioration is turning to Islam. And as the fitrah [human nature] continues to be desecrated day by day in the West and more and more women abandon motherhood, wifehood, chastity, femininity, and heterosexuality, the true woman in the West has become an endangered creature. The Western way of life a female adopts brings with it so many dangers and deviances, threatening her very own soul. […] The solution is laid before the Western woman. It is nothing but Islam, the religion of the fitrah. (Umm Khalid alFinlandiyyah, 2016: 25)

ISIS propaganda holds that women in the West wearing religious clothing such as the hijab or the burqa are vulnerable to discrimination. Migrating to ISIS-held territories is presented as the sole solution to this problem. Women who comply with the demand of making hijrah, thereby fulfilling their religious duty, will be heavily rewarded with

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises

the grace of God both in this life and in the hereafter. Often highlighted is the fact that the rewards will be in accordance with the sacrifices made (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015e: 22). Those that fail to fulfill their religious duty will face severe punishment. ISIS depicts these individuals as a disgrace for all Muslims collectively. The promise of fulfilling one’s religious duty, and thereby receiving in this life and the afterlife the rewards for so doing, is most prominent in Dabiq’s earlier issues but does also occur in early editions of Rumiyah (Rumiyah 2, 2016a: 3). This magazine later seems to shift focus to the religious duty of remaining in the so-called Islamic State, motivating women to endure despite the hard living conditions (Rumiyah 2, 2016b: 30).

BECOME AN IMPORTANT STATE BUILDER ISIS official propaganda further promises women an important role in its state-building ambitions. Here women have three main functions that are portrayed as key for the state’s survival. The first state-building role, most prominent in early propaganda, is that of employment. Women are offered the possibility to become doctors, nurses or teachers in a new state. An article about the welfare system of the Islamic State describes the merits of studying at a new medical school in Raqqa: The teaching staff consists exclusively of degree holders. Entrance is open to both females and males, with a dedicated school building, hospital, and female teaching staff for the female students. To support the students in their efforts the Islamic State does not charge any fees and provides the students with all that is necessary in terms of food, clothing, housing, transport, and books. For further encouragement high-achievers are granted rewards. (Dabiq, 2015:26)

As highlighted in Dabiq, women can make a real difference while receiving everything needed by migrating to ISIS-held territories:

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This should be received as a wake-up call for the many Muslim students in the lands of kufr who claim to study medicine to “benefit and support the Muslim Ummah”, but then remain in those lands, chasing after worldly pleasures instead of performing hijrah to the Islamic State – and this despite hijrah being an undeniable Islamic obligation, in addition to the fact that hijrah was and still is relatively easy. The Islamic State offers everything that you need to live and work here, so what are you waiting for? (Dabiq, 2015: 26)

Second, women are also, through motherhood, seen as key actors in nursing the next generation of fighters, often referred to as ‘lion cubs’. Women ‘produce’ the next generation of men of whom the survival of the state depends on (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015a: 44). The importance of this role is highlighted throughout both Dabiq and Rumiyah: Islam encourages bearing children for numerous reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these is to increase the Muslim population so as to strengthen the Ummah. […] By increasing the number of Muslims kufr is terrified and the religion further triumphs. (Rumiyah 5, 2017: 34)

The possibility to bear children in the Islamic State is portrayed not only as a duty but also as a great possibility. One passage in Rumiyah states: Every woman whom Allah has granted the blessing of giving birth in the Islamic State should take advantage of this tremendous grace – which Allah has not granted to many other women – and painstakingly endeavor to raise her children in a manner that pleases her Lord and brings benefit to her ummah. (Rumiyah 9, 2017: 18)

Women are thus given the responsibility of furthering the cause of ISIS into the next generation. The importance of not spoiling heritage and lineage is often touched upon (Rumiyah 2, 2016b: 30). A Finnish convert living in ISIS-territory gives an account in Dabiq, testimony of the benefits of raising children in the Islamic State: When you’re in Dar al-Kufr (the lands of disbelief) you’re exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to

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lead you astray. Here you’re living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don’t need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. (Umm Khalid al-Finlandiyyah, Dabiq, July 2016, 39)

Providing a good upbringing for the children of the Islamic State in accordance with the organization’s interpretation of the religion rather than that of secularism and infidelity is key. For so doing, ISIS promises help to the mothers in this venture through kindergartens, training camps and Shar¯ı’ah institutions (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir a¯ h, 2015a: 45). Rumiyah even goes so far as to provide a ‘parental guide’ highlighting mothers’ teaching responsibilities with these three key principles: who is your lord, what is your religion and who is your prophet? Crucial is also trivializing the worldly life and embellishing the hereafter (Rumiyah 9, 2017: 19). The third and final role for women as state builders is that of the wife. The significance given to this supporting role is emphasized in an article published in Rumiyah: ‘Let us be as those women who knew their role and fulfilled them, for being supportive of your muaj¯ahid husband is one of your key roles in the land of jihad, my dear sister, and the importance of it cannot be overemphasized’ (Rumiyah 11, 2017: 14). The importance of wifehood is underlined in Dabiq where its merits are equated to that of jih¯ad: Please listen. Indeed you are in jih¯ad when you await the return of your husband patiently, anticipating Allah’s reward, and making du’¯a’ for him and those with him to attain victory and consolidation. You are in jih¯ad when you uphold your loyalty to him in his absence. You are in jih¯ad when you teach his children the difference between the truth and falsehood, between right and wrong. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015a: 41)

Women also have a key role in supporting their husbands in their fighting for the survival of the so-called Caliphate. In a brief interview in Dabiq with Umm Bas¯ır alMuhajira, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly

who attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris in 2015, this becomes clear: My sisters, be bases of support and safety for your husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. Be advisors to them. They should find comfort and peace with you. Do not make things difficult for them. Facilitate all matters for them. Be strong and brave. […] Know that the Companions (radiyallahu ¯ ‘anhum) did not spread Islam in these vast lands except with their righteous wives behind them. (U.B. al-Muhajir¯ah, Dabiq, February 2015, 50)

Throughout the ISIS propaganda, women are given important state-building roles. In the early days of the Caliphate the roles that were promised were multiple, including that of a working woman. As the Caliphate crumbled, more traditional female roles such as wifehood and motherhood were emphasized. Fulfilling these would result in divine rewards.

EXPERIENCE TRUE BELONGING According to the ISIS propaganda, women joiners to ISIS will experience true and meaningful belonging. The Islamic State is described as a safe haven void of discrimination on the basis of skin color, ethnicity or nationality. Dabiq underscores that the diversity of Muslims within ISIS-held territory unifies the organization in the spirit of religion: [T]he rate of hijrah magnified and now every day there are not only muh¯ajir¯ın to the land of Islam but also muh¯ajir¯at who were sick of living amongst kufr and its people. As soon as the sun of their awaited state rose, they rushed to it alone and in groups from the eastern and western extents of the Earth. Their colors and tongues are different, but their hearts are united upon “there is no god but Allah”. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015c: 33)

In building the Caliphate, ISIS aimed at creating a sense of belonging and unity in a large, diverse and geographically dispersed group of people. Belonging is an important and necessary ingredient in building a new nation and attracting new citizens. Those that

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises

feel lost or discriminated against in Western communities are offered a homeland where all Muslims are treated well and equally. The promise of belonging was most prominent in early propaganda, disappearing as the territory dissolved.

GET TO KNOW REAL SISTERHOOD Women that live in ISIS-controlled territory, according to its propaganda, will experience sisterhood and friendship that widely surpasses blood bands. The published articles targeting women open at times in a very inclusive manner, this one from Rumiyah: My beloved sisters with whom I am on a journey to Allah, let us purify our intentions and rectify our deeds, as it seems that ahead of us await times of intense trials and extreme hardships, and times of severe battles between iman and kufr[.] (Rumiyah 11, 2017: 13)

Another example of sisterhood is brought up in an article in Rumiyah discussing the great sin of ‘backbiting’ your closest circle: ‘Every Muslim woman should remember that any disagreement of her Muslim brother or sister, even with a mere gesture, is prohibited slander, which is one of the greatest sins’(Rumiyah 7, 2017: 31). The importance of always siding with your fellow ISIS-sisters is also described in an article discussing the positive aspects of polygyny, the taking of up to four wives (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir a¯ h, 2015e). Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah highlights that women need to embrace the taking of more than one wife as it benefits them as a group. Polygyny is presented as insurance for women and children alike. ‘Sisters’ living in ISIS-controlled territories are frequently widowed due to the participation of their husbands in armed struggle. The author calls for altruism by saying ‘Let every sister just put herself in the shoes of a wife of a shahid and sacrifice some of the selfishness that is part of our nature’ (Umm Sumayyah

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al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015e: 22). This selflessness is supposed to be interpreted as an act of sisterhood that benefits the weak and lonely. In the end it ensures that no ‘sister’ is left outside of the community. Sisterhood and selfless deeds are, according to ISIS propaganda, heavily rewarded. Good sisters increase their rewards in the present life as well as in the afterlife (Ibid.). Being a shahid’s widow results in increased status and glory for ISIS women. It also works as an assurance for a new marriage to be arranged which, in turn, means security to the ‘sisters’.

LEAD AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE Women joining the Islamic State are also promised an exciting adventure. The journey to the Caliphate is highlighted as a possibility to experience something extraordinary. The promise of adventure is often portrayed through vivid recounts of the journeys made by women to ISIS-held territories. Official propaganda discusses the courageous women found among those migrating to Syria and Iraq. This is evident in an article in Dabiq by author Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah who interprets all the women she met on her journey to the Caliphate as a life-changing experience of joy but also adventure: [Women go] through the hardship of a long journey that is also exciting and full of memories. While we would discuss the stories of hijrah, we would all agree upon a feeling that overtakes every muh¯ajirah during her journey. It is as if we leave from darkness to light, from caves of darkness to a welcoming green land. Rather, by Allah, it is as if we are resurrected, from death to life! (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015c: 35)

A prominent feature is that of meeting new people. Only the brave manage to make the trip, and are generously rewarded: On the path towards Jannah, there is no place for the fearful and for cowards! And even if I were to forget everything, I would never forget the moment our feet treaded upon the good lands of

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Islam and the moment our eyes saw the Uq¯ab banner fluttering high. […]The first checkpoint we saw, the first image of the State’s soldiers far from the Internet and TV screens – those dusty and ragged in their flesh and blood – we saw them here with our eyes while tears from our eyes poured forth generously and our tongues pronounced the takb¯ır silently. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015c: 36)

The promise of adventure is more noticeable in early propaganda where the calls for hijarah were frequently made. With Rumyiah in 2016 there exists explicit promises of adventure.

EXPERIENCE TRUE ROMANCE The promise of romance is rare in official ISIS-propaganda. When mentioned, it is in relation to the issue of marriage where women assume the key role of supporting their husbands (Example: Umm Bash¯ır al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015). Women joining ISIS get access to righteous men that provide a rise in status. ISIS aims at attracting women without male companions: Here I want to say with the loudest voice to the sick-hearted who have slandered the honor of the chaste sisters, a woman’s hijrah from darulkufr ¯ is obligatory whether or not she has a mahram, if she is able to find a relatively safe way and fears Allah regarding herself. She should not wait for anyone but should escape with her religion and reach the land where Islam and its people are honored. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajirah, ¯ 2015c: 35)

According to ISIS-ideology, living within the boundaries of marriage and respecting men is key. Official propaganda, however, openly encourages women living with men who do not follow ISIS’ interpretation of Islam to abandon them (Umm Sumayyah alMuhajir¯ah, 2015d: 47). Hijrah can present new possibilities. Official propaganda promises great rewards to those that leave behind their ‘infidel’ spouses and migrate to ISISheld territories:

[If] you fear your Lord and His anger, and abandon this apostate husband in obedience to Him, then He will replace him with something better and will provide for you from where you do not expect. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015d: 45)

The passages relating to romance are tied to the concept of marriage and family life. Women are, according to ISIS, dependent on their husbands and the concept of dating is nonexistent. This is bluntly conveyed in Rumiyah: A woman is always in need of a husband who will look after her and tend to her affairs, and any woman who says otherwise is opposing the fitrah upon which Allah created her. No one around her can fill the place of a husband, neither her father, nor her brother, nor the closest of her relatives. (Rumiyah 4, 2016: 33)

Rumiyah further emphasizes that the space for sisterhood is limited by the fact that the default place for women is at home, also in relation to friends and family (Rumiyah 12, 2017: 36).

INCREASED INFLUENCE Women joining ISIS are promised increased influence and restitution both in the Caliphate and in world politics. This is highlighted in both Dabiq and Rumiyah. ISIS claims that Muslims have been humiliated slaves to the West for centuries. Without a state of their own, scattered in the lands of infidels, they have been marginalized due to their faith. This becomes evident in an article in Dabiq justifying ISIS forcing Yazidi women, taken as slaves, to convert into Islam. Doing so seems to elevate the status of the Muslim women: [I] and those with me at home [in the Caliphate] prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home. Yes, we thanked our Lord for having let us live to the day we saw kufr humiliated and its banner destroyed. Here we are today, and after centuries, reviving a prophetic

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises

Sunnah, which both the Arab and non-Arab enemies of Allah had buried. By Allah, we brought it back by the edge of the sword, and we did not do so through pacifism, negotiations, democracy, or elections. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015b: 47)

Women also help to increase ISIS’s influence. Through childbearing and birth giving they instill fear in the adversary. An article in Rumiyah states: [W]ith the birth of every newborn Muslim, a thorn is planted into the throat of kufr and a dagger is stabbed into flank of shirk. Nor do these women realize that by increasing the number of Muslims, the despicable are suffocated and the banners of the kuffar are lowered, just as the voices of the righteous are raised. (Rumiyah 5, 2017: 35)

The promise of influence in world politics is central in ISIS official propaganda. The idea of a Caliphate, founded through jih¯ad, is described as an essential tool for regaining honor, power and influence with Muslims worldwide. Muslim women are promised influence by subjugating women from other religions. Siding with ISIS provides a safe road to success and fortune, both in this life and in the hereafter.

WHAT ABOUT VIOLENCE? Violence has been used by multiple Islamic extremist organizations to attract male followers (Swedish Security Services, 2010: 43–4). In ISIS official propaganda targeting women there is little evidence of this. Women are exempted from the obligation of physical jih¯ad. An article published in Dabiq emphasizes other priorities more suitable for women: My Muslim sister, indeed you are a muj¯ahidah, and if the weapon of the men is the assault rifle and the explosive belt, then know that the weapon of the women is good behavior and knowledge. Because you will enter fierce battles between truth and falsehood. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015a: 44)

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Official propaganda instead stresses that a woman’s role is to engage in religious studies. This has, according to Dabiq, caused tension among women wanting to enjoy the same rewards of jih¯ad as men (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2015a: 41). Al-Muhajir¯ah stresses that women play an instrumental, although non-combative, role in the waging of jih¯ad as mothers of future ISIS-fighters (Ibid.). Another supporting function, through commitment and financing, is highlighted in Rumiyah: Belief in Allah and waging jihad for His cause with wealth and soul are emphazised here, and jihad using one’s wealth is mentioned fist because wealth is used initially in order to prepare equipment and arm the troops, and because jihad using ones physical self (soul) has exemptions – those who are excused from fighting – and the woman is exempt therefrom. (Rumiyah 1, 2016: 18)

This support provided by women in the waging of war comes with great rewards: Though the Muslim women may miss out on much goodness in waging jihad with the sword, due to Allah’s favouring men therein, the great gate of jihad with wealth is left wide open for the women who will make deals with their lord, deals that will never end poorly. (Rumiyah 1, 2016: 20)

That women are barred from fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq does not mean that their use of violence in other settings is condemned. In a recount of the San Bernardino attacks in California in December 2015, ISIS praises the perpetrators, a husband and a wife: Thus, the Khil¯afah’s call for the Muslims to strike the crusaders in their own lands was answered once more, but on this particular occasion the attack was unique. The muj¯ahid involved did not suffice with embarking upon the noble path of jih¯ad alone. Rather, he conducted the operation together with his wife, with the two thereby aiding one another in righteousness and taqw¯a. […] May Allah accept the sacrifices of our noble brother Syed Rizwan Farook and his blessed wife, accept them among the shuhad¯a’, and use their deeds as a means to awaken more Muslims in America, Europe, and Australia. (Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah, 2016: 4)

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Similar celebrations are made in Rumiyah where three women carrying out an attack in Mombasa, Kenya are praised for their actions (Rumiyah 2, 2016a: 3–4).

AN UNPRECEDENTED SHIFT There had been occasional reports on ISISwomen as fighters, suicide bombers and snipers, along with images in social media of women bearing arms. Women had also been engaged in terror plots such as the one thwarted in Paris in September 2016 (De Leede et. al 2017: 28–9). The vast majority of all terror attacks and plots, however, have been planned and carried out by men. In early October 2017, reports surfaced that an unprecedented call to women had been made in ISIS official propaganda (Katz, 2017). In ‘The Duty of Women in Waging Jihad against the Enemy’ published in the ISIS weekly Arabic newsletter al-Naba, women were invited to participate in the physical jihad and prepare themselves as mujahidat, female holy warriors: Today, in the context of this war against the Islamic state, and with all that is experienced of hardship and pain, it is mandatory for the Muslim women to fulfill their duty from all aspects in supporting the mujahideen in this battle, by preparing themselves as mujahidat in the cause of Allah, and readying to sacrifice themselves to defend the religion of Allah the Most High and Mighty[.] (Katz, 2017)

ISIS’ call for female physical jihad contradicts prior statements and goes against earlier established practices. In February 2018 the call for engagement in al-Naba was followed by the release of the first-ever official ISIS video showcasing women fighting on the frontlines alongside men. The video, released in both Arabic and English, moved ISIS’ position on female participation in jihad towards a more ‘liberal’ stance (Dearden, 2018). The statement in al-Naba and the video released marks the first time that ISIS itself openly acknowledges women’s contributions

and calls on them to participate in war (Dearden, 2018). Analysts have attributed this key change to the fact that ISIS is in decline, drawing on its final resources. The change in stance came at a time when ISIS was losing ever more territory and personnel (Dearden, 2017). The ISIS call on women to participate in armed jihad could have implications on European security. As the roles of ISIS female supporters widens, security services around the world should be weary of gender biases. ISIS now views women as more than mothers and wives.

CONCLUSION How has ISIS used propaganda to attract women? By scrutinizing official propaganda in the magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah, a number of promises made to women have been mapped. Women are offered the possibility to fulfill their religious duty, to become important state builders, to experience indepth belonging and sisterhood and to some extent also romance and adventure. They are also promised great influence. Early official propaganda does not make promises to women of exerting violence in ISIS-held territories, but it does not condemn such acts on foreign soil. There used to be little evidence to support the notion of women participating in violent action, but a worrying shift seems to be under way. Fulfilling the role as a female ISISsupporter, living under ISIS rule, offers divine benefits. Women who please God by advancing ISIS’ strict interpretation of Islam are rewarded, in this life and in the hereafter. The promises mapped seem to create a powerful pulling force, that could partly explain how ISIS has managed to attract an unprecedented number of women. The way that ISIS continually shifts focus in Dabiq and Rumiyah underlines the fact that the communicated material is nothing but propaganda: one sided information in support of a specific cause.

ISIS Female Recruits: The Alluring Propaganda Promises

REFERENCES BBC Monitoring. (2017). Analysis: Islamic State media output goes into sharp decline. November 23. Available at: https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c1dnnj2k Bloom, M. (2011). Bombshell: The Many Faces of Women Terrorists. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chowdhury Fink N., Barakat, R. and Shetret, L. (2013). The Roles of Women in Terrorism, Conflict and Violent Extrmism – Lessons for the United Nations and International Actors. Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation. April. Gambhir, H. (2014). Dabiq: The Strategic Messaging of the Islamic State, Backgrounder, Institute for the Study of War. Gustafsson, L. (2015). Våldsbejakande islamistisk extremism och sociala medier, Centrum för Asymetriska Hot- och TerrorismStudier, Försvarshögskolan. Dearden, L. (2017). Isis calls on women to fight and launch terror attacks for first time. Independent. October 6. Available at: https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/­ middle-east/isis-war-syria-iraq-women-callto-arms-islamic-state-terror-attacks-propaganda-change-ban-frontline-a7986986.html Dearden, L (2018). Isis propaganda video shows women fighting for first time amid ‘desperation’ to bolster ranks. Independent. February 8. Availabe at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isisvideo-women-jihadis-female-fighters-recruitment-syria-iraq-islamic-state-propagandaa8200621.html De Leede, S., Haupfleisch, R., Korolkova, K. and Natter, M. (2017). Radicalization and violent extremism – focus on women: How women become radicalized, and how to empower them to prevent radicalization, European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights & Gender Equality. Horgan, J. (2008). From Profiles to Pathways and Roots to Routes: “Perspectives from Psychology on Radicalization into Terrorism. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 618(1), 80–94 Hoyle, C., Bradford, A., and Frenett, R. (2015). Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS. Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

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Huey, L. (2015). No Sandwiches Here: Representations of Women in Dabiq and Inspire Magazines. Canadian network for research on terrorism, security and society. Working Paper Series 15(4). Ingram, K. (2016). More Than “Jihadi Brides” and “Eye Candy”: How Dabiq Appeals to Western Women. The International Center for Counter Terrorism. August 12. Ingram, K. (2017). IS’s Appeal to Western Women: Policy Implications. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague 8(4). Katz, R. (2017). How do we know ISIS is losing? Now it’s asking women to fight. The Washington Post. November 2. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ posteverything/wp/2017/11/02/how-do-weknow-isis-is-losing-now-its-asking-womento-fight-for-it/?utm_term=.6c668ffb7b74 Kühle, L. and Lindekilde, L. (2010). Radicalization Among Young Muslims in Aarhus. Report. Center for Studies in Islamism and Radicalization, Aarhus University, Denmark. Mahzam, R. (2017). Rumiyah – Jihadist Propaganda & Information Warfare in Cyberspace. Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 9(3), 8–14. Neumann, P. (2008). Introduction. Perspectives on Radicalization and Political Violence. Papers from the First International Conference on Radicalization and Political Violence. London. 3–7. Official Report of the Swedish Government (2014). Våldsbejakande extremism i Sverige – nuläge och tendenser. SOU Ds. Rafiq, H. and Malik, N. (2015). Caliphettes: Women and the Appeal of Islamic State. Quilliam Foundations. Ranstorp, M. and Hyllengren, P. (2013). Förebyggande av våldsbejakande extremism i tredjeland: Åtgärder för att förhindra att personer ansluter sig till väpnade extreistgrupper i konfliktzoner, Centrum för Asymetriska Hot-och Terorism Studier, Försvarshögskolan. Sageman, M. (2004). Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Säkerhetspolisens rapport (2010). Våldsbejakande islamistisk extremism i Sverige, Edita, Swedish Security Services.

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Säkerhetspolisens årsbok. (2015). Edita, Swedish Security Services. Saltman, E. and Smith, M. (2015). ‘Till Martyrdom Do Us Part’: Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon. London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Schori Liang, C. (2015). Cyber Jihad: Understanding and Countering Islamic State Propaganda, Geneva Center for Security Policy, Policy Paper 2015/2, February. Schweitzer, Y. (2006). Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality? The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. Speckhard, A. (2008). The Emergence of Female Suicide Terrorists. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 31(11), 1–29. Stump, J. and Dixit, P. (2013). Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods. New York and London: Routledge. Van Ginkel, B. and Entenmann, E. (2016). The Foreign Fighters Phenomenon in the European Union. Profiles, Threats & Policies. The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague 7(2). Winter, C. (2015). The Virtual ‘Caliphate’: Understanding Islamic State’s Propaganda Strategy. London: Quilliam Foundation. Zakaria, R. (2015). Women and Islamic Militancy. Dissent. Available at: https://www. dissentmagazine.org/article/why-womenchoose-isis-islamic-militancy Zelin, A. (2015). Picture Or It Didn’t Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media Output. Perspectives on Terrorism 9(4).

Umm Bash¯ır al-Muhajir¯āh. (2015). A brief interview with Umm Bash¯ır al-Muhajir¯ah, From hypocrisy to apostasy, the extinction of the grayzone, al-Hayat Media Center, February, Dabiq issue 7, 50–51. Umm Khalid Al-Finlandiyyah. (2016). How I Came to Islam, Breaking the Cross, al-Hayat Media Center, July, Dabiq, 36–39. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2015a). A Jih¯ad Without Fighting, From the battle of AlAhzab to the war of coalitions, al-Hayat Media Center, August, Dabiq, 40–45.Umm Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2015b). SlaveGirls or Prostitutes, They plot and Allah plots, al-Hayat Media Center, May, Dabiq, 44–49. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2015c). The Twin Halves of the Muh¯ajir¯ın, Sharia alone will rule Africa, al-Hayat Media Center, March, Dabiq. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2015d) They Are Not Lawful Spouses For One Another, The law of Allah or the laws of men, al-Hayat Media Center, July, Dabiq issue 10, 42–48. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2015e). Two, Three or Four, Just terror, al-Hayat Media Center, November, Dabiq, 19–22. Umm Sumayyah al-Muhajir¯ah. (2016). Advice on Ihd¯ad, The radidah from Ibn Saba to the Dajjal, al-Hayat Media Center, January, Dabiq, 24–26.

PROPAGANDA

Rumiyah 1. (2016). O Women, Give Charity. Al-Hayat Media Center, September, 18-20. Rumiyah 2. (2016a). A Message from East Africa. Al-Hayat Media Center, October, 2-3. Rumiyah 2. (2016b). Stories of Steadfastness from the Lives of the Sahabiyyat. Al-Hayat Media Center, October, 28-30. Rumiyah 4. (2016). Marrying Widows is an Established Sunnah. Al-Hayat Media Center, December, 32-33. Rumiyah 5. (2017). I Will Outnumber the Other Nations Through You. Al-Hayat Media Center, January, 34-35. Rumiyah 7. (2017). The Flesh of Your Spouse is Poisonous. Establishing the Islamic State

Dabiq (no byline, unless indicated) Dabiq. (2014a). The Call to Hijrah, al-Hayat Media Center, September, 3–4. Foreword. Dabiq. (2014b). The Flood, al-Hayat Media Center, July, 3–4. Foreword. Dabiq. (2014c). The Return of the Khilafa, alHayat Media Center, July, 42–48. News. Dabiq. (2015). They plot and Allah plots, alHayat Media Center, May, 24–26. Health Care in the Khilafa, Dabiq. (2016). The radidah from Ibn Saba to the Dajjal, al-Hayat Media Center, January 2016, 3-4. Foreword.

RUMIYAH (NO AUTHOR, UNLESS INDICATED)

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Between the Prophetic Methodology and the Paths of the Deviants. Al-Hayat Media Center, March, 30-32. Rumiyah 9. (2017). The Woman is a Shepherd in her Husband’s Home and Responsible for her Flock. The Ruling on the Belligerent Christians. Al-Hayat Media Center, May, 18-21.

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Rumiyah 11. (2017). Our Journey to Allah. The Ruling on Ghanimah, Fay and Ihtitab. AlHayat Media Center, July, 12-15. Rumiyah 12. (2017). The Female Slaves of Allah in the House of Allah. It Will be a Fire that Burns the Cross and its People in Raqqah. Al-Hayat Media Center, August, 36-38.

33 IS’s Strategic Communication Tactics Charlie Winter and Craig Whiteside

INTRODUCTION The Islamic State is widely considered to be a revolutionary innovator when it comes to its use of influence operations, both on and off the battlefield. This reputation is well founded. Indeed, to a large extent, it was its adept use of information that enabled it to commandeer the reins of global jihadism from its like-minded rival, al-Qa’idah. From the psychological campaigns that preceded its 2014 Mosul offensive to the blissful promises of utopia that followed it, communication has almost always been central to its insurgent doctrine. In years to come, it is likely to become even more important as a tool for curating its post-territorial legacy, smoothing the transition from covert insurgency to overt proto-state and back again. Evidently, this is an organisation that considers the information domain to be a decisive battlespace in its struggle to build a state, and, based on this calculation, it has devoted an unprecedented amount of resources and

manpower to propaganda-based influence operations. While this has been discussed at length by academics, think-tank analysts, and journalists alike, to date, there has been a persistent focus on the thematic side of the equation and almost no inquiry as to their actual methodology – particularly in the offline domain. In other words, we have learned a lot about ‘what’ the group is doing but not about ‘how’ and ‘why’ it is doing it. Bridging this gap in the knowledge, this chapter draws on the Islamic State’s recent and not-so-recent history, tracking the evolution of its media production and deployment activities over the last 15 years. Getting beyond a uniquely thematic approach – which, while useful, has been done many times before (Milton, 2016; Winter, 2018; Zelin, 2015) – we focus our attention on the tactics the group uses to engage in strategic communication. After a brief literature review and explanation of our sources, the chapter proceeds in two sections: the first examines how the

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movement designed its messaging campaigns between 2003 and 2018 by identifying the principles that underpin its engagement in outreach; and the second explores how it disseminated this message, assessing how the reach and targeting of its propaganda has developed since its inception. Our analysis shows that, while its influence operations as a whole are unprecedented, their constituent parts are actually highly conventional and could easily have been predicted. Before proceeding, a note on our terms of reference: as we consider the Islamic State and all of its previous manifestations since 2003 – this includes, in consecutive order: Tawhid w-al-Jihad, al-Qa’idah in the Land of the Two Rivers (better known as al-Qa’idah in Iraq), the Islamic State of Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and finally the Islamic State – to be part of the same jihadist ‘family’, we prefer to refer it as the ‘Islamic State Movement’ (ISM). This captures the idea that the organisation as we see it in 2018 did not emerge from a vacuum – rather, it is the result of a continuous evolution dating back decades.

LITERATURE REVIEW While the ISM has long been on the radar of academics and think-tank experts, it was most heavily scrutinised in the wake of its advances across Iraq and Syria in 2014. Broadly speaking, the ISM literature falls into four thematic clusters, with accounts focusing on: (a) its organisational history and ideology; (b) its doctrine for insurgency; (c) its use of terrorism abroad; and (d) its strategic communication activities. In the next few paragraphs, we identify the contours of the last of these clusters, which is itself split into three: studies using quantitative methods to examine its online sympathiser communities and networks; studies using content analysis to decipher specific propaganda genres and media products; and

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studies using thematic analysis to make sense of its theo-political brand. The first cluster, which focuses on mapping social networks and dynamics, is characterised by work from the likes of Carter et  al. (2014), Klausen (2014), Berger and Morgan (2015), and Conway et  al. (2017). Each of these studies explores the ISM’s online ecosystem through the lens of big data, and their authors broadly agree that the ISM sympathiser community is as nebulous as it is subject to change. Qualitative investigations from Amarasingam (2015) and Stalinsky and Sosnow (2017) demonstrate that it is at once hierarchical and diffuse, reliant on a strong sense of communal identity. The second cluster consists of close explorations into individual propaganda genres or products. Chouliaraki and Kissas (2018), for example, take an aesthetic approach towards the appearance of violence in the ISM’s video propaganda, whereas the likes of Macnair and Frank (2017) use thematic analysis to decipher cultural meaning in films produced by its Al Hayat Media Center. In each case, they are struck by editorial and visual motifs that directly reflect Western media conventions, an observation also made by Winkler et al. (2016) in their analysis of Dabiq, the State’s Englishlanguage magazine. For his part, Ingram (2016, 2017, 2018) has provided a series of valuable contributions to this portion of the literature, among them: an in-depth content analysis of Dabiq as a standalone product; a comparative study between it and al-Qa’idah in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine; and an evaluation of how it and its successor, Rumiyah, evolved between 2014 and 2017. The third cluster comprises archival explorations of the ISM brand. Zelin’s (2015) was the first account to empirically evaluate the movement’s jihadist promise; using a oneweek snapshot of its official output collected from Twitter in May 2015, he sets out the parameters of its appeal and demonstrates that it is neither as monochromatic nor as brutal as much media coverage at the time suggested. These findings were reiterated by

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Winter (2015, 2017), who, in his analyses of official media products from 2015 and 2017, comes to a comparable set of conclusions, illustrating that the group’s propaganda usually falls into one of three thematic categories when considered in aggregate: civilian life, military activities, and victimhood. Milton (2016) also examines official visual media products, focusing in particular on the 20 months between January 2015 and August 2016. He again finds that its strategic narrative comprises more than warfare and brutality, also noting that its communication capabilities were squeezed between 2014 and 2016, a finding corroborated by Conway et  al. (2017), Winter (2018), and BBC Monitoring (2017). As the above shows, explorations of the ISM’s recent outreach activities abound, but investigations into its past efforts are few and far between – aside, that is, from the likes of Rogan (2005), Kimmage (2008) and Whiteside (2016). This has left us with a piecemeal understanding of how and why the caliphate idea resonated – and continues to resonate – among jihadists in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. Seeking to correct this imbalance in the knowledge, the following pages connect the dots between the ISM of yesteryear and the group as it appears today.

SOURCES We principally rely on primary sources for what follows. This is for two reasons: first, secondary source accounts examining the ISM’s communications are often hindered by partial access to data and therefore end up being skewed. This issue is especially salient in the context of media reportage. Second, and more importantly, the organisation has itself offered unparalleled textual insights into how it thinks about propaganda – especially in-theatre, a sphere of its operations that is otherwise obscured by the fog of war – so it is prudent to make (critical) use of them.

Based on these considerations, we, below, use a longitudinal sample of seminal Islamic State propaganda texts as a window into its influence activism. All primary materials dating from 2014 onwards were archived by the first author from the movement’s official online dissemination channels. Depending on the period in question, data was collected from Twitter (2014–2015) and Telegram (2015– 2018). Materials from before 2014 were either collected from the US Government’s Open Source Center or obtained from an archive of captured documents maintained by the US Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

DESIGNING THE CAMPAIGN Shifting Strategic Narrative Since its inception in 2003, the ISM has aggressively and expertly asserted itself on the information battlefield, deploying a variety of influence efforts to win popularity both locally and globally. In the early years, its propaganda was almost uniquely focused on gaining name recognition; this primarily took the form of high visibility terrorist acts and other military activities (Benson, 2004). Indeed, soon after its emergence, the group became notorious for rough-cut footage of sniper operations, car bombings, and executions – be they of enemy combatants, civilian aid-workers, or journalists (Newman, 2004). By 2006, it felt strong enough to experiment with a nascent form of institutionalised governance as well – in a statement published at the beginning of 2007, the ISM inaugurated its first civilian cabinet complete with a Ministry for Public Diplomacy and a Ministry of Information, something that hinted at an early inclination for the development of influence-focused management expertise (al-Juburi, 2007). This proto-state initiative prompted a violent backlash among tribal groups that were not enthusiastic about

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living under a jihadist administration (Hafez, 2007). Hence, the years that followed were witness to a systematic propaganda campaign – incorporating both media and deed – that was geared towards communicating the idea that the Islamic State of Iraq, which had been founded in late 2006 and largely rejected in 2007, would ‘remain’ no matter what (alBaghdadi, 2007). Ultimately, the campaign was successful in convincing Iraqis that the ISM did indeed have a future in Iraq, an outcome facilitated by the advent of increased sectarian tensions between its Sunni and Shi’i populations (Fishman, 2016). By 2013, the ISM’s growing activities had finally begun to live up to its proto-state branding. With Syria’s disintegration into civil war, the group had started to engage in more than governance lip service and, because of this, the breadth of its propaganda operations could expand beyond military and terroristic violence to also convey information about its experiments into civilian administration. By 2015, the ISM had reached its zenith and utopian images of quotidian existence in its recently proclaimed caliphate dominated its media, with more than 50 percent of its videos and photo-stories depicting an idealised image of civilian life, focusing on anything from municipal services and social welfare distribution to education and wildlife (Winter, 2015). This was not, however, a permanent state of affairs. Indeed, as the coalition and its allies advanced against the group in Syria and Iraq, it recalibrated its approach. By early 2017, its communicative clout had dramatically diminished, both in terms of media productivity and narrative complexity, and nearly all of its materials had begun to revolve around militarism. In other words, the ISM had to a large extent returned to its roots, once again framing itself as a fighting force first and a proto-state second.

Persistent Strategic Priorities To make sense of this evolution, it serves to look to the group’s own literature – specifically,

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a 2010 speech by, then second in command of the ISM, Abu Hamzah al-Muhajir, and a fieldguide for in-theatre media operatives released by its official publishing house in 2015. Abu Hamzah, as the ISM’s Minister of Defence and, later, Prime Minister, was the immediate subordinate of (and putative coleader with) the ISM’s amir between 2006 and 2010, Abu ‘Umar al-Baghdadi. A member of the movement since its inception in 2003, Abu Hamzah complemented Abu Umar’s role as political leader of the group by handling its day-to-day administrative affairs (al-’Utaybi, 2013). During his incumbency, Abu Hamzah issued detailed guidance to a number of the ISM’s civilian and military departments, usually in the form of audio statements. One such speech was ‘To those entrusted with the message’, a 35-minute audio text published in 2010 by the al-Fajr Media Centre (al-Muhajir, 2010). Emerging more than four years before the ISM’s rise to global infamy as the Islamic State, the statement was – and continues to be – a communication blueprint for the group, comprising 14 guidelines for optimising its overarching media architecture. Each is set out, in consecutive order, below: • First, ISM media should engage in aggressive psychological campaigns with a view to ‘sow[ing] terror in the hearts of [the] enemy using everything permitted by shari’ah for this purpose’. This ‘everything’ includes video propaganda, which hints at an underlying strategic logic behind the ISM’s frequent depiction of extreme brutality. • Second, ISM media must go on the ideological offensive by ‘defaming the image of infidels, exposing their immorality, and describing every defect they have’. • Third, ISM must always deflect ‘enemy’ propaganda. To this end, media operatives should ‘follow up on the books, reports, and analysis that the West publishes’. • Fourth, ISM media should protect the community against countervailing theological trends. Hence, its media operatives are beholden to keep track of global theological discussions, especially those taking place among rival organisations, by monitoring ‘the publications of groups of falsehood

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and evil imams and expos[ing] their contradictions, violations, and grave sins’. Fifth, ISM media must be technologically sophisticated. Abu Hamzah held that technological innovation is central to the development of effective propaganda and he thus advised that media workers should prepare ‘training courses to teach all media techniques via the [I]nternet and divide these courses into levels’. They should also consider sending ‘youth to take scientific crash courses’ on media production. Sixth, ISM media must be international, with operatives ‘establish[ing] communication and dialogue with those who sympathize with and support [the ISM,] especially those in the countries that in some way or another enjoy freedom of the press and media, or countries where the World Wide Web cannot be easily controlled’. Seventh, ISM media should be regular and consistent. Muhajir specifically noted that media operatives ‘should prepare a daily video news bulletin that focuses on updates, and analyse events, especially those related to the mujahidin’, which should be broadcast ‘every morning to cover all the events taken from the day before’. Eighth, ISM media campaigns must be built upon evidence-based foundations about what does and does not work. He advised that scientific studies on conflict communication – that is, ‘every useful item’ as well as its ‘sources’ – should be read and integrated across the influence spectrum. Ninth, ISM media should involve, at least to a limited extent, Internet-based subterfuge, with operatives ‘establish[ing] moderate Islamic forums’ with a view to ‘deceiving the infidels’. Tenth, ISM media must work to win over ‘scholars and knowledge-seekers’ before ‘call[ing] them to perform their duty to respond to the deviations of those who are deviants and delinquents’, while also ‘show[ing] the extent of the deviant creeds of nationalism and democracy’. Eleventh, ISM media must be secure. Its operatives must hone their cyber capabilities – ­offensive and defensive – on the one hand being ‘careful about the issue of piracy [hacking]’ while also ‘encourag[ing] all those who have the talent to perform duties of piracy’. ISM-affiliated hackers, Abu Hamzah held, should be provided ‘with instructions on all they can do to increase their capabilities’ and be ‘support[ed] with all possible means to destroy the sites of the enemy, raid the

posts of the enemy’s military, their security, and their political foundations’. • Twelfth, ISM media should be consistent. Echoing the point above about regularity, Abu Hamzah called upon media operatives to produce regular in-depth reports on its insurgency, specifically ‘a memorandum of proposals and guidance [published] on a monthly basis for the mujahidin and the commanders of jihad’. This regularity would ‘function as a bridge between the ummah and its leaders’. • Thirteenth, ISM media should always account for audience reception. To this end, media operatives must ‘register all reactions that arise from all the mujahidin and the leaders of jihad and what they say and do, especially the reactions coming from the enemy’. These reactions must be meticulously reviewed with a view to ‘recognis[ing] their positive and negative points, in order to be able to improve performance, solve mistakes, and increase the level of our performance’. • Fourteenth, and finally, ISM media must be built off of ‘organized and authenticated teamwork’, such that all related efforts, no matter how complex, can be ‘carried out in accordance with security conditions’.

In the years since 2010, it has been eminently apparent that the ISM’s media operatives were listening – and are continuing to listen – to Abu Hamzah’s principles. Indeed, even a cursory glance at its recent influence efforts yields multiple examples of his ideas being operationalized almost word-for-word: the execution videos in which Mohammed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazi took centre stage were prototypical attempts to ‘sow terror’ among its adversaries; intellectual attacks against ‘the image of infidels’ continue to be ubiquitous across its materials; and the regular inclusion of excerpts from mainstream news coverage about the ISM in its own coverage are testament to the time that ISM media operatives spend monitoring ‘enemy’ discourse – the list goes on. Further evidence for the internalisation of Abu Hamzah’s information doctrine is found in ‘Media operative, you are also a Muslim warrior’, a field-guide for ISM propagandists that was published offline in 2015 and online

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in April 2016 (al-Himmah Library, 2016; Winter, 2017). Developing and reiterating the above ideas, it too addresses media operatives, contending that ‘the Islamic ummah today is waiting for you to lead it by its hands to the shari’ah and rid it of the inferiority and injustice from which it suffers’. Media operatives are told that it is their job to ‘open [the global Sunni Muslim community’s] eyes’ as to their organisation’s ‘creed, methodology, and intentions’. This way, they can ‘paint a brighter picture’ of jihad, one that better appeals to would-be supporters of the group. Closely echoing Abu Hamzah, the document notes that media operatives must defend against ‘the frenzied media campaign’ and ‘deceptive ways’ of the enemy. To this end, reiterating his advice, they are told to ‘expose the deviances of secularists and hypocrites, responding to those who dishearten, alarm or discourage the Muslims [and] call for tolerance and coexistence with the unbelievers’. Finally, and again restating Abu Hamzah’s code, the guidelines hold that media operatives should wage war in and through the information space, in which propaganda can, in certain circumstances, ‘actually be more potent than atomic bombs’. From the narrative of utopia to its polemics against unsympathetic religious scholars, rival jihadist groups, and adversary governments, the ISM’s influence campaigns have been unparalleled in their execution. However, as set out in documents like these – which are but a drop in the ocean of the materials that are out there – their strategic genius could perhaps have been anticipated.

DEPLOYING THE CAMPAIGN In November 2016, one of the ISM’s encrypted social media accounts published a video shot in northern Syria (Aleppo Province Media Office, 2016a). While the bulk of it focused on martyrdom commemoration, the opening sequence focused on the evolution

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of the ISM’s offline influence networks over the course of the last decade. It opens with a balaclava-wearing media worker skulking surreptitiously through a darkened ally before casting to the floor a compact disk bearing the title ‘Video releases of the Islamic State’. A caption in the bottom-right corner of the video frame denotes that this was how media outreach was undertaken ‘in the year 1427 after Hijrah’. Immediately afterwards, the figure ‘1427’ begins to roll upwards, as if on fruit-machine, until it reads ‘1438’ – that is, in the Islamic calendar, the present day – the accompanying footage transporting the viewer through time up to late 2016. As cameras pan across a ‘typical’ scene of media outreach a decade later – viewers are shown a packed open-air cinema complete with red faux-leather seating and an overhead projector – the audience is treated to a celebration of the ISM’s revolutionised approach towards influence deployment. This brief vignette captures the transition of the ISM’s communication operations from crude and secretive to overt and sophisticated, an evolution that we briefly unpack in the following pages.

From Local to Global… The ISM media department has operated continuously since its formation in 2004, seamlessly navigating five name changes with no gap in production (Whiteside, 2016: 9).1 Its presence has been integral and unflinching in spite of the many political evolutions that the movement went through, and it has always calibrated its wares towards both local and global audiences. This approach can be tracked straight back to 1980s Afghanistan, the first modern-day expeditionary jihad. Imitating the practices they saw in their early battlefield experiences there, the early leaders of the ISM media department focused their attention on the local, offline level, developing clandestine networks for the mass production and

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distribution of handbills and video CDs (Whiteside, 2016: 12).2 At the same time, they experimented with the online sphere, posting their first statement to jihadist websites in 2004 (al-Zarqawi, 2004). By 2007 they were posting almost 1000 online statements a year (Kimmage, 2008). Due to military and political setbacks, though, this level of productivity was set to decline. The end of 2009 found the group reinventing itself and experimenting with new media techniques in support of a future comeback. The release of some of its key veterans from prison that year seems to have reinvigorated its design and deployment tacticians, and there was an observable improvement in its narrative style (Whiteside, 2016: 16–8). This trend only accelerated when, in 2011, the US military left Iraq and neighbouring Syria slipped into civil war, two developments that, although they were entirely external to the ISM, gave its influence strategists room to breathe and further globalise their brand. Hence, while they still prioritised influence efforts at the local level, hoping to win the allegiance of resistance networks in Iraq and now Syria, their approach underwent a qualitative shift toward globalisation, something that enabled them to focus on the acquisition of the foreign fighters now flowing towards the Syrian conflict.3 Capturing this human resource soon became a priority for the ISM, and the newly global emphasis of its influence operations that followed served as a significant pull factor.

And Back Again The above dynamics, coupled with the rapid deterioration of the situation in Syria, meant that the ISM was soon able to control populations much larger than it ever could in Iraq in the 2000s. Indeed, by 2013, its proto-state project had become a very real endeavour, something that ushered in a raft of new situational exigencies for the group and prompted it to once again prioritise the local information

theatre. This period was characterised by countless influence innovations, many of which specifically revolved around the issue of media deployment. The most crucial of its physical innovations were the nuqtah i’lamiyyah (literally, ‘media point’), the Office for Proselytisation and Mosques, and the Ministry for Education. Regarding the first of these, a March 2016 article in the ISM’s official newspaper, Naba’, provides some revealing insights. Established in places that were ‘lacking in communications mechanisms’, media points were intended to ‘present the media in all of its forms to the ordinary people’ and serve as a ‘coupling link’ between the ISM as an organization and its civilian constituents (Naba’, 2016: 12–3). At one and the same time, they delivered news updates on the war effort and projected the utopian caliphate narrative. Wherever they were, they screened propaganda films while also serving as satellite publishing houses, radio listening points, and digital distribution centres. Importantly, they were not limited to towns and cities – mobile kiosks were also rigged up so that the ISM’s audio-visual output could reach even the remotest areas of Iraq and Syria. In Raqqah, which acted as the central nervous system of the caliphate until 2017, activists that had lived there under the ISM asserted to the authors that there were ‘many [media points] in the city and its environs’. According to the aforementioned Naba’ article, each kiosk, of which there were 25 in Raqqah in March 2016, ‘provide[d] a full media archive in a number of languages, from English, French and Kurdish to Turkish, Farsi and Bangla, and so one’. The same article also claimed that the group had as many as 60 media points in Nineveh Province – with more than 20 in the city of Mosul alone – and a further 39 in Dijlah Province. This initiative was complemented by the ISM’s Centre for Proselytisation and Mosques, a proto-state-wide outreach unit that was dedicated to in-theatre recruitment operations. Devoted to enlisting both

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civilians and soldiers to the group’s ideology, the centre operated doggedly in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2018. The scope and sophistication of its activities were encapsulated in a May 2016 video from Syria which documented one of its many enlistment drives (Aleppo Province Media Office, 2016b). First, a group of its officials are shown distributing handbills in mudbrick villages. Next, there is an account of its da’wah and shari’ah courses: young boys are depicted being coached in tahfidh – that is, learning the Qur’an by rote – as well as being taught how to write. The narrator explains that, on top of these seminaries, there are similar courses on offer for women and girls, something that had, he claims, resulted in mothers signing their own children up to volunteer for military operations. The campaign is shown to conclude with a sight familiar to the ISM, a da’wah caravan party at which villagers are shown rapturously pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before tucking into boiled sweets and bursting into song. The above was just one example of the Centre’s in-theatre recruitment drives – as many other propaganda videos and photograph reports attest, they occurred continuously across the ISM’s territories between 2013 and 2018. Moreover, they were not just confined to outreach in rural villages – rather, they ran to the very heart of the organisation’s mosque administration, too. Indeed, through the Centre, the Islamic State weaponised religious institutions across Syria and Iraq, using them to peddle a unified strategic narrative of warfare and utopia. Finally, and running in parallel to these efforts, was the Ministry for Education, which presided over public schooling. After its sweeping victories of 2014, the ISM commandeered the pedagogical infrastructure that was already in place – teachers were reeducated or, failing that, cast off, and entire curriculums were revised (Somerville and Dalati, 2017). When the schools eventually reopened, they worked to internalise ISM norms – alongside a revisionist history of

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Islam and ‘Islamic’ geography, arithmetic was taught with reference to AK-47s and hand grenades (Engel, 2016). Candidates for shibl (‘cub’) camps were cultivated here, too (Almohammad, 2018). Upon selection, they would be dispatched to boarding facilities in rural areas, provided with weapons training, and subjected to intensive ideological coaching, a cocktail of measures that turned many of them into the ISM’s most committed fighters. The group’s approach towards the deployment of in-theatre influence operations was highly sophisticated between 2013 and 2018, but it did not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, these efforts were a scaled-up continuation of what it had been doing clandestinely in Iraq for years. Indeed, just as had been the case during the first ten years of its existence, the ISM was merely leveraging pre-existing social structures alongside a set of its own.

CONCLUSION Johnson’s (2017, xxxii–iii) research into the Afghan Taliban’s influence operations between 2004 and 2011 found that they were more effective than those of NATO/ISAF and the Afghan government because they were ‘precise, focused, and localized, recognizing political and social cleavages in Afghanistan’. Their efforts took the form of ‘night letters’, poetic chants, poetry, DVDs, periodicals, and text messages. While the Taliban does have an online social media presence – a fact largely ignored by analysts due the perception that its insurgency is an internal struggle – it is clear that its principal focus is at the local, offline level. Over the last two decades, this microtargeted approach paid significant dividends to the group, enabling it to lastingly undermine the centralized government and its sponsors. The case of the ISM is similar, at least in the offline, local context. However, its in-theatre influence efforts were supplemented – perhaps even outshone – by its

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aggressive global campaign, something that has obscured this fact and meant that analysts rarely recognise that its leadership has long maintained a careful balance between influence at the international level and influence at the local level. To be sure, its international activism is intuitive: the ISM is fighting a different war to that being fought by the Afghan Taliban. The very character of its conflict in Iraq and Syria, as well as its global aspirations in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, presents it with very different exigencies. Whatever the case, the ISM’s response has been more than adequate. Indeed, it is unquestionable that its synergised local and global influence campaigns have secured it, possibly temporarily, the allegiance of a broader spectrum of supporters than any of its jihadist predecessors and rivals had ever managed before. With the above in mind, it is justified to state that its approach towards influence operations is unprecedented; however – and critically – it did not emerge out of a vacuum. Rather, everything the world witnessed in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2018 stemmed from the movement’s past experience of the need to focus on local political dynamics. From 2003 onwards, this panned out in Iraq, and it has since panned out in Syria, too, from late 2011 to date. The rise of the ISM caliphate in Syria and Iraq was a vindication of its integrated local policy approach and in-theatre propaganda campaigns, which, together, were successful in defeating rivals and establishing localised brand dominance. Once this had been achieved, the ISM’s leadership replicated its campaign at the global level, something in which it had been succeeding until its territorial collapse in 2017. In years to come, there is no certainty that the movement will be able remain the world’s preeminent jihadist organisation. This is for two reasons. First, its principal rival, alQa’idah, has learned and adapted from its approach towards influence warfare and,

with great tenacity, itself begun to refocus its attention on local dynamics in places like Syria and Yemen. Second, the territorial collapse of the ISM caliphate has already dented its legitimacy, undermining the perceived justification for its international demands for allegiance. As its ‘golden years’, that is, 2014 to 2016, fade into distant memory, the ISM will likely struggle to return to anything like its former level of prominence – unless, that is, its international terrorist capabilities are realised, or it manages to replicate its one-time domination of local dynamics intheatre, matching this with a corresponding influence campaign that exploits and expands the many socio-political cracks that already lie between its global adversaries.

Notes 1  For example, Abu Maysara al-’Iraqi went from being the Tawhid wa-l-Jihad’s spokesman to Al-Qa’idah in Iraq and later Mujahidin Shura Council without a pause, just as Abu Muhammad al-’Adnani went from being spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq to ISIS and finally the Islamic State. 2  In 2007, the US military uncovered large media centres entirely devoted to editing and massproducing hundreds of propaganda products a day, including handbills for mosque distribution, video clips for personal phones and computers, and long-form videos for posting on invitationonly websites. 3  See, for example, the al-Furqan Foundation video, ‘Messages from the Land of Epics 13,’ which was distributed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant in December 2013. Among other things, it featured messages for the people of Sinai and mainland Egypt from an Islamic Court judge in Aleppo Province and a foreign fighter in Iraq conducting a suicide operation.

REFERENCES Primary Sources al-Baghdadi, A.’U., 2007. Harvest of the years for the state of the muwahhidin (monotheists). Furqan Foundation.

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Al-Himmah Library. 2016. Anonymous. Media operative, you are a mujahid, too.. al-Juburi, M., 2007. The establishment of the first Islamic administration of the Islamic State of Iraq. Furqan Foundation. al-Muhajir, A.H., 2010. To those entrusted with the message. Furqan Foundation. al-’Utaybi, A.S., 2013. Letter to al-Qa’idah leadership (dated April-May 2007). Ana alMuslim Network. al-Zarqawi, A.M., 2004. Audio message by Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, commander of the mujahidin in Iraq and the person who tops the US wanted list, addressed to the Muslim nation. Audiotape transcript, Open Source Enterprise document GMP20040107000001. Aleppo Province Media Office. 2016a. Anonymous. Raiding the villages to spread guidance. Aleppo Province Media Office. 2016b. Anonymous. The seekers of life. Naba’. 2016. Anonymous. The media point: A window inside the media of the Islamic State. XXI, March 8.

Articles, Books and Media Coverage Almohammad, A., 2018. ISIS child soldiers in Syria: The structural and predatory recruitment, enlistment, pre-training indoctrination, training, and deployment. International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Available at: https://icct.nl/wp-content/ uploads/2018/02/ICCT-Almohammad-ISISChild-Soldiers-In-Syria-Feb2018.pdf. DOI: 10.19165/2018.1.14 Amarasingam, A., 2015. Elton ‘Ibrahim’ Simpson’s Path to Jihad in Garland, Texas. War on the Rocks, 14 May. Available at: https:// warontherocks.com/2015/05/elton ibrahim-simpsons-path-to-jihad-in-garlandtexas/ BBC Monitoring., 2017. Analysis: Islamic State media output goes into sharp decline. 23 November. Available at: https://monitoring. bbc.co.uk/product/c1dnnj2k Benson, P., 2004. CIA: Zarqawi tape ‘probably authentic’. CNN, April 7. Available at: http:// edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/04/07/ zarqawi.tape/index.html

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Berger, J.M. and Morgan, J., 2015. The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Carter, J., Maher, S. and Neumann, P., 2014. #Greenbirds: Measuring Importance and Influence in Syrian Foreign Fighter Networks. London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, King’s College. Chouliaraki, L. and Kissas, A., 2018. The communication of horrorism: A typology of ISIS online death videos. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35 (1), pp. 24–39. Conway, M., Khawaja, M., Lakhani, S., Reffin, J., Robertson, A. and Weir, D., 2017. Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and its Impacts. VOX-Pol, 42 (1–2), pp. 141–160. Engel, P., 2016. Inside the textbooks that ISIS uses to indoctrinate children. Business Insider, August 21. Available at: https:// www.businessinsider.com/isis-textbooks2016-8?r=US&IR=T Fishman, B., 2016. The master plan: ISIS, alQaeda, and the jihadi strategy for final ­victory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hafez, M., 2007. Al-Qa’ida losing ground in Iraq. CTC Sentinel, 1 (1). Ingram, H., 2016. An analysis of Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine. Australian Journal of Political Science, 51 (3), pp. 458–477. Ingram, H., 2017. An analysis of Inspire and Dabiq: Lessons from AQAP and Islamic State’s propaganda war. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40 (5), pp. 357–375. Ingram, H., 2018. Islamic State’s English-­ language magazines, 2014–2017: Trends & implications for CT-CVE strategic communications. The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. Johnson, T.H., 2017. Taliban narratives: The use and power of stories in the Afghanistan conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kimmage, D., 2008. The al-Qaeda media nexus: The virtual network behind the global message. Washington, DC: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Available at: https:// docs.rferl.org/en-US/AQ_Media_Nexus.pdf Kimmage, D. and Ridolfo, K., 2007. Iraqi insurgent media: War of images and idea. Washington, DC: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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Available at: https://docs.rferl.org/archive/ online/OLPDFfiles/insurgent.pdf Klausen, J., 2015. Tweeting the jihad: Social media networks of Western foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 38 (1), pp. 1–22. Macnair, L. and Frank, R., 2017. ‘To my brothers in the West …’: A thematic analysis of videos produced by the Islamic State’s alHayat Media Center. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 33 (3), pp. 234–253. Milton, D., 2016. Communication breakdown: Unravelling the Islamic State’s media efforts. West Point: Combating Terrorism Center, United States Military Academy. Newman, M., 2004. Video Appears to Show Beheading of American Civilian. The New York Times, May 11. Availableat: https:// www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/middleeast/video-appears-to-showbeheading-of-american.html Rogan, H., 2005. Jihadism online – A study of how al-Qaida and radical Islamist groups use the Internet for terrorist purposes. Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt 00915. Available at: https:// admin.ffi.no/no/Rapporter/06-00915.pdf Rogan, H., 2007. ‘Al-Qaeda media strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007. Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt. Available at: https:// www.ffi.no/no/Rapporter/07-02729.pdf Somerville, Q. and Dalati, R., 2017. An education in terror. BBC News, August 17. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ resources/idt-sh/an_education_in_terror Stalinsky, S. and Sosnow, R., 2017. Germanybased encrypted messaging app Telegram emerges as jihadis’ preferred c­ ommunications

platform. MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), January 3. Available at: http://cjlab.memri.org/lab-projects/trackingj i h a d i - t e r ro r i s t - u s e - o f - s o c i a l - m e d i a / germany-based-encrypted-messaging-apptelegram-emerges-as-jihadis-preferredcommunications-platform-part-v-of-memriseries-encryption-­technology-embraced-byisis-al-qaeda-other-jihadis/ Whiteside, C., 2016. Lighting the path: The evolution of the Islamic State media enterprise (2003-2016). International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Available at: https://icct.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ ICCT-Whiteside-Lighting-the-Path-the-Evolution-of-the-Islamic-State-Media-Enterprise2003-2016-Nov2016.pdf Winkler, C., El Damanhoury, K., Dicker, A. and Lemieux, A., 2016. The medium is terrorism: Transformation of the about to die trope in Dabiq. Terrorism and Political Violence, 31 (2), pp. 224–243. Winter, C., 2015. Documenting the virtual ‘caliphate’. London: The Quilliam Foundation. Winter, C., 2017. Media jihad: The Islamic State’s doctrine for information warfare. London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Winter, C., 2018. Apocalypse, later: a longitudinal study of the Islamic State brand. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35 (1), pp. 103–121. Zelin, A., 2015. Picture or it didn’t happen: A snapshot of the Islamic State’s official media output. Perspectives on Terrorism, 9 (4).

34 The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda in Cyberspace Gabriel Weimann

INTRODUCTION This chapter reviews the use of online platforms for terrorist propaganda and the proliferation of online terrorist propaganda over the years. Terrorism, from its early days, relied on the use of mass media to spread fear, to launch propaganda campaigns and to recruit sympathizers and fighters. Technological advances in communication technologies provided terrorists with the opportunity to produce media-oriented spectacles of terror. However, terrorist attempts to use the mainstream mass media were often blocked by the media’s gatekeepers and regulations. Thus, the move to cyberspace was inevitable. The Internet, the most open and free channel of communication, provided terrorist propaganda with the ideal platform. The section When Terrorism Met the Internet describes the advantages of the Internet for terrorist propaganda and the emergence of terrorist websites while the following section, Terrorist Migration to Social Media,

focuses on a later stage when terrorists realized the communicative advantages of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others. Terrorist use of social media poses several potentially serious threats to national security as well as to civil liberties, as described in the section The Perils of Terrorists in Social Media. The use of audience segmentation and profiling of target groups and individuals, referred to as narrowcasting, has become an important tactic in online terrorist propaganda. The section on Narrowcasting describes how terrorists focus on specific segments of the public, including children, women, diaspora communities and more. The growing awareness of terrorist abuse of online platforms led to counter measures, detailed in the section Countering Online Terrorism. As described, there are three forms of counter measures: the first one combines approaches that are aimed at reducing the supply of terrorist content online (e.g., removing terrorist content from the Net). The second involves reducing

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the demand for radicalization and violent extremist messages by directly challenging the extremist narratives and by promoting awareness and education of young people. The third way is to exploit terrorists’ online communications to gain intelligence and gather evidence in the most comprehensive and systematic fashion possible. However, terrorists learned how to respond to most of these efforts and apply sophisticated counter measures to avoid identification or removal of material. One of these measures was the transition to the Dark Net, described in the section Going Darker: The Appeal of the Dark Net. Recent studies reveal how terrorists and extremists are creating growing numbers of safe havens on the Dark Net to plot future attacks, raise funds and recruit new followers. Terrorists are now using the Dark Net also as a reservoir of propaganda: the removal of extremist and terrorist content from the surface web increases the risk that material of terrorist organizations may be lost. Much of this material later resurfaces on the Dark Net. Finally, looking at the future, the Conclusion section presents two venues for countering terrorist propaganda: the ­content-based approach and the technologybased approach. The content-based perspective relies on countering terrorist narratives while the technology-based approach suggests greater public-private co-operation in the design of future communication platforms.

MEDIA AND TERRORISM: THE THEATER OF TERROR From its early days, terrorism has combined propaganda, communication and psychology. Specifically, the word ‘terror’ comes from the Latin word ‘terrere’ that means ‘to frighten’ or ‘to scare’. The first use of largescale terrorism was during the popular phase of the French Revolution. The period from June 1793 to July 1794 in France is known as

the Reign of Terror, or simply ‘the Terror’, due to the upheaval following the overthrow of the monarchy. This threw the nation into chaos and the government into frenzied paranoia. The Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced thousands to the guillotine. Estimates of the death toll range between 16,000 and 40,000. The executions were conducted before large audiences and were accompanied by sensational publicity thus spreading the intended fear. Modern terrorists have become exposed to new opportunities for launching propaganda campaigns as a result of technological advances in communication technologies. They replaced the public executions in Parisian squares with spectacular violent productions performed on the global stages of the mass media and online platforms. Several academicians and journalists have noticed the emergence of media-oriented terrorism. Laqueur said that ‘the media are the terrorist’s best friends, the terrorists’ act by itself is nothing, publicity is all’ (Laqueur, 1976: 104), while Nacos noted that, ‘getting the attention of the mass media, the public, and decision makers is the raison d’etre behind modern terrorism’s increasingly shocking violence’ (Nacos, 1994: 8). In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-­ command, wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq at the time: ‘We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media’.1 More recently, an ex-Islamic State (ISIS) operator described his organization, known for its focus on propaganda, as: It is a whole army of media personnel. The media people are more important than the soldiers. Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic State.2

The emergence of media-oriented terrorism led several communication and terrorism scholars to re-conceptualize modern terrorism within the framework of symbolic

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communication theory. As Jenkins (1975: 4) concluded in his analysis of international terrorism: Terrorist attacks are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press. Taking and holding hostages increases the drama. The hostages themselves often mean nothing to the terrorists. Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims. Terrorism is a theater.

Several terrorist organizations realized the potential of mass-mediated terrorism in terms of effectively reaching huge audiences. Weimann and Winn (1994) examined 6,714 incidents of international terrorism from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The analysis revealed a significant increase in terrorist acts that apply media-oriented considerations (in choice of victims, location, timing, form of action, contact with media, etc.). No wonder that Bell (1978: 89) argued, ‘It has become more alluring for the frantic few to appear on the world stage of television than remain obscure guerrillas of the bush’. It is clear that media-wise terrorists were planning their actions with the media as a major consideration. They select targets, location and timing, according to media preferences, trying to satisfy the media criteria for newsworthiness, the media timetables and deadlines and media access. They prepare visuals for the media, such as video clips of their actions, taped interviews and declarations from perpetrators, films, press releases or VNRs (video news releases). Modern terrorists are feeding the media, directly and indirectly, with their propaganda material, often disguised as news items. ISIS’s propaganda has been described as the most sophisticated and effective terrorist campaign. According to Aly et al. (2016), the ISIS media strategy combined five narratives: (1) mercy (as opposed to brutality); (2) victimhood (for example, collateral damage blamed on the enemy); (3) war or military gains; (4) belonging (appealing to especially foreign recruits with friendship, security and

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a sense of belonging); and (5) utopianism, that is, not just talking about the caliphate but enacting it. Thus, ISIS’s propaganda was intended to appeal to a broad audience, not only bloodthirsty fighters, which helps to explain its recruitment success. In their study of ‘terrorist theming’, Kinney et  al. (2018) examined how the propaganda campaigns of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS maintained similar strategies of signaling global illegitimacy while cultivating distinct themes of terrorism in an effort to differentiate themselves from one another. The findings suggest that terrorist organizations use propaganda to signal distinct organizational identity, even while broadly operating under the umbrella identity of Islamic fundamentalism. Numerous studies have documented terrorist success in reaching global audiences through media-oriented strategy and tactics (e.g., Archetti, 2012; Jenkins, 2003; Nacos, 1994, 2016; Norris et  al., 2003; Schmid, 1989; Tugwell, 2017; Wilkinson, 1997). Research on media and terrorism in the post-9/11 era revealed that modern terrorist organizations are very much aware of standards and values governing media selection of news and learned how to exploit these norms to accomplish their objectives (e.g., Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2008). However, terrorist attempts to channel their propaganda to the mainstream mass media were often blocked by the media’s gatekeepers. The emergence of the Internet – the most liberal, open and free channel of communication – provided terrorist propaganda with the ideal platform. The Internet has significantly expanded the opportunities for terrorists to secure publicity. Until the advent of the Internet, terrorists’ hopes of winning publicity for their causes and activities depended on attracting the attention of television, radio or the print media. These traditional media have ‘selection thresholds’ (multistage processes of editorial selection) that terrorists often cannot reach. No such thresholds, of course, exist on the terrorists’ own websites. The fact

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that many terrorists now have direct control over the content of their message offers further opportunities to shape how they are perceived by different target audiences and to manipulate their own image and the image of their enemies.

WHEN TERRORISM MET THE INTERNET Paradoxically, the very decentralized network of communication that the US security services created out of fear of the Soviet Union now serves the interests of the greatest foe of the West’s security services since the end of the Cold War: international terror. The roots of the modern Internet are to be found in the early 1970s, during the days of the Cold War, when the US Department of Defense was concerned about reducing the vulnerability of its communication networks to nuclear attack. The Defense Department decided to decentralize the whole system by creating an interconnected web of computer networks. After twenty years of development and use by academic researchers, the Internet quickly expanded and changed its character when it was opened up to commercial and private users. However, with the enormous growth in the size and use of the network, utopian visions of the promise of the Internet were challenged by the proliferation of pornographic and violent content on the web and by the use of the Internet by extremist organizations of various kinds. Groups with very different political goals, but united in their readiness to employ terrorist tactics, started using the network to distribute their propaganda, to communicate with their supporters, to foster public awareness of and sympathy for their causes and even to execute operations. The growing presence of modern terrorism on the Internet is at the nexus of two key trends: the democratization of communications driven by user generated content on the Internet, and

the growing awareness of modern terrorists of the potential of the Internet for their purposes. Decentralized and providing almost perfect anonymity, it cannot be subjected to control or restriction and allows access to anyone who wants it. Large or small, terrorist groups started to post their own websites, using this medium to spread propaganda, raise funds, seduce, radicalize, recruit and train members, communicate and conspire, plan and launch attacks. In 1998, around half of the thirty organizations designated as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ under the US Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 maintained websites; by 2000, virtually all terrorist groups had established their presence on the Internet (Weimann, 2006). The Council on Foreign Relations concluded its 2009 report on online terrorism: Terrorists increasingly are using the Internet as a means of communication both with each other and the rest of the world. By now, nearly everyone has seen at least some images from propaganda videos published on terrorist sites and rebroadcast on the world’s news networks… The Internet is a powerful tool for terrorists, who use online message boards and chat rooms to share information, coordinate attacks, spread propaganda, raise funds, and recruit.3

Whom do the Internet terrorists target at their sites? Analyses of the propaganda content of terrorist websites suggested three different audiences (Tsfati and Weimann, 2002; Weimann, 2004; 2006): • Current and potential supporters: Terrorist often target their local and overseas supporters with a site in the local language and will provide detailed information about their activities and internal politics of the organization, its allies and its leaders. • International public opinion. The international publics, who are not directly involved in the conflict but who may have some interest in the issues involved, are courted with sites in languages other than the local tongue. Most sites offer links to versions in several languages. Judging from the content of many of the sites, it appears that foreign journalists are also targeted.

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Press releases are often placed on the websites in an effort to get the organization’s point of view into the traditional media. The detailed background information is also very useful for international reporters. • Enemy publics. Some terrorist sites make an effort to demoralize the enemy by posting executions of captured enemies, by threatening attacks and by fostering feelings of guilt about the enemy’s conduct and motives. In the process, they also seek to stimulate public debate in their enemies’ states, to change public opinion, and to weaken public support for the governing regime.

The proliferation of terrorist websites, forums and chatrooms caused a growing concern among governments, security forces and counterterrorism organizations. Subsequently, the terrorist sites were challenged by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, counter terrorism services and civil activists who attacked them, forcing them to change their URL frequently or to employ their own firewalls and protective measures such as ­password-accessed-only sites. Accessing these sites became riskier and more difficult. Consequently, to broaden their reach, Internetsavvy terrorists have learned to use the newest online platforms, commonly known as the ‘new media’ or ‘social media’.

TERRORIST MIGRATION TO SOCIAL MEDIA Social media depends on communication technologies such as personal computers and/ or mobile technology and web-based networks to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify usergenerated content. Social media differentiates from traditional/conventional media in many aspects such as interactivity, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy and permanence (Morgan et al., 2012). They are comparatively inexpensive and easily accessible. They enable anyone to upload, download or access

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information in an easy, user-friendly and fast way. Traditional media, such as radio, television or the press, are characterized as ‘one-tomany’ communication, where the audience might be virtually limitless, but a small cohort of established institutions selectively disseminates information. Social media platforms, by contrast, allow information consumers to also act as communicators, yielding a vast expansion in the number of information transmitters present in the media landscape. This process resulted in lowering the barriers to enter communication markets by letting in small, diffused sets of communicators and groups who can easily share with others online news, pictures and videos. In recent years, these platforms grew in popularity. By 2018, Facebook had over 2.2 billion active users, YouTube had 1.5 billion active users, while Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp follow behind with 1.3 billon users each. These are the most popular platforms but are most certainly not the only platforms that allows users the chance to share their thoughts, ideas and experience with everyone. Other outlets include Twitter, Instagram, QQ, WeChat, Weibu, Tumblr and many more. Social network penetration worldwide is ever increasing. In 2017, 71 percent of internet users were social network users and these figures are expected to grow. In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social network users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. The increased worldwide usage of smartphones and mobile devices has opened up the possibilities of mobile social networks with increased features such as location-based services. Most social networks are also available as mobile social apps, whereas some networks have been optimized for mobile internet browsing. These trends were also noticed by terrorists, who quickly learned how to harness the new social media for their purposes: Today, 90% of terrorist activity on the Internet takes place using social networking tools, be it independent bulletin boards, Paltalk, or Yahoo! eGroups. These forums act as a virtual firewall to

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help safeguard the identities of those who participate, and they offer subscribers a chance to make direct contact with terrorist representatives, to ask questions, and even to contribute and help out the cyberjihad. (Noguchi and Kohlmann, 2006).

The turn to social media followed. The main motivation to use Facebook and other social media was properly outlined by the terrorists themselves in a Jihadi online forum calling for a ‘Facebook Invasion’. While the identity of the writer is unknown, the forum, alFaloja, which is password-protected, is a very popular and effective Jihadi platform. The posting noted that, This [Facebook] is a great idea, and better than the forums. Instead of waiting for people to [come to you so you can] inform them, you go to them and teach them! …[I] mean, if you have a group of 5,000 people, with the press of a button you [can] send them a standardized message. I entreat you, by God, to begin registering for Facebook as soon as you [finish] reading this post. Familiarize yourselves with it. This post is a seed and a beginning, to be followed by serious efforts to optimize our Facebook usage. Let’s start distributing Islamic jihadi publications, posts, articles, and pictures. Let’s anticipate a reward from the Lord of the Heavens, dedicate our purpose to God, and help our colleagues.4

Terrorists have good reasons to use social media. First, these channels are by far the most popular with their intended audience, which allows terrorist organizations to be part of the mainstream. Second, social media channels are user-friendly, reliable and free. Finally, social networking allows terrorists to reach out to their specific target audiences and virtually ‘knock on their doors’ – in contrast to older models of websites in which terrorists had to wait for visitors to come to them. Furthermore, the new social media have technical advantages for terrorists: sharing, uploading or downloading files and videos no longer requires fast computers or any computers for that matter; it no longer requires sharing sites or savvy members capable of uploading such videos. Rather, smart phones and social media accounts are all that is needed to instantly share material

in real time with tens of thousands of jihadists. Thus, for example, on December 22, 2016, a message from the French-language media division of the Islamic State (ISIS) was published via the Telegram (an instant message application that uses end-to-end encryption-based technology) channel of An-Nur Media Center. The post called all followers to publish and share information in order to take part in the ‘media war’: As for you, O supporters of the Caliphate, O brothers and sisters in Allah, do not wait for the publications and communiques! Invoke Allah without whom victories would not be possible. Publish and share the information, and take command over the social networks and participate in the media war.

What makes this post interesting (but not necessarily unique) is the call for taking ‘command over the social networks’ as opposed to waiting for publications and communiques to arrive. This is just one example of the way terrorists and extremists perceive social media as important (if not vital) tools to spread their agenda, and they are essential for their cause like any other asset in the war they wage. Increasingly, terrorist groups and their sympathizers are shifting their online presence from websites, chatrooms and forums to social platforms (Ingram, 2017; Klausen, 2015). This shift was acknowledged by Adam Gadahn, who headed al-Qaeda’s media wing, Al-Sahab. In a March 1, 2013 interview with Inspire, the online al-Qaeda magazine, he noted the importance of American social media companies, saying: This is your day, so rise to the challenge and become a part of history in the making… we must make every effort to reach out to Muslims both through new media like Facebook and Twitter… and we should fully acquaint ourselves with both the people to whom we are reaching out, as well as the methodology and cause to which we are inviting them, so that we are able to hone our methods, refine our techniques, and spread our message in an intelligent and educated fashion accessible to all sectors, sections, levels and factions of the ummah.

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In similar vein, Umar Patek, who masterminded the October 2002 bombing in Bali that left 202 dead, warned on June 7, 2012 during his trial: ‘…For those who do not know how to commit jihad, they should understand that there are several ways of committing jihad’. He added: ‘This is not the Stone Age… This is the Internet era, there is Facebook, Twitter and others’. Maybe the most significant and effective terrorist campaign on social media has been launched by ISIS. The Sunni terrorist group ISIS, which operated in Syria and Iraq, launched a multi-platform online campaign covering the entire range of social media. ISIS has used social media to seduce, radicalize and recruit. In 2014, ISIS opened numerous social media accounts for distributing its videos, audios and images via various channels and in many languages, thereby avoiding online censorship. As part of these intensive propaganda efforts, it has launched Al-Hayat Media, a new media branch specifically targeting Western and non-Arabic speaking audiences. Launched in May 2014, this new media branch follows ISIS’s general media strategy of distributing online videos, ‘news’ reports, articles and translated jihadi materials. Its main Twitter account is in German, but it also publishes materials in English and French as well as other languages. For instance, it posted a speech by ISIS spokesperson Abu Muhammad Al-’Adnani translated into seven languages (English, Turkish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian and Russian). Following the aggressive ISIS offensive in Iraq in June 2014, Twitter closed down many official ISIS and proISIS accounts, including the main accounts of Al-Hayat Media, in German, English and French, but these were soon replaced by new Twitter accounts. The recruitment of thousands of fighters from European and North American countries, as revealed in their active presence in Syria and Iraq, indicates the success of ISIS’s online campaign. On Twitter, ISIS was very active and dynamic. For example, under the hashtag

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#AllEyesOnIsis, ISIS tried to appeal to Muslim youth, scare ISIS’s enemies on the ground and intimidate the rest of the world. A Twitter campaign entitled ‘One Billion Muslims to Support the ISIS’ was launched on June 13, 2014. From the six re-tweets and four favorites from the initial post, the campaign has grown to encompass contentshared hundreds of times an hour. On Twitter, the hashtag has been shared over 9,500 times since it was first introduced. Besides Twitter, the campaign includes video contributions hosted on YouTube along with activity on the Facebook social networking site. Among the Facebook activity devoted to the campaign, a Facebook ‘causes’ page using the hashtag had gathered hundreds of ‘likes’ since being established on June 16, 2014.

THE PERILS OF TERRORISTS IN SOCIAL MEDIA A 2010 Department of Homeland Security report announced that extremists were focusing on Facebook as a way to identify sympathizers and to disseminate instructions (Allen, 2010). Additionally, Katz and Devon (2014) argued that YouTube ‘has become a significant platform for jihadist groups and supporters, fostering a thriving subculture of jihadists who use YouTube to share propaganda, communicate with each other, and recruit new individuals to the jihadist cause’. Later, terrorist groups learned to use new social media, including Flickr and Instagram (Weimann, 2014, 2015). In his testimony before the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Berger (2015) argued: Jihadists have figured out how to use social media to make an impact, even though their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the overall user base, with Islamic State, more commonly known as ISIS or ISIL, leading the way. Its highly organized social media campaign uses deceptive tactics and shows a sophisticated understanding of how such networks operate.

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Terrorist use of social media poses several potentially serious threats to national security as well as to civil liberties. First, social media allows terrorist groups to control their psychological campaigns by posting videos, texts, analysis and commentary. In fact, ‘the traditional media loses its monopoly on covering and interpreting these incidents and gives terrorist groups the ability to convey their messages directly-an option not generally provided by conventional media sources’ (Knox, 2014: 300). Although the traditional media sometimes publishes terrorist material, the propaganda is generally part of the message rather than the message. For terrorist propaganda, the open, uncensored and uncontrolled social media are an ideal platform. Second, social media provides terrorist organizations with a channel to huge audiences on a global scale. Social media is uniquely dangerous because it allows the terrorist group to reach individuals and communities who might not otherwise access such radical contents. This online reach includes ‘diaspora’ communities, alienated and frustrated individuals in Western societies, and individuals who may come across the propaganda accidentally, for example, by searching for ‘moderate’ material or by simply clicking on links posted by friends or friends of friends. Therefore, social media ‘lowers the barrier of access’ to terrorist propaganda and extends its reach to an unprecedented range. Thirdly, terrorist groups can use social media to find and profile individuals who might be particularly vulnerable to their propaganda, thus making their recruitment efforts more effective. A 2012 report issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explains: Terrorist propaganda is often tailored to appeal to vulnerable and marginalized groups in society. The process of recruitment and radicalization commonly capitalizes on an individual’s sentiments of injustice, exclusion or humiliation. Propaganda may be adapted to account for demographic

f­actors, such as age or gender, as well as social or economic circumstances (United Nations, 2012: 5).

Social media provide almost unlimited information available about any given person. Such information helps the recruiter individualize his/her efforts. Moreover, the combined selection of certain social media and profiling their audiences allows for terrorist use of ‘narrowcasting’.

NARROWCASTING An emerging trend in online terrorist propaganda, ‘narrowcasting’, is a concept based on the postmodern idea that mass audiences do not exist. Narrowcasting refers to the dissemination of information (usually via Internet, radio or television) to a narrow audience, not to the broader public at-large. Also called ‘niche marketing’ or ‘target marketing’, narrowcasting involves aiming media messages at specific segments of the public, defined by characteristics such as values, preferences, demographic attributes or location. Terrorists have learned about this new concept and now apply it in their cybercampaigns. Instead of ‘one-website-for-all’, Internet-savvy terrorists target specific ­subpopulations, including children, women, ‘lone wolves’, overseas communities, or diasporas and imprisoned fans and followers. The unmistakable growth in the participation of women and youth in terrorist activity along with the evident growth in persuasive online messages targeting these groups may provide alarming signals of the narrowcasting tactic’s success. Just as marketing companies can view members’ information to find potential customers and select products to promote to them, terrorist groups can view people’s profiles to decide whom to target and how to approach each individual. Social media allow terrorists to use this targeting strategy of narrowcasting more effectively.

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On social media, messages are tailored to match the profile of a particular social group or social category. These methods enable terrorists to target youth especially. Counterterrorism expert Anthony Bergin says that terrorists view these youth-dominated websites as recruitment tools ‘in the same way a pedophile might look at those sites to potentially groom would-be victims’.5 Many social media users join interest groups, and these groups enable terrorists to target users whom they might be able to manipulate. These users often accept people as ‘friends’ on the social media site whether or not they know them, thereby giving strangers access to personal information and photos. Some people even communicate with the strangers and establish virtual friendships. Terrorists can therefore apply the narrowcasting strategy used on the broader Internet to specific and more personal social networking. They can tailor their name, accompanying default image and information on a group message board to fit the profile of a particular social group. Interest groups also provide terrorists with a list of predisposed recruits or sympathizers. In the same way that marketing groups can view a member’s information to decide which products to target on their webpages, terrorist groups can view people’s profiles to decide whom they are going to target and how they should configure the message. The use of narrowcasting combined with social media platforms is evident in the case of recruiting foreigners to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. While in the past, jihadi groups published most of their materials on traditional media outlets such as websites, chatrooms and forums, ISIS has pioneered the use of social media as the main means for recruitment of foreigners, especially from North America and Europe. Very often ISIS uses foreign fighters recruited from a certain Western country to appeal to potential recruits from their homeland. Thus, for example, in a video posted on December 20, 2014 on the pro-ISIS jihadi forum Alplatformmedia. com, a masked and armed ISIS fighter calls

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on Muslims in that country to either make ‘hijra’ (immigrate) to the Caliphate (i.e., the parts of Syria and Iraq controlled by ISIS) or to ‘blow up France’ and kill unbelievers by any means: with a gun, a rock or a knife. The fighter speaks in French with a North African accent, and his statements are subtitled in Arabic. On October 15, 2014, ISIS, via its Al-Hayat Media, released a video featuring several foreign fighters, including a British national named Abu Abdullah, a French national named Abdul Wadoud and a German national named Abu Dauoud. The 9 minute and 14 second video, entitled, ‘Wait. We Too Are Waiting’, shows the three men sitting in Dabiq, a town in Aleppo, Syria, and addressing speeches in their native tongues. Abu Abdullah boasted that ISIS will kill every single soldier sent against them and declared: ‘We will chop off the heads of the Americans, chop off the heads of the French, chop off the heads of whoever you may bring’. Also, remarking on the presence of foreign fighters, he stated: ‘Know this, that it is not just one American, it is not just one European that is here. Know that we are many and we are many in numbers and we will take your lives, [Allah willing, Allah permitting]’. On December 9, 2014, ISIS released a German chant promoting both ISIS and allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The English-subtitled video was distributed on Twitter and jihadi social media, stating: ‘Mujahidin from all over the whole world are here / Nothing will stop us / We are fighting for the cause of Allah / Our State is victorious!’ Footage shows fighters pledging allegiance to Baghdadi. Both Abdul Wadoud and Abu Dauoud gave similar messages. Additionally, Abu Dauoud urged German Muslims to come join the ISIS in the battlefield, and Abdul Wadoud addressed a word to French President Francois Hollande, telling him: ‘We shall take revenge for every drop of blood spilt as a result of your actions. Because the Muslims who have arrived from France (to the Islamic State)’.

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The success of these online recruitment efforts was impressive: more than 30,000 foreign fighters, 3,000 of them from Western countries, have joined the war in Syria within 3 years. Many of the Westerners were females and youngsters. Social media outlets were a powerful tool for luring these people into these groups. Many of the recruits may have personal motives to join ISIS but social media platforms provided the initial contact, the appeals, the directions and the final instructions.

COUNTERING ONLINE TERRORISM So what can be done to counter the online persuasive propaganda campaigns launched by terrorist groups? It seems obvious now that the Internet and online platforms have evolved into a unique and significant arena in which terrorist propaganda plays out. Violent extremists, Jihadists and terrorist groups have recognized this and become adept at using the new technology to their advantage. What can governments and other actors do to counter their efforts? The virtual war between terrorists and counterterrorism forces and agencies is certainly a vital, dynamic, and ferocious one. Government agencies and some private contractors have been fighting back: cracking terrorist passwords, monitoring suspicious websites and social media (and cyberattacking others) and planting bogus information. Interest in countering online terrorism has also brought together researchers from around the world and from various disciplines, including psychology, security, communications and computer sciences, to develop tools and techniques to respond to the challenge (Sinai, 2011). In a 2014 Los Angeles Times op-ed on ‘Future Terrorists’, Jane Harman, president and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, argued that ‘we need to employ the best tools we know of to counter radicalizing messages and to build bridges to the vulnerable.… Narratives can inspire people

to do terrible things, or to push back against those extremist voices’ (Harman, 2014). To run such a strategy, a political internet campaign against terrorism must use tactics that have proven to be successful and that have counterterrorism applications. Finding such effective tactics was at the heart of discussions at the January 2011 Riyadh Conference on the Use of the Internet to Counter the Appeal of Extremist Violence. Co-hosted by the United Nations Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force and the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences in Riyadh in partnership with the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation, the conference brought together around 150 policymakers, experts and practitioners from the public sector, international organizations, industries, academia and the media (United Nations Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force, 2012). The conference focused on identifying good practices in using the Internet to undermine the appeal of terrorism, expose its lack of legitimacy and its negative impact, and undermine the credibility of its messengers. Key themes included the importance of identifying the target audience, creating effective messages, identifying credible messengers, and using appropriate media to reach vulnerable communities. Among the recommendations were: • Promote counternarratives through all relevant media channels. • Make available a counternarrative whenever a new extremist message appears on Facebook, YouTube or similar outlets. • Consider selective take-down of extremist narratives that have the elements of success. • Ensure that counternarratives include messages of empathy/understanding of political and social conditions facing the target audience, rather than limiting the counternarrative to lecturing or retribution. • Offer an opportunity for engagement in crafting and delivering counternarratives to young people who mirror the ‘Internet Brigade’ members of radical groups. • Support the establishment of civil society networks of interested groups, such as women

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against violent extremism, parents against suicide bombers or schools against extremism. (United Nations Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force, 2012: 81)

In his review of countermeasures, Neumann (2013) suggests and examines three ways to counter terrorism online. The first one combines approaches that are aimed at reducing the supply of terrorist content online. However, removing terrorist content from the Internet and restricting freedom of speech are not only the least desirable, they are also the least effective. Instead, he argues, governments should play a more energetic role in reducing the demand for radicalization and violent extremist messages by directly challenging the extremist narratives and by promoting awareness and education of young people. In the short term, the third way is to exploit their online communications to gain intelligence and gather evidence in the most comprehensive and systematic fashion possible. The attempts to reduce terrorist presence on social media led to growing pressure on the companies providing these platforms. The pressure yielded willingness of these companies to remove certain contents but the efforts seemed rather limited and futile. For example, Facebook’s policies prohibit material that supports or advances terrorism. The company’s definition of the term, published in April 2018 for the first time, includes a ban on nongovernmental organizations that use violence to achieve political, religious or ideological aims. It specifies that such groups include religious extremists, white supremacists and militant environmental groups. Indeed, Facebook has tried to take down pages associated with US designated terrorist groups. In 2014, within hours of Bloomberg Businessweek inquiring about pages for Hezbollah, Facebook removed those for Al-Manar, Hezbollah news site Al-Ahed and the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, a charity associated with Hezbollah. All three, however, quickly reappeared with tweaks to make them seem new. At the end of April 2018, Al-Ahed’s website linked to an

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Arabic Facebook page with more than 33,000 followers. Content on the page included a video of masked snipers targeting Israeli soldiers. Another Al-Ahed Facebook page had more than 47,000 followers, and one in English had 5,000. In April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg declared to Congress and investors that Facebook’s artificial intelligence programs are turning the tide against extremism on his site. Yet, at least a dozen US-designated terror groups maintain a presence on Facebook, a review by Bloomberg Businessweek shows (Silver and Frier, 2018). That includes Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, Boko Haram in West Africa and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The terror groups are rallying supporters with everything from gruesome photos of death caused by their enemies to quotidian news about social services they offer. Several can be found simply by typing their names into Facebook’s search bar in English or, in some cases, in Arabic or Spanish. Some of the groups proudly link to their Facebook pages on their home websites. Indeed, within several years, all terrorist groups added social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and others to their online platforms (Weimann, 2015). However, there are some disadvantages and risks involved: terrorists may be identified online, their intentions may be revealed and their contents may be removed by social media companies. Consequently, terrorists learned how to respond to these risks and apply sophisticated counter measures to avoid identification or removal of material. One of these measures was the transition to the Dark Net.

GOING DARKER: THE APPEAL OF THE DARK NET The terms Deep Web, Deep Net, Invisible Web or Dark Net refer to the content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by

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standard search engines. The deepest layers of the Deep Web, a segment known as the Dark Net, contain content that has been intentionally concealed including illegal and anti-social information. The Dark Net can be defined as the portion of the Deep Web that can only be accessed through specialized browsers. A recent study found that 57% of the Dark Net is occupied by illegal content like pornography, illicit finances, drug hubs, weapons trafficking, counterfeit currency, terrorist communication and much more (Moore and Rid, 2016). Probably the most notorious example of these activities can be seen in The Silk Road. In October 2013, the FBI shut down the first version of this drug market and arrested its owner Ross William Ulbricht. The Dark Net has been associated with the infamous WikiLeaks, as well as Bitcoin, said to be the currency of the Dark Net. Of course, dissident political groups, civil rights activists and investigative journalists in oppressive countries have also been known to use the Dark Net to communicate and organize clandestinely. Terrorists, too, have discovered the advantages of the Dark Net and started using its secretive platforms (Nastiti, 2016, Weimann, 2018). Although it has long been assumed that terrorist attacks are coordinated in a secret network, solid evidence of terrorist use of Dark Net platforms has only been attained in 2013. In August 2013, the US National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted encrypted communications between alQaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Nasir Al-Wuhaysi, the head of Yemen-based alQaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Institute for National Security Studies revealed that, for about a decade, the communication between leaders of the worldwide al-Qaeda network was at least partially leveraged on the Dark Net (Rosner et al., 2013). Following the November 2015 attacks in Paris, ISIS has turned to the Dark Net to spread news and propaganda in an apparent attempt to protect the identities of the group’s supporters and safeguard its content

from hacktivists. The move comes after hundreds of websites associated with ISIS were taken down as part of the Operation Paris (OpParis) campaign launched by the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous. ISIS’s media outlet, Al-Hayat Media Center, posted a link and explanations on how to get to their new Dark Net site on a forum associated with ISIS. The announcement was also distributed on Telegram, the encrypted communication application used by the group. Telegram is an application for sending text and multimedia messages on Android, iOS and Windows devices. Telegram is so confident of its security that it twice offered a $300,000 reward to the first person who could crack its encryption. The messages shared links to a Tor service with a ‘.onion’ address, more commonly known as a website on the Dark Net. The site contains an archive of ISIS propaganda materials, including its documentary-style film, The Flames of War. The site also includes a link to the terrorist group’s private messaging portal on Telegram. In April 2018, a report, entitled ‘Terror in the Dark’, summarizes the findings of a study conducted by the Henry Jackson Society, revealing the growing use of the Dark Net by terrorist groups (Malik, 2018). The findings illustrate how terrorists and extremists are creating growing numbers of safe havens on the Dark Net to plot future attacks, raise funds and recruit new followers. Weimann’s (2018) report ‘Going Darker? On the Challenges of Dark Net Terrorism’ reveals how terrorists are now using the Dark Net as a reservoir of propaganda: the removal of extremist and terrorist content from the surface web increases the risk that material of terrorist organizations may be lost. Much of this material later resurfaces on the Dark Net. Moreover, terrorists are now using the Dark Net to communicate in a safer way than ever before. In March 2016, the French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve argued that the Dark Net is extensively being used by the terrorists. In a meeting of the National Assembly, he said that those who have been responsible for the

The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda in Cyberspace

recent terrorist strikes in Europe have been making use of the deep web and communicating through encrypted messages. Recently, ISIS and other jihadist groups have used new online applications that allow users to broadcast their messages to an unlimited number of members via encrypted mobile phone apps such as Telegram. Since it went live on August 14, 2013, Telegram has seen major success, both among ordinary users as well as terrorists. But it was not until its launch of ‘channels’ in September 2015 that the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC) began to witness a massive migration from other social media sites, most notably Twitter, to Telegram (TRAC, 2015). On September 26, 2015, just four days after Telegram rolled out channels, ISIS media operatives on Twitter started advertising the group’s own channel dubbed Nashir, which translates to ‘Distributor’ in English. A recent special report on Telegram revealed that ‘since September 2015, we have witnessed a significant increase in the use of the Telegram software (software for sending encrypted instant messages) by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. In March 2016 alone, 700 new channels identified with the Islamic State were opened’ (Barak, 2016). While many of the channels have Islamic State affiliations, there are an increasing number of channels from other major players in the global jihadi world: these include AQAP, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL) and Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and Jaysh al-Islam, both in Syria. AQAP launched its own Telegram channel on September 25, 2015 and the Libyan Ansar al-Shari’ah group created its channel the following day. According to the TRAC report, membership growth for each discrete channel is staggering. Within a week’s time, one single Islamic State channel went from 5,000 members to well over 10,000. When asked about it, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov conceded that ISIS indeed uses Telegram to ensure the security of its communications, but added: ‘I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is

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more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism’.6

CONCLUSION Terrorists were and will always be reliant on propaganda. Throughout history, terrorists used the available media to launch their propaganda campaigns. The changes in the communication technologies and media platforms were all followed by changes in media strategy and tactics of terrorist communication. From leaflets and printed press to broadcasting, from theatrical productions to YouTube videos, from chatrooms to the Dark Net, media-savvy terrorists learned how to apply, adopt and operate them all. While the platforms changed, even more rapidly in recent years, terrorist campaigns and messages remained the same. The deadly mixture of psychological warfare, extreme depiction of violence, demonstration of ideological and religious devotion, persuasive rhetoric and charismatic iconic leaders is the basic formula of the terrorist propaganda machinery. Looking at the future, there are two approaches for countering terrorist propaganda: the content-based approach and the technology-based approach. The contentbased perspective relies on countering terrorist narratives. More than an armed confrontation, the war on terrorism is being played in the realm of narratives and it involves ideas, values and images. The studies on terrorist online propaganda and radicalization identify the terrorist narratives being strategically deployed by ISIS or al-Qaeda and their affiliates, Jihadists and other militant groups. These narratives are used to fuel extremism and attract new recruits. In order to develop a strategy and to identify appropriate tactics to counter terrorist narratives, it is necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the role these narratives play in the seduction and persuasion of

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target audiences. Thus, it appears that one of the most effective ways for Western democracies to counter terrorism propaganda is by monitoring the emerging terrorist narratives and launching credible counter-narratives. As to the technology-based approach, we have to assume that terrorists will continue to adopt emerging new communication platforms. Thus, governments and counterterrorism agencies should promote the collaboration between the public and private sectors. Such partnerships have been discussed in narrow ways in the scholarly literature with regard to homeland security (such as emergency management or critical infrastructure protection). However, as Busch et al. noted (2012: 1), ‘the scholarly literature has not yet caught up to the practitioner understanding of public-private partnerships’ prominence in homeland security’. The public-private partnerships hold great promise, especially regarding the development of future online platforms that will be pre-designed to minimize the potential for terrorist use and abuse.

Notes 1  Ayman al-Zawahiri, cited in ‘Al Qaeda letter called ‘chilling’’, CNN International, October 12, 2005. 2  Abu Abdullah al-Maghribi, ISIS defector, cited in ‘Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine’, The Washington Post, November 20, 2015. 3  http://www.cfr.org/terrorism-and-technology/ terrorists-internet/p10005 4  Cited by Department of Homeland Security, ‘Terrorist Use of Social Networking Facebook Case Study’, in Public Intelligence (December 5, 2010) At: https://publicintelligence.net/ufouoles-dhs-terro rist-use-of-social-networking-facebook-casestudy/ 5  ‘Facebook Terrorism Investigation,’ The Advertiser (Adelaide, Australia), April 5, 2008. 6  Cited in the Washington Post, November 19, 2015. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ morning-mix/wp/2015/11/19/founder-of-appused-by-isis-once-said-we-shouldnt-feel-guiltyon-wednesday-he-banned-their-accounts/

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United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2012). The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes. https://www.unodc.org/documents/frontpage/Use_of_Internet_for_Terrorist_Purposes.pdf Weimann, G. (2006). Terror on the Internet. The New Arena, the New Challenges. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Weimann, G. (2014). New Terrorism and New Media, The Woodrow Wilson Center Research Series, https://www.wilsoncenter. org/sites/default/files/STIP_140501_new_ terrorism_F_0.pdf Weimann, G. (2015). Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and tables. 9/11, 65, 261–2, 500 Aaj Tak Live, 228 Abe, Shinzo, 424, 425, 429, 430, 435, 436 Abe 2.0, 431 Abenomics, 433 Abrahms, M., 176, 179 Abu Hamzah, 569, 570, 571 accessibility, 115 action/conversion, 234 Active Change Foundation (ACF), 361 advertising, 139, 233, 250, 350 behavioural advertising, 89 dark advertising, 541, 543–4n negative advertising (see attack videos) affect, 72–3, 79–80 affective feedback loop, 78 Affonco, Denise, 394 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 520–1 Afghanistan, 38–9, 39–40, 44–5, 48, 340 agenda-setting, 207 agitation, 191 agitative propaganda, 192–3, 352, 355–6, 357–9 agitators, 197 Al Shabab, 241–2 al-Assad, Asma, 131 al-Assad, Bashar, 129, 131, 133 Alexander II, Tsar, 4, 16 al-Finlandiyyah, Umm Khalid, 556, 557–8 Al-Hayat Media, 583, 585, 588 Alliance Internationale de la Democratie Socialiste, 11 al-Muhajir, Abu Hamzah, 569, 570, 571 al-Muhajir¯ah, Umm Sumayyah, 556, 557, 558, 559–60, 561 al-Nusra Front, 231 al-Qaeda, 358, 361 aims, narratives and lines of persuasion, 241–2 dark net, 588 media, 578, 579 propaganda videos, 231, 232 Saddam Hussein, 359 Southeast Asia, 395–6 United States, 261 war with ISIS, 328 Alqassam Brigades, 129, 130–1 alternative narratives, 62, 294–5 Aly, A., 579

al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 578, 588 Amazon, 523 American Sugar Refining (ASR), 536 amplification, 90–1 analytical propaganda, 130 anarchism, 8, 9, 10 Andersen, J., 72 Andropov, Yuri, 200 Angkar, 394 anonymity, 114–15, 119 Anonymous (hacker group), 113 anthropological imperialism, 375 Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning (Grabo), 256–7 anti-colonialism, 377–82, 400 anti-communist propaganda see Greece: Civil War anti-propagandists, 267–70 see also counterpropaganda Antúnez, J.C. and Tellidis, I., 360–1 Aoi, Chiyuki, 429 Applebaum, A., 296 Arabic language videos, 325, 326–9, 326, 329 Arafat, Yasser, 273, 275 Arakam Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), 395 Arendt, Hanna, 312 Argentina, 477 Aristotle, 156–7, 159 Armstrong, M., 289 art, 194, 198 Arudo, Debito, 428 Asahara, Shoko, 433 Asahi Shimbun, 424, 432, 435 Ashcraft, B., 434 Ashcroft, Michael, 536, 537 Askew, Marc, 394 Asquith, Herbert, 267 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 371, 396–400, 400–1 Assyriology, 142 astroturfing, 309 atrocity propaganda, 22–3, 56 anti-propagandists, 267–9 contemporary legacy, 269–70 architects of, 27–8 concept and theory, 23–6 impact on Australian population, 30–4 international law as, 28–30 Nazis, 34–5

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post-World War II, 35 the ‘rape’ of Belgium, 265–7 attack videos, 326–9 attention/exposure, 233 Attlee, Clement, 254, 255, 268 audience see fake audience; target audiences audience amplification, 90–1 audience engagement see participatory propaganda; user participation audience satisfaction, 77–8 see also customer experience audience segmentation, 88–90, 342–3 see also narrowcasting austerity, 533, 534 Australia atrocity propaganda, 22–3 architects of, 27–8 concept and theory, 23–6 impact on population, 30–4 international law as, 28–30 authoritarian propaganda, 523 authoritarianism, xxv Bad News for Refugees (Philo), 534 Badsey, Stephen, 24 Bakunin, Mikhail, 8, 10, 11, 13 Balfour Declaration, 48 Bande Noire, 13 Bandura, A., 88 Banks, Aaron, 536, 540 Bannon, Steve, 63, 537, 540, 543 barbarism, 24 Barnett, Michael, 26 BBC, 258, 429–30, 435, 446 Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants to ISIS (Hoyle), 551 Begin, Menachem, 279 behavioural advertising, 89 Belarus, 498 Belgium atrocity propaganda, 24, 25, 26, 56 architects of, 27–8 Australian atrocity propaganda, 30–4 international law as, 28–30 German invasion, 24, 262–3 the ‘rape’ of Belgium, 265–7 Bell, D., 191 Bell, J.B., 579 Belt and Road Initiative, 409 Benkler, Y., 91, 127 Berezovsky, Boris, 495 Berger, J.M., 583 Berkman, Alexander, 4 Berlusconi, Silvio, 60, 66 Bernays, Edward L., 137, 138, 143, 352, 444, 510, 511 Berry, M., 534 Bertelsmann Japan Report, 430

Betz, David, 48, 50, 52 Bevin, Ernest, 255 bias, 306, 513 cognitive bias, 117 confirmation bias, 56, 64, 75, 76, 77–8, 260, 292 disconfirmation bias, 292 media bias, 309–11 bias blind spot, 293–4 bidirectional asymmetric model, 140–1 bidirectional symmetric model, 141 big data, 184–5, 539 Bin Ladin, Osama, 327 biological warfare propaganda, 336, 337–9, 345–6 biopower, 147 Bjola, C., 184 Black, Jay, 246 Black, Jeremy, 40, 374 Blair, Tony, xxvi, 450 Blinder, S. and Richards, L., 533, 534 blogs, 58, 174 microblogs, 179 Blumer, Herbert, 113 Boczkowski, Pablo, 308 Bogdanov, Alexander, 194 Boiry, P.A., 138 Boko Haram, 230–1, 241–2, 339–40, 345, 587 Bolivia, 480, 483, 484, 485–6, 485 Bologna rising, 13 Bolsheviks, 191, 192, 195, 197, 251, 252 Bolt, N., 352 Booth, K., 357 Borger, M., 92 Botometer, 118 bots, 107, 108, 111–13, 503 Boudreau, B., 45, 46, 52 Bourdieu, P., 148 Bournazos, S., 463–4 boyd, d., 118 Boyd-Barrett, Oliver, 311 Bradshaw, S. and Howard, P., 107, 113 Brandtzaeg, P.B., 177, 179–80 Brantner, C., 130 Brazil, 477 Breed, London, 423, 424–5, 427 Breitbart, 63 Brexit see EU referendum Briant, E.L., 350 Briggs, Harold, 385 Brigid and the Cub (Turner), 32–3 British Malaya, 375–6 Brousse, Paul, 11 Bruce, Mary Grant, 32 Bruntz, George, 23 Bryce Report, 27, 29, 263–4, 265, 266, 268 Buitenhuis, Peter, 26 Burkhard, Marat, 109–10

INDEX

Burma, 383 Busch, N., 590 Bush, George, 60 Bush, George W., 48, 60, 66, 500 Buzzfeed, 516 Cabot, John, 374 Cairns Post, 34 Caliphates: Women and the Appeal of Islamic State (Rafiq and Malik), 552 Cambodia, 380–1, 383, 393–4, 398 Cambridge Analytica, 64, 89 Cameron, David, 362, 536 Cameroon, 519 Canada, 95–9 Canalejas Méndez, José, 4 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 4 capitalism, 144, 380 Carlos I, King of Portugal, 4 Carnot, M.F.S., 4 cartographical imperialism, 374 cash loans, 230–1, 339–40, 345 Castells, M., 147 Castro, Fidel, 208 Catholic Church, 139–40, 372, 467, 470, 510 Catholic Press, The, 33 Cazeneuve, Bernard, 588–9 censorship, 194, 197, 208, 216, 297, 316–17, 416–17 Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), 324 Digital Outreach Team (DOT), 324, 327–33, 332 center of gravity, 224, 232, 237n Chadwick, A., 178, 180 character assassination (CA), 189–201 in Soviet propaganda, 189, 190–2 motives and targets, 195–7 role of the media, 197–8 strategies, 192–5 violence, 198–200 theoretical framework, 189–90 charisma, 148 Chávez, Hugo, 477, 479, 480, 481, 483, 484, 486–7 Chechnya, 495, 496, 500 chemical weapons attack, 448 media coverage, 449–2 Chen, Adrian, 105–6 Chicago Eight, 17 children’s books, 32–3 China Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 398–9 blogs, 174 Cambodia, 393 Cold War, 337 Communist Party, 58–9, 189 computational propaganda, 181

journalists, 519 Mao Zedong, 68 Russia, 501, 502 sockpuppets, 110 in US media, 206 China Digital Times, 417 Chinese Dream, 405–18 19th CPC Congress, 410–11 current situation and predicament, 413–17 development, 406–10 propaganda to policy, 411–13 Chomsky, N., 352 Chouliaraki, L. and Lissas, A., 567 Christianity, 215 Churchill, Winston, 467 Cialdini, R.B., 339 Cicero, 157 cigarette industry, 59 cinema, 33–4, 113, 198 citizen journalism, 92 citizens as content producers, 184 see also user participation Clarke, Edward, 27 Clarke, H., 534 class-consciousness, 194 climate change, 60 Clinton, Hilary Pizzagate, 65, 76, 77, 303 Presidential election 2016, 63 fake news, 309 media coverage, 514 participatory propaganda, 94 rhetoric, 515 Twitter, 512 Twitter, 515 CNN, 516 CNN effect, 446 Cockburn, P., 449, 453 co-conspiracy, 66–7 see also participatory propaganda; post-truth: collective reinforcement of Code of Athens, 139 code of practice, 317 coercion, 190 cognitive bias, 117 cognitive clutter, 226 cognitive dissonance, 78 cognitive domain, 38 Cold War biological weapons propaganda, 337–9 censorship, 208 Greece, 459–73 normalization process, 466–71 state of emergency propaganda, 461–6 Internet, 580 propaganda and disinformation, 253–7, 308 South Korea, 211

595

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Soviet propaganda, 196, 286–7 US counterpropaganda, 316 Collyns, D., 483 colonialism, 371, 373–7 see also anti-colonialism; postcolonialism Columbian Chemicals, 105–6, 112 Columbus, Christopher, 374 comfort women, 423–5, 427, 428 Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), 424, 438n commercial propaganda see advertising Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War, 267, 270 communication, 52, 141, 143 counterterrorism, 323–33 mediatisation of, 72 political, 166–7, 184–5 populist, 476–89 strategic, 41–2, 144, 566–74 see also strategic narratives communications technologies, 5, 7 see also information and communication technologies (ICT) Communist International (Comintern), 193 Communist Youth League (CYL), 409 computational propaganda, 87–8, 105–19, 167 bots, 107, 108, 111–13, 503 China, 181 content analysis, 183–4 definitions, 107, 183 fake audience, 107 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 106 reflections on next steps, 114–19 sockpuppets, 107, 108–11, 113 trolls, 108–9 see also digital propaganda; viral propaganda confirmation bias, 56, 64, 75, 76, 77–8, 258, 292 conflictual process problem, 226 Confucianism, 432 confusion, 59 conspiracy theories, 64 constituencies, 146 content analysis, 171–86 big data, 184–5 dark web, 227 limits, 181–3 as a methodological tool, 172–3 new challenges in digital environments, 183–4 in political communication research, 173 in propaganda studies, 173–81, 175–8 social media, 227 conversion, 234 Cook, J. and Lewandowsky, S., 294, 295 Coombs, W.T. and Holladay, S., 146 Corey, Robin, 336–7 Corman, S., 48 Corman, S.R. and Schiefelbein, J.S., 360

corporate propaganda, 138, 148–9 ontology, 142–5 structural dimension, 145–8 see also public relations corporate strategy, 143–4 Correa, Rafael, 477, 479, 480, 481, 482–3, 484, 486 Cortazzi, Hugh, 427 Costa, Andrea, 13 Couldry, N. and Hepp, A., 72, 73 Council on Foreign Relations, 296 counterpropaganda, 315–16 biological warfare propaganda, 336–9, 345–6 fear appeals, 343–5 peace marketing as, 359–3 see also anti-propagandists Counterpunch, 311 counter-radicalization, 361 counterterrorism, 586–7 counterterrorism communications, 323–33 Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), 324 Digital Outreach Team (DOT), 324, 325–31, 332 Global Engagement Center (GEC), 324, 325 way forward, 331–3 Cox, Harold, 264 Cox, Jo, 541–3 credibility, 292, 294 Crimea, 40, 289, 305, 306–7, 346 Vladimir Putin, 290, 497, 499, 502 Cuba, 208 Cucek, Michael, 435 cultural revolution, 193, 194 cultural violence, 190 culture, 5, 193, 214, 426, 427, 437–8 Cummings, Dominic, 541 customer experience, 74 see also audience satisfaction cyber-blurring, 297 Cyvogt, Antoine, 13 Dabiq, 554–5, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561 Daesh see Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh) Dahlgren, P. and Alvares, C., 74 Daily Herald, 30–1 Daily Mail, 65, 265 Daily Telegraph, 32 Dale, Peter N., 427 d’Ancona, M., 74, 81 dark advertising, 541, 543–4n dark money, 542, 544n dark web / dark net, 227, 235, 587–9 Davis, David, 536 Davis, E., 77, 78, 80, 81 Davison, Emily Wilding, 17 Dawkins, Richard, 156, 163 de Albuquerque, A., 481, 484 De Dreu, C., 292

INDEX

Dearlove, Sir Richard, 360 Death of Death (Kravchinski), 16 debunking, 294–5, 296, 298, 313–14 deception, 60–1 Defeating Communist Insurgency (Thompson), 256 Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), 444, 453 Delmer, Sefton, 253 delusion, 64–5 demagoguery, 480–1 Demartial, Georges, 267–8 democracy, 48, 50, 87, 114, 184, 388 democracy index ranking, xxv demonization, 277 Denmark, 166 Dennis, CJ, 32 Dentsu Public Relations, 433 depth interviews, 227 Dershowitz, Alan, 433 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 264 Digital Age, 87, 257–8 Digital Outreach Team (DOT), 324, 325–31, 332 digital propaganda, 171 content analysis, 174–81, 182, 183–4 Russia, 502–3 see also computational propaganda; viral propaganda disconfirmation bias, 292 disinformation, 55–68 aims, 58–60 ancient Greece, 247–8 code of practice, 296 definitions, 246 Donald Trump, 64–5, 66, 67 history, 56–7 impact, 67 market for, 57–8 meaning, 65–6 methodology, 60–4 versus propaganda, 247, 248–58 Cold War, 253–7, 308 in the digital age, 257–8 interwar period, 250–2 World War One, 248–50 World War Two, 252–3 psychology of, 64–5 Russia, 65–6, 503 Soviet Union, 196–7 and truth, 66–7 Wardle’s taxonomy of, 304 see also fake news; false and misleading claims; firehose of falsehood propaganda model; ‘information disorder’; lies division, 59 Doob, L.W., xxiv, 45, 52 doubt, 59–60 Douma, Syria, 448–2 Döveling, K., 73, 74, 76

Dowd, Matthew, 524 Duc, Vu Hoai, 392 Duda, Andrzej, 290 duplicitous rhetoric, 63 Durov, Pavel, 589 East StratCom Taskforce, 503 echo chambers, 50, 78, 86, 88–9, 92 economic boom, 7 economic management, 478 Economist, 63, 64, 65, 406, 433, 496, 533 Economist Intelligence Unit, xxv Ecuador, 477, 480, 482–3, 484 press freedom, 485, 486 Edelman, M., 351 education, 293–4, 414, 511 see also media literacy Edwards, L., 147, 148 effectiveness see Islamist propaganda effectiveness Egypt, 272, 278, 519 El Universal, 485 election propaganda, 207 Elisabeth of Austria, 4 Ellinas, A.A., 535, 536 Ellul, J. agitation campaigns, 192 conflictual process problem, 226 ideology, 190 integrative propaganda, 352, 363 Japan, 436 Marxism-Leninism, 191 mission statements, 45 propaganda, xxv, 143 propaganda of integration, 193 sociological propaganda, 49 stereotypes, 197 technological society, 372 emancipatory ethics, 356–7 emigration, 7 see also immigration emotional propaganda, 130–1, 133 emotions, 74–5, 79–80 endorsement, 292 engagement, 234 Engels, Friedrich, 8, 9, 190 Entman, R.M., 443, 447, 453, 456n epistemological optimism, 157 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 523 Esarey, A. and Qiang, X., 174, 175 espionage, 249–50 Estado da India trading company, 374 ethics, 139 emancipatory, 356–7 EU referendum, 64 financial motivations, 537–9 immigration, 534–5, 536, 540, 541 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 503, 543n

597

598

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

Jo Cox, 541–3 Leave campaign, 63–4, 80–1 Leave.EU, 532–3, 536, 537, 539–41 Vote Leave, 536, 540–1 participatory propaganda, 94–5 United States, 536–7 Europe, 7 European Commission, 296 European elections, 493 European political communication, 166 European School of Public Relations, 138 European Union, 314, 317, 503 evidence, 65 ‘Excellence’ study, 141 Experience Age, 73–5, 77–8, 80, 81 experts, 75 exposure, 233 extant fear processing models, 341–2 Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), 229, 342, 344 Facebook Abe 2.0, 431 Brexit campaign, 503, 539, 540, 541 customised results, 64 fake accounts, 115 fake news, 297, 307, 314–15 Infowars, 58 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 106 ISIS, 126 media literacy, 258 misinformation, 67 news content, 108 participatory propaganda case studies, 93–9 Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, 116 Syrian conflict, 131–3, 174 Syrian conflicts, 129 terrorist propaganda, 582, 583, 587 US Presidential election 2016, 59, 62, 91, 517, 517 Cambridge Analytica, 89 Russian propaganda, 504 users, 117, 127, 128, 131, 581 visual propaganda, 129 Facebook Messenger, 581 fact-checking, 179–80, 296, 298, 313–14, 315, 524 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 446 fake accounts, 115–16 fake audience bots, 107, 108, 111–13, 503 reflections on next steps, 114–19 sockpuppets, 107, 108–11, 113 fake news, 297, 303–18, 516–17, 518–9, 525 definitions, 304–6 Donald Trump, 311, 511, 514, 516 fight against, 313–18

framing, 306–13 Leave.EU, 541 Wardle’s taxonomy of, 304 see also disinformation Falkland War, xxviii–xxix false and misleading claims, 519–2 see also disinformation; lies Falsehood in Wartime (Ponsonby), 268–9 Farage, Nigel, 534, 536, 537–8 Faris, R.M., 177, 180 Farwell, James, 295, 296–7 Fast Company magazine, 160 Fatah, 274 fear, 64, 199, 336–7 fear appeals, 229–30, 339–7 biological warfare propaganda, 345–6 Boko Haram, 230–1, 339–40 counterpropaganda, 343–5 effects by audience segment and cultural group, 342–3 extant fear processing models, 341–2 Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), 229 mechanism, 340–41 nuclear war, 346–7 Fear-Drive Theory, 340, 341 Fekete, L., 535 Feng, M.X.Y., 410 Ferrara, E., 116, 117, 185 Fetzer, T., 534 Fewsmith, J., 408 fiction, 65, 66 film, 33–4, 198, 252–3, 416–17 filter bubbles, 75–6, 78, 82, 88–9, 292 Financial Times, 414, 415, 493, 499 firehose of falsehood propaganda model, 290–8 defending against, 293–7 persuasiveness, 291–3 First World War see World War One Fischer, Gerhard, 25 Flammer, P.M., 391 flows of affect, 72–3 focus groups, 227 Foreign Policy magazine, 328 forewarning, 295–6 forgery, 61–2 Foucault, Michel, 144, 147 Fox News, 58, 521 Foxley, T., 340 framing, 130, 206–7, 443, 454n fake news, 306–13 human interest frames, 130, 133 Syrian conflict, 444–7 France colonialism, 374, 375, 376, 379–80, 380–1 Islamist propaganda, 232 Presidential election 2016, 503 Presidential election 2017, 297

INDEX

Revolution, 578 sockpuppets, 110–11 World War One, 262 Frankfurt, Harry, 305–6 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 431 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 4 Fraser, Lindley, 24 Freear, M., 360 Freedman, D., 543 Freedman, L., 47 Freedom House, 289, 297, 485 freedom of information, 496 freedom of speech, 296–7 Freiheit, 14–15 French Revolution, 578 Friedman, Thomas, 406, 407, 414, 417 Fukushima, 428, 434 Gaber, I., 45.46 Gadahn, Adam, 582 Galeotti, M., 307 Gallo, Charles, 14 Galtung, J., 190, 199, 351, 355 Gandhi, Mahatma, 355, 362 Ganor, B., 160 Gaza conflict guerrilla warfare, 275–7 Hamas, 281, 283, 284n psychological operations (PSYOP), 274–5, 279–81 viral propaganda, 162 visual propaganda, 127–8, 129–31, 174 Gaza Strip, 272 Gelman, V., 199 ‘Gentleman German, The’ (Sullivan), 29–30 geopolitics, 184 George, A.L., 182 George I, King of Greece, 4 Gerasimov doctrine, 307, 502 germ warfare see biological warfare propaganda Germany atrocity propaganda, 22–3, 56 anti-propagandists, 267–9 architects of, 27–8 concept and theory, 23–6 impact on Australian population, 30–4 international law as, 28–30 invasion of Belgium, 24, 262–3 Nazi Germany, 34–5 the ‘rape’ of Belgium, 265–7 interwar period, 250 Nazi Germany, 34–5, 56–7, 128 Russian propaganda, 505 Germis, Carsten, 430–1, 432 Ghosn, Carlos, 432–3 Giesea, Jeff, 114 Giglietto, F., 304–5 Gil de Zúñiga, H., 75

Gilead, M., 76, 79 Giles, K., 296 Gingrich, Newt, 63 Giuliani, Rudy, 75 Gladstone, William, 26 global economic boom, 7 Global Engagement Center (GEC), 324, 325 Global Times, 411 global warming, 60 Godin, Seth, 161 Godwin, William, 9 Goebbels, Joseph, 45, 52, 274, 539 Goldzwig, S.R., 480–1 Google, 58, 64, 90, 297, 311 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 200 Gosset, D., 408 Gove, Michael, 75 governance, informal, 201 Gowan, Richard, 446 Grabo, Cynthia, 256–7 Grady, Henry, 459, 466, 467, 471 Grady, Lucretia, 466, 467, 468, 470 Graham, A., 415 Gramsci, A., 141, 146, 193 grand strategy, 23 ‘Granfalloon technique’, 64 Graphic of Australia, 33 Graves, Lucas, 306, 315 Great Britain atrocity propaganda, 22–3, 56 anti-propagandists, 268–9 architects of, 27–8 concept and theory, 23–6 international law as, 28–30 the ‘rape’ of Belgium, 265–7 Cold War, 254–6 colonialism, 374, 375–6, 380, 384–5, 388–90 Russia Today (RT), 501 World War One, 249–50 (see also Great Britain: atrocity propaganda) World War Two, 252–3 see also United Kingdom Great War see World War One Greece ancient Greece, 247–8 Civil War, 459–73 normalization process, 466–71 state of emergency propaganda, 461–6 microblogs, 179 Greek Orthodox Church, 464, 467, 470 group membership, 292 Grundini, Pavel, 499 Grunig, James E., 140, 141 Guardian, 446, 449–50, 483, 537 guerrilla warfare, 275–7 ‘Guided Democracy’, 388 Gulf states, 272–3

599

600

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

Gunster, Gerry, 537, 540 Gusinsky, Vladimir, 495 Gustafsson, L., 554 Guttenfelder, David, 207 Habeck, M., 360 Hague Conventions, 26 Hak-sun, Kim, 424, 438n Hall, Ivan P., 428 Hall, Stuart, 5 Hallahan, K., 144 Hallin, D.C., 76 Hallin, D.C. and Mancini, P., 481 Hamas, 272, 284n, 587 propaganda method, 282, 283 Hamas-Israeli conflict, 284n guerrilla warfare, 275–7 psychological operations (PSYOP), 274–5, 279–81 viral propaganda, 162 visual propaganda, 127–8, 129–31, 174 Hamre, John, 434 Hannan, J., 79, 80, 81 Harman, J., 586 Harsin, J., 74, 81 Haste, Cate, 25 hate crimes, 542 Haymarket Massacre, 17 healthcare, 520–1, 539, 540 hegemony, 193 Henderson, Jennifer Jacobs, 119 Henry, Emile, 14 Henry Jackson Society, 588 Henry VII (King), 374 Herman, E.S. and Chomsky, N., 309 Herzen, Alexander, 12 Hezbollah, 273, 277–9, 280, 281, 282–3, 284n, 587 hijrah, 556–7, 560 Hill & Knowlton, 138 Hitler, Adolf, 159 Hjarvard, S., 72 Ho Chi Minh, 379, 381, 391 Hoang Cao Khai, 376 Hoaxy, 118–19 Hobbs, R., 317 Hof, R., 89 Holmstrom, M., 71, 80, 81 Hong Kong, 417 Horne, John and Kramer, Allen, 25, 263, 267, 269 Horsthemke, K., 77 Hotmail, 160 ‘house-broken press’, 422 Howard, P.N., 91, 177, 180 Huey, L., 551, 553 Hull, Isabel V, 25, 262, 263, 266 human interest frames, 130, 133 human thought and identity, 42–3

humanitarianism, 26, 27 Huntington, H.E., 166–7 Hussein, Sadam, 359 hypodermic needle model, 226, 237n, 343 Hyunjin, S. and Ebrahim, H., 174, 176, 179 ideavirus, 161 identity see human thought and identity ideology, 25, 49, 142–3, 144–5, 190, 191, 210 Ignatius, D., 357 imagery see visual propaganda immigration, 7, 533–5, 535, 540, 541 imperialism, 374, 375 Independent, 446, 450–1 India, 207, 297, 380 Indochina, 376 see also Cambodia; Laos; Vietnam Indochina Wars, 390–4 see also Vietnam War Indonesia, 380, 383, 386–90, 395, 397 influence, 234 see also persuasion informal governance, 201 information, 442 freedom of, 496 see also disinformation; misinformation information (self-)tailoring, 75–6 Information Age, 38, 73 see also Experience Age information and communication technologies (ICT), 127, 133 see also Internet; social media; websites information deficit model, 294 ‘information disorder’, 246–7 information operations, 373, 382–96 Indochina Wars, 390–4 Indonesian Konfrontasi, 386–90 Islamic fundamentalism, 394–6 Malayan Emergency, 383–6 information warfare, 442 information work, 256, 257 Infowars, 58, 316 Ingram, H., 567 inoculation, 295–6, 298 Inoue, Takashi, 432 Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), 118, 514, 525n insurance industry, 537–8 insurgency theory, 6 integrative propaganda, 193–5, 352, 354, 355–6, 363, 435–8 International Public Relations Association (IPRA), 139 International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), 4, 7–8, 10–11 Internet, 164, 499 radicalization, 552

INDEX

Riyadh Conference on the Use of the Internet to Counter the Appeal of Extremist Violence, 586–7 terrorist propaganda, 579–81 users, 131 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 91, 106, 109–10, 115, 288 Brexit campaign, 503, 543n Crimea, 305 criminal complaints against, 315 Vladimir Putin, 499 interwar period, 250–2 intimidation, 199 Iran, xxv, 208–9, 283, 451 see also Hezbollah Iraq, 569, 572, 574 Iraq War disinformation, 57, 66–7 framing, 206 Great Britain, xxvi, xxix media campaigns, 444 sockpuppets, 110 strategic narratives, 38–9, 39–40, 44–5 iReorter, 258 Islamagainstextremism.com, 361 Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh) / Islamic State Movement (ISM) agitative propaganda, 357–9 counterpropaganda, 359–3 aims, narratives and lines of persuasion, 241–2 botnets, 112 dark net, 588, 589 female recruits, 550–62 prior research, 551–2 promises made to, 555–62 propaganda channels, 553–5 radicalization, 552–3 terrorist attacks, 562 media, 359, 360, 578 media strategy, 569–3, 579 propaganda of the deed, 261 recruitment, xxvii, 58, 224 (see also Islamic State (IS/ISIL/ISIS/Daesh) / Islamic State Movement (ISM): female recruits) Russian propaganda, 290 social media, 583 recruitment, 585–6 Southeast Asia, 395–6 strategic communication tactics, 566–74 campaign design, 568–71 campaign dissemination, 571–3 literature review, 567–8 sources, 568 US counterterrorism communication, 327–9 video production, 330–1 viral propaganda, 160 visual propaganda, 126 see also Islamist propaganda effectiveness

601

Islamist propaganda effectiveness, 223–36 aims, narratives, lines of persuasion and dissemination, 241–2 barriers to measuring, 224–6 center of gravity, 232 fear appeal, 229–31 Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), 229 leadership effect, 231–2 measures of, 228–9 measurement space, 225 methodologies for measuring, 226–8 policy implications, 235 recruitment, 232–4 Israel and Hamas, 284n guerrilla warfare, 275–7 psychological operations (PSYOP), 274–5, 279–81 viral propaganda, 162 visual propaganda, 127–8, 129–31, 174 and Hezbollah, 273, 277–9, 279–81 propaganda method, 281–2 psychological operations (PSYOP), 282, 283–4 Italy, 13, 60, 274 Janis, I.L., 341 Janis, I.L. and Feshbach, S., 340 Japan, 422–38 comfort women, 423–5, 427, 428 Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), 440n integration propaganda, 435–8 Malayan Emergency, 383, 384 media, 426, 429–30 coverage of Carlos Ghosn case, 432–3 foreign media’s criticism of Abe administration, 430–2 propaganda environment, 433–5 Russia, 501–2, 506n soft power strategy, 426–9 World War Two, 66, 375, 425 Japan Times, 425 Jenkins, B., 579 Johnson, L., 89 Johnson, Lyndon, 60 Johnson, T.H., 340 Joint Threats Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), 110 Jones, Alex, 316 Jones, Sally-Anne, 231–2 Jonsson, O. and Seely, R., 307 journalism, 58, 65 citizen journalism, 92 fact-checking, 179–80 fake news, 305, 306, 519 objectivity, 524 online journalism, 307–9

602

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

power, 148 United States, 318 Jowett, G.S. and O’Donnel, V.J., 41, 100n, 181, 206, 223, 351, 354, 356 Jungherr, A., 185 Kadyrov, Ramzan, 500 Kairoi, 468, 469, 470, 471, 471 Kammerer, Anton, 15 Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P.F., 343 Katz, R., 562 Katz, R. and Devon, J., 583 Kaye, David, 430 Kennedy, John F., 393 Kerr, Alex, 426, 427, 428 Khashoggi, Kamal, 519 Khawirijites, 360–1 Khoman, Thanat, 396–7 Khor, Martin, 408 Kiev Post, 504 Kimerling, A.S., 195 King, G., 178, 181 Kinney, A.B., 579 Kissinger, Henry, 397 Kitzberger, P., 479, 480 Kjeldsen, J.E., 166 Klein, N. and Yadav, M., 353–4 Klein, O. and Muis, J., 540 Klicperová-Baker, M., 199 Klinger, U. and Svensson, J., 182 Kmer Rouge, 393–4 Knight Foundation, 513, 517, 521, 525 Knightley, Philip, 56 Knobel, M. and Lanksher, C., 164 knowledge, 442 public knowledge, 510–20, 520–1 Kogan, Aleksandr, 539 Konfrontasi, 387–90 Kono, Yohei, 425 Kony, Joseph, 233 Korea see North Korea; North Korean case study Korean War, 209–10, 214 Kotler, P., 351 Kotler, P. and Zaltman, G., 354 Kozinets, R., 227 Kracauer, S., 181–2 Krämer, B., 478 Kravchinski, Sergey, 16 Kremer, A. and Martov, Yu., 191 Krippendorff, K., 172, 186 Kropotkin, Peter, 10, 12, 14 Krushchev Thaw, 196 Kushner, B., 436 Kuwait, 138 ‘Kuwaiti baby atrocity’, 60 Kuzio, T. and D’Anieri, P., 307

La República, 487 Laato, A., 142 Laclau, E., 477, 478 Lakoff, G., 516 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 159 Landsberger, S.R., 408 Laos, 383, 398 Lasswell, Harold, xxiv, 113, 173, 206, 372, 401, 461 Lasswell. D., 190 Latin America, 476–89 historical and conceptual aspects of populism, 477–80 synthesised framework of populist communication, 480–7, 482 LaTour, M.S. and Zahra, S.A., 340, 341 Latsabidze, Beqa, 309 Latvia, 297 Laybats, C. and Tredinnick, L., 75 Lazarsfeld, P.F., 513 Le Queux, William, 249 Le Révolte, 13 leadership effect, 231–2 Leave campaign, 63–4, 80–1 Leave.EU, 532–3, 536, 537, 539–41, 542 Lebanon, 130, 273, 277, 278, 279, 281, 284n Lee, B. and Campbell, V., 167 Lee, Edwin, 425 Lee, Ivy, 137 Lee Kuan Yew, 381–2, 388 legitimization, 148 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 8, 9, 191, 193, 195, 199, 200 see also Marxism-Leninism Lerner, A., 89 Lessig, Lawrence, 307 L’Etang, J., 148 Levada Center, 498–9 Leventhal, H., 341 Lewandowsky, S., 76, 77, 82 Li Keqiang, 413 Li Zhanshu, 413 libel, 62–3 liberal democracy, 48, 50, 87 Libya, 445, 451 Liebling, A. and Strauss, C., 227 lies, 60–1 see also disinformation; fake news limited access cases, 207–9 see also North Korean case study Lindsay, J., 386, 387 Lindsay, Norman, 30, 31 Linnemann, T., 165 literacy, 193 see also media literacy literature, 194 see also children’s books Lloyd George, David, 265, 266

INDEX

Los Angeles Times, 416, 586 Lotan, Gilad, 112 Lu, C., 417 Lucas, E. and Nimmo, B., 287, 288, 289, 293 Luntz, Frank, 63, 513 Lyons, 13, 14 McDonald, Malcolm, 389 Macfarlane, Julian, 433–4, 435 Machiavelli, N., 157 Macnair, L. and Frank, R., 567 Macron, Emmanuel, 73, 111, 297, 503 Maduro, Nicolas, 485, 486, 487 Magellan, Ferdinand, 374 magic bullet theory see hypodermic needle model Mahoney, Michael S., 306 Mair, Thomas, 541–2 Majul, Cesar, 378 Makronissos prison camp, 464–5, 473n Malatesta, Errico, 13 Malay Peninsula, 374, 375–6 Malayan Emergency, 383–6 Malaysia, 397 Manila, 397 Mao Zedong, 68, 194 marhaenism, 380 Marion, Kitty, 17 market segmentation, 342–3 see also audience segmentation marketing niche marketing (see narrowcasting) peace marketing, 351, 354–7, 359–3 as propaganda, 353–4 viral marketing, 160–1 Markwica, R., 74 Marshall Plan, 461, 470–1, 472 Marwick, A. and Lewis, R., 163–4 Marx, Karl, 8–9, 10 Marxism, 143, 379 Marxism-Leninism, 190–1, 200, 383 mass migration, 7 see also immigration Massoumi, Cyrus, 309, 315 master narratives, 47–8 see also myths Masterman, Charles, 27, 249, 265 Matrat, Lucien, 138–9 May, Theresa, 536 Mayring, P., 182 Mazzoleni, G., 73, 478 McCain, John, 522 McCants, Will, 327 McChesney, Robert, 4 McGeehan, T., 289 McIntyre, L.C., 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82 McKenna, Rebecca, 376–7

603

McKinley, William, 4 McVeigh, B., 166 media al-Qaeda, 578, 579 chemical weapons attack, 449–2 Donald Trump, 517–19, 522–3, 524–5 framing, 443–4 ISIS, 359, 360, 569–3, 578, 579 Japan, 426, 429–30 coverage of Carlos Ghosn case, 432–3 foreign media’s criticism of Abe administration, 430–2 propaganda environment, 433–5 mainstream media, 232 mass media, 22, 228–9, 444 North Korea, 210 populism, 478–80, 481, 484–7 refugees, 534 in Soviet propaganda, 197–8 Syrian conflict, 446–7 Western media coverage, 447–53 and the terrorist propaganda, 578–9 (see also online?) UK Independence Party (UKIP), 535 US Presidential election 2016, 513–14 Vladimir Putin, 492, 493, 494–5, 495–7, 499, 500–1 ‘Work and Victory Week’, 466, 467, 468 see also journalism; news channels; news magazines; newspapers; radio; Russia Today (RT); social media; television media bias, 309–11 media literacy, 117–19, 293–4, 298, 317 media priming, 443, 454n mediatisation, 72 Medvedev, Dmitry, 493, 497 ‘Megali Idea’, 462 memes, 156, 163–6 metaphorical, 166–7 memetics, 162–3 metaphor, 159–63 metaphorical memes, 166–7 microblogs, 179 migration, 7 see also immigration militant philanthropy, 463 Miller, J., 72 Miller, Yuri, 58 Milton, D., 568 Mingzao, C., 408 mirror imaging, 258 misinformation, 67, 246 Wardle’s taxonomy of, 304 see also disinformation Miskimmon, A., 40, 41, 47, 51, 52, 399 mission statements, 44–6

604

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

missionaries, 376–7 Mittelstaedt, Jean, 411 Miyamoto, Dr. Masao, 437 MMR vaccine, 57 modernity, 371–2 Moloney, K., 87, 138, 145, 149 Moods of Ginger Mick, The (Dennis), 32 Morales, Evo, 477, 479, 480, 481, 483, 484, 485–6, 488 Morgan, John Hartmann, 28, 266 Morocco, 519 Most, Johann, 14–15 Mudde, C., 478 Mueller, Robert, 317 Murdock, G., 72 Murphy, J. and Devine, D., 535, 543 Murray, Gilbert, 27 Muslim Brotherhood, 272, 277 Musolff, A., 166 Mustafaraj, E. and Metaxas, P.T., 90 Myanmar, 394–5, 398 myths, 49–51, 62, 190 see also master narratives Nacos, B., 578 Nakano, Koichi, 432 naming and shaming, 295 Napoleon Bonaparte, 55 narrative persuasion, 43 narrative turn, 42 narrative-led operations, 45 narratives post-truth, 80–1 see also alternative narratives; master narratives; strategic narratives narrowcasting, 584–6 see also audience segmentation Nasrallah, Hassan, 278, 279, 283 nation building, 352 National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), 196 National Health Service (NHS), 539, 540 national mindedness, 462 National Resistance Movement, Greece, 465 National Schism, Greece, 462 nationalism, 377–82, 497 NATO, 44, 47, 269, 316 Nazi Germany, 34–5, 56–7, 128 Nedelea, A. & M., 354 negative advertising see attack videos neo-populism, 477, 478, 489n Netherlands, 375, 380, 386 netnography, 227 Neuman, P., 552 Neuman, S., 165 Neumann, P.R., 587 New York Times audience, 521

Chinese Dream, 406, 414 Columbian Chemicals, 105 disinformation, 61 Donald Trump, 516, 517 Hugo Chavez, 483 restructuring, 525 World War One, 4 Newman, D., 74 news channels, 57–8 see also Russia Today (RT) news magazines, 130 newspapers, 4, 7, 174, 193, 197, 206, 446 see also individual newspapers Nguyen, N.H., 392 NHK World-Japan, 429–30, 433, 434, 438n niche marketing see narrowcasting night letters, 340 Nihonjiron, 427, 438n Nikkei, 432 Nishioka, Tsutomu, 424 Nix, Alexander, 89 normalization process, 466–71 North Korea biological warfare propaganda, 336, 337, 345–6 nuclear war, 346–7 North Korean case study, 205–19 background and literature review, 206–9 findings, 213–17 inter-Korean relations, 209–11 lessons learnt, 217–18 limitations, 218–19 methodology, 212–13 Norton-Taylor, R., 446 nuclear war, 346–7 Nuland, Victoria, 503–4 Nye, Joseph and Armitage, Richard, 428 Oakes, Nigel, 540 Obama, Barack, 62–3, 325, 414, 452, 472, 512 Obamacare, 520–1 obfuscation, 91, 398 objectivity, 524 Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), 448 Old Testament, 56 Olsen, D., 165 One Belt One Road (OBOR) see Belt and Road Initiative online dishonesty, 307–8 online journalism, 307–9 online political posters (OPPs), 167 Ontario provincial elections, 96–9 ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ (Lindsay), 31 Orban, Victor, 523 Ordered Protection Motivation Model (OPM), 341–2 Oriental Outlook, 407 Orlov, Vladimir, 251

INDEX

Orthodoxy, 497–8 see also Greek Orthodox Church Osaka, 423, 425 O’Shaughnessy, N., 35, 350 O’Shaughnessy, N. and Baines, P.R., 359 otherisation, 481 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 283 pan-propagandaism, 143 Papacharissi, Z., 72 Papadimitriou, D., 462 parallel reality, 65–6 Parallel Response Model (PRM), 341 Paris, 14 Paris Commune, 4 Paris Peace Process, 267, 269, 270 Parker, Critchley, 31–2 participatory propaganda, 85–100 audience amplification, 90–1 audience segmentation, 88–90 case studies, 93–9 definition, 92 evolving nature of propaganda, 86–8 obfuscation, 91 US Presidential election 2016, 93–4 see also co-conspiracy; computational propaganda; post-truth: collective reinforcement of; user participation Pasternak, Boris, 194 Patek, Umar, 583 patriotism, 497, 499 Payne, K., 441, 444, 446 peace, 355 peace dividend, 351 peace marketing, 351, 354–7, 359–3 Pearce, W.B. and Littlejohn, S.W., 190, 191 Peisakhin, L. and Rozenas, R., 289 Pennycook, G. and Rand, D., 296 People’s Choice, The (Lazarsfeld), 513 perception, 442 Perrow, C., 434 Perry, Rick, 60 Perry, S., 159 personalized pluralist model, 484 persuasion, 43, 47, 56, 234, 295, 442, 511 Peru, 477 Pew Research Center, 108, 117, 128, 515 Phan Dinh Phung, 376 Philippines, 374, 376–9, 396, 397, 519 Phillips, W., 535 Philo, G., 534 Piata, A., 167 Pineda, A., 142 Pisicane, Carlo, 11 Pizzagate, 65, 76, 77, 303 Plato, 156, 248

pleasure economy, 74 Plekhanov, Gregory, 191 pluralism, 426 polarisation, 64 police, 344–5 political campaigns, 92–3 political communication, 166–7, 184–5 political expression, 58 political fear, 336–7 political fiction, 56 political parallelism, 484, 489n political reform, 317–18 Political Warfare Executive (PWE), 252, 253 Politico.com, 314 politics of fear, 199 PolitiFact, 313 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 264 Ponsonby, Arthur, 265, 268–9 popular culture, 5, 214 populism / populist communication, 476–9 historical and conceptual aspects, 477–80 neo-populism, 477, 478, 489n synthesised framework, 480–7, 482 Portugal, 374, 375 Pospelov, Pyotr, 337 postcolonialism, 382–96, 400 Indochina Wars, 390–4 Indonesian Konfrontasi, 386–90 Malayan Emergency, 383–6 postmodern warfare, 307 post-truth, 71–82 affiliation and affect, 79–80 audience satisfaction, 77–8 collective reinforcement of, 78–9 Experience Age, 73–5 fake news, 312 information (self-)tailoring, 75–6 mediatisation and affect, 72–3 narrative construction, 80–1 Potter, J., 158 Poulgrain, G., 389 power, 141, 142, 147, 148, 189–90 and peace, 355 soft power strategy, 426–9 power balancing, 375 Pravda, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 press, 4–5 ‘house-broken press’, 422 see also newspapers press agent model, 140 press freedom, 485–7, 505 prison detainees, 12–13, 464 profiling see audience segmentation; narrowcasting Project Servator, 344–5 Proletkult, 194 promotion, 362 Pronin, E., 293

605

606

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

propaganda (im)moral stance, xxiv ancient Greece, 248 anti-propagandists, 267–70 as co-production between communicator and audience, xxvi–xxvii definitions, xxv–xxvi, 86, 246, 351–3 Fraser, L., 24 Grabo, Cynthia, 256 Jowett, G.S. and O’Donnel, V.J., 41, 100n, 223 Lasswell, Harold, 206, 372, 461 Oxford English Dictionary, 269 Pineda, A., 142 Plekhanov, G., 191 Ponsonby, Arthur, 268 Taylor, P.M., 157, 453, 460 versus disinformation, 247, 248–58 Cold War, 253–7, 308 in the digital age, 257–8 interwar period, 250–2 World War One, 248–50 World War Two, 252–3 evolving nature of, 86–8 objectives, 510–11 origin of the term, 127 relevance, xxiiv–xxiv responses to, 143 role in opinion and perception, 442–4 Propaganda (Bernays), 137 Propaganda Critic, 118 propaganda of the deed (POTD), 3–18, 261, 351–2, 390 acts of violence / assassinations, 4, 5–6, 13–15 Bakunin supporters, 11–12 genealogy, 7–10 Islamist propaganda, 228, 261 political economy background, 6–7 press, 4–5 Vera Zasulich, 12, 16 Protection Motivation Model (PMM), 341 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 61 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 8, 9–10 proxy wars, 445 pseudo-realities, 62 psychiatry, 200 psychological operations (PSYOP), 273–4, 279–81, 282–4 psychological reactance, 230, 237n psychological violence, 199 public information model, 140 public knowledge, 519–20, 520–1 public relations, 137–8, 138–41, 144–5, 148–9 definitions, 143, 145–6, 146–7 historiography, 142 peace marketing, 355 Soviet Union, 193 see also corporate propaganda public trials, 199

Putin, Vladimir, 201, 290, 307, 316, 511 propaganda performance 2000-2018, 492–505 approval and disapproval ratings 2013-2014, 498 comparison of 2000 and 2018, 494 domestic, 495–9 international, 499–504 Pyszczynski, T., 363 Qualter, T.H., 353 radical populism, 477, 478, 489n radicalization, 49, 552–3 counter-radicalization, 361 radio, 208–9, 463, 486 Radio Swan, 208 Rafiq, A., 358–9, 361 Rafiq, Haras and Malik, Nikita, 552 Ramos, Jorge, 487, 488n Rani, Anita, 435 Ranstorp, M. and Hyllegren, P., 552 Rayport, Jeffrey, 160–1 Read, J., 268 Reagan, Ronald, 60 reality parallel reality, 65–6 pseudo-realities, 62 reciprocity, 230, 339 referendums, 481–4 see also EU referendum refugee crisis, 533, 534 regulation, 297, 298, 316–17 religion Chinese Dream, 416 Cold War, 467 Hamas and Hezbollah, 281 Israel, 280, 281–2 North Korea, 215, 217 Soviet propaganda, 194, 200 Ren-TV, 500 Reporters Without Borders, 505 Republic, The (Plato), 248 Resilient Communities Fund, 324–5 resonance metaphor, 47 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 587 Revolutionary Catechism, The (1869), 11 Reychler, L., 354 Rheingold, Howard, 307 rhetoric, 156–8 ancient Greece, 247 in Arab culture, 273 Donald Trump, 514, 515, 516, 517 duplicitous, 63 Hilary Clinton, 515 populism, 478, 480–1 divisive mechanisms, 481–4 rhetorical criticism, 155–6, 158, 167–8 memes, 163–6

INDEX

metaphor, 159–63 metaphorical memes, 166–7 Richards, I.A., 159 Richardson, Louise, 24 Rieger, D., 50 Riesman, D., 352 Riyadh Conference on the Use of the Internet to Counter the Appeal of Extremist Violence, 586–7 Rizal, Jose, 378, 379 Roberts, C., 208 Rodley, C., 162, 164–5 Rodocanachi, C., 464–5, 465 Rogers, R., 185 Rogers, R.W., 341 Rohingya Muslims, 394–5 Rokeach, M., 190 Romania, 337 Roosevelt, Theodore, 18 Roper, J., 141 Rossiya, 496, 500 Rove, Karl, 61 Rovira-Kaltwasser, C., 478 Rowbury, Ross, 430 Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), 445 Rumiyah, 555, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562 Rushkoff, D., 165–6 Russia 2007 parliamentary vote, 497 2008 presidential elections, 497 Aaron Banks, 537 ‘arrested modernisation’, 12 character assassination (CA), 201 China, 501, 502 Crimea, 40, 289, 305, 306–7, 346 democracy index ranking, xxv digital propaganda, 502–3 disinformation, 65–6, 503 fake news, 519 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 91, 106, 109–10, 115, 288 Brexit campaign, 503, 543n Crimea, 305 criminal complaints against, 315 Vladimir Putin, 499 Japan, 501–2 post-truth, 312 prison detainees, 12–13 propaganda of the deed (POTD), 15–17 social media, 503, 504 Syrian conflict, 449, 450, 451 US Presidential election 2016, 59, 61–2, 91, 106, 303, 317, 503–4 Yuri Miller, 58 see also Putin, Vladimir; Russian propaganda; Soviet Union Russia Today (RT), 62, 287, 316, 500–1 Russian Civil War, 195

Russian Orthodox Church, 497–8 Russian propaganda, 286–298 character, 286–7 characteristics, 290 defending against, 293–7 effectiveness, 289–90 goals and objectives, 289 persuasiveness, 291–3 sources and types, 287–9 Rwanda, 519 Saipov, Sayfullo, 223 Sakharov, Andrei, 195 Salafi jihadists, 35, 39–40, 47–8, 50 Salah, Sheikh Raed, 277 Saltman, E. and Smith, M., 551, 553 San Francisco, 423, 424–5, 427 Sanders, Bernie, 512 Sandy Hook massacre, 65 Sankei Shimbun, 432 Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, 116 Sargeaunt, Antony, 23 Saudi Arabia, 272–3 Sawab Center, 332 SCAME method, 226, 343 Schank, Roger, 42 Schattschneider, E.E., 352, 354 Schiappa, E., 156 Schlieffen Plan, 262 Schori Liang, C., 554, 555 Schudson, Michael, 318 science, 306 scripted propaganda, 443 search engines, 90 see also Google Second World War see World War Two Segaert, Henry, 28 segmentation, 88–90 Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins), 156, 163 self-reliance, 210 semiotic analysis, 227–8 Seo, H., 126, 129–30, 174, 175 Seo, H. and Ebrahim, H., 126, 131, 134, 445 Shanghai Daily, 416 Shared Values Initiative, 324 Sharp, G., 355, 359, 362 Sheffield, H., 357 Shifman, L., 164 show trials, 199 Shrivastava, P., 143 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom, 380–1 Singapore, 381–2, 384, 389, 395, 397 Sister Cities International, 438n Skouras, Spyros, 466, 467–8 Skripal, Sergey, 503 Sloman, S. and Fernbach, P., 78

607

608

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

Snow, N., 425 Snowden, Edward, 110 Snyder, T., 311 Sobchak, Ksenia, 499 Sobieski, Daniel John, 90 Soble, J., 426 social capital, 148 social media Abe 2.0, 431 affective feedback loop, 78 audience amplification, 90–1 audience segmentation, 88–90 citizens as content producers, 184 (see also user participation) code of practice, 317 confirmation bias, 64 content analysis, 174–81, 175–8, 182, 227 counterterrorism, 587 echo chambers, 50, 78, 86, 88–9, 92 Experience Age, 73–5 fact-checking and verification, 296–7 fake news, 307–8 framing, 207 information (self-)tailoring, 75–6 ISIS, 554, 583 Israel, 282 mediatisation and affect, 72–3 news from, 57, 108 obfuscation, 91 policing, 314–15 populism, 488 regulation, 297 Russia Today (RT), 501 Russian propaganda, 288, 307, 499, 503 Vladimir Putin, 493 Syrian conflict, 445–6 terrorist propaganda, 227, 231, 232, 581–3 narrowcasting, 584–6 threats posed by, 583–4 terrorist recruitment, 233–4, 233, 585–6 user participation, 114 visual propaganda, 128–33, 174 see also computational propaganda; Facebook; participatory propaganda; Twitter; WhatsApp socialisation, 234 sociological propaganda, 49–51, 143 sockpuppets, 107, 108–11, 113, 117–18 Soekarno, 380, 382, 386, 387, 388 Soft Power 30 Report (McClory), 426 soft power strategy, 426–9 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 194 Somalia, 519 Song, Y. and Xu, R., 75 Sophists, 156 source identification, 295–6 South Korean propaganda case study, 205–19 background and literature review, 206–9

findings, 213–17 inter-Korean relations, 209–11 lessons learnt, 217–18 limitations, 218–19 methodology, 212–13 South Lebanese Army (SLA), 278 Southeast Asia, 371–401 anti-colonialism, 377–82, 400 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 371, 396–400, 400–1 colonialism, 371, 373–7 information operations, 382–96 Indochina Wars, 390–4 Indonesian Konfrontasi, 386–90 Islamic fundamentalism, 394–6 Malayan Emergency, 383–6 modernity, 371–2 Soviet Union character assassination (CA), 189, 190–201 motives and targets, 195–7 role of the media, 197–8 strategies, 192–5 violence, 198–200 Cold War, 196–7, 208, 253–7, 286–7, 460 biological warfare propaganda, 337–9 White Russia massacre, 68 see also Russia Spain, 232, 374, 375, 376–7, 378–9 Sparkes-Vian, C., 162, 163 speech, freedom of, 296–7 Spence, J., 68 Spicer, Sean, 522–3 spin doctors, 140 Sproule, J. Michael, 113–14, 143 stakeholders, 146 Stalin, Joseph, 192–3, 194–5, 195, 196, 199 Stampnitzky, L., 542 Stanley, J., 523 state of emergency propaganda, 461–6 state propaganda, 308 ‘stealing thunder’, 295 Stephen, Leslie, 63 Stimson, Henry L., 377 Stirner, Max, 10 StopFake, 310, 313–14 stories see alternative narratives; master narratives; strategic narratives Straitjacket Society: An Insider’s Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan (Miyamoto), 437 strategic communication, 41–2, 144 Islamic State Movement (ISM), 566–74 strategic narratives, 38–52 concept and theory, 39–40 definitions, 40–1, 44, 47 Islamic State Movement (ISM), 568–9 in practice battles of narratives, 48–9

INDEX

as everything, 46–7 ideology, 49 master narratives, 47–8 mission statements, 44–6 sociological propaganda, 49–51 target audiences, 51 theoretical appeal, 42–4 STREET project, 361 Stroud, N.J., 76 Study Times, 410 Subotić, Jelena, 51 Sullivan, Edmund J., 29–30 Sulzberger, A.G., 522 surveillance, 119 Swan, JG, 33 Swettenham, Frank, 375 Swiftboat Veterans, 61 Sydney Morning Herald, 32 Sykes Picot Agreement, 48 symbolic violence, 147–8 Syria, 519 Syrian conflict Facebook, 129, 131–3, 174 framing, 444–7 Islamic State Movement (ISM), 569, 572, 574 Vladimir Putin, 493 Western media coverage, 35, 447–53 Syrian White Helmets, 62 Takata Corporation, 428 Taliban, 340, 573 Tanner Jr, J.F., 341 target audiences, 51 target marketing see narrowcasting Tatham, S., 42 Taylor, P.M., 55, 157, 441, 442, 443, 460 Teague-Jones, Reginald, 68 technological society, 372, 436 Telegram, 588, 589 television, 287–8, 289, 486, 487, 496–7, 497, 498–9 see also Russia Today (RT) Templer, Gerald, 385 TEPCO, 428 Terror Management Theory (TMT), 342 terrorism see also, 351–2 terrorist attacks, 261–2, 562, xxiiv–xxiv see also 9/11; propaganda of the deed (POTD) terrorist propaganda, 577–89 counterterrorism, 586–7 dark net, 587–9 Facebook, 582, 583, 587 Internet, 579–81 media, 578–9 narrowcasting, 584–6 social media, 179, 581–3 threats posed by, 583–4 see also Islamist propaganda effectiveness

609

Thailand, 383, 394, 397–8 theatre, 198 Theocharisa, Y., 176, 179 Thi, Lam Quang, 391–2 Thompson, Sir Robert, 256 Thucydides, 247–8 Till Martyrdom Do Us Part (Saltman and Smith), 551 Times, The, 61 tobacco industry, 59 totalitarian propaganda, 312 Track Two, 399–400 Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (Bentley), 424 Treaty of London 1839, 262 Treaty of Versaille, 267, 270 Trepov, Fyodor, 12 trolling, 80, 90, 108–9, 287, 288, 290, 304 Trotsky, Leon, 193, 195, 198, 199 Truman, Harry S., 459, 467, 470 Truman Doctrine, 460 Trump, Donald disinformation, 64–5, 66, 67 election campaign, 303, 511–13, 523–4 media coverage, 513–14 rhetoric, 514, 515, 516 Russia, 503, 504 Twitter, 515–17, 518 fake news, 311, 511, 514, 516 false and misleading claims, 519–22, 519, 520 inconsistency, 45 lies, 60 supporters, 90, 309 Syrian conflict, 450, 451, 452 Twitter, 128, 185 war on media campaign, 517–19, 522–3, 524–5 Xi Jinping, 414 truth, 66–7 partial, 63 see also post-truth truth decay, 312 truthiness, 65 Tsfati, Y. and Weimann, G., 580 Tugwell, M., 276, 359 Tumblr, 117 tunnel warfare, 276, 282 Turkey, 519 Turkle, Sherry, 307 Turner, Ethel, 32–3 Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D., 64 Twitter Abe 2.0, 431 BBC, 430 bots, 112 content analysis, 180–1 Digital Outreach Team (DOT), 332 disinformation, 57

610

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

Donald Trump, 90, 128, 185, 515–17, 518 fake accounts, 62, 106, 115 fake news, 313, 315 framing, 130, 207 Hillary Clinton, 512 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 91 ISIS, 583 political campaigns, 179 populism, 488 Russian propaganda, 292, 504 Sally-Anne Jones, 232 Sawab Center, 332 users, 127, 128 visual propaganda, 126, 129–31, 174 Twitterbots, 503 UK Independence Party (UKIP), 534, 535, 537 Ukraine, 66 media literacy, 317 media regulation, 316 Russian propaganda, 288, 289, 290 fake news, 303, 306–7, 309–11 social media, 207 StopFake, 310, 313–14 US support, 500 Vladimir Putin, 493, 498, 500, 502 Ullah, Ata, 395 Umberto I, King of Italy, 4 Union of Democratic Control (UDC), 268 United Kingdom 2015 general election, 112 austerity, 533, 534 EU referendum, 64 financial motivations, 537–9 immigration, 534–5, 536, 540, 541 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 503, 543n Jo Cox, 541–3 Leave campaign, 63–4, 80–1, 532–3, 536, 537, 539–41 participatory propaganda case study, 94–5 immigration, 533–5 Iraq War, xxvi, xxix Russia, 503 Syrian conflict, 446, 447 terrorism, 223 see also Great Britain United Nations (UN), 209, 584, 586–7 United States alt-right, 166 Brexit campaign, 536–7 Chinese Dream, 407, 414 Cold War, 316 Great Britain, 470–2 Greece, 459, 460, 462–3, 466–8 colonialism, 374, 375, 376, 376–7 counterpropaganda, 316 biological warfare propaganda, 336–9, 345–6

counterterrorism communications, 323–33 Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), 324 Digital Outreach Team (DOT), 324, 325–31 Global Engagement Center (GEC), 324, 325 way forward, 331–3 Cuba, 208 healthcare, 520–1 immigration, 7 Iran, 208–9 Iraq War, 110, 444, 500 Japan, 428–9, 437 Korean War, 209 media regulation, 316 National Security Agency (NSA), 588 North Korea, 346–7 objective journalism, 318 Presidential election 2004, 62–3 Presidential election 2016 content analysis, 180 Hilary Clinton, 63, 94 media coverage, 513–14 Mueller investigation, 317 participatory propaganda, 89, 90, 91, 93–4 participatory propaganda case study, 93–4 rhetoric, 514–15 Russia, 59, 61–2, 91, 106, 303, 493, 503–4 Trump campaign, 511–13 Russia Today (RT), 501 sockpuppets, 110 Syria, 445, 447, 452 terrorism, 223 Ukraine, 500 Vietnam War, 381, 390, 392–3 Vladimir Putin, 500, 502 World War One, 265, 266 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 208 United States Freedom Army, 90 Unleashing the Ideavirus (Godin), 161 user participation, 114 see also citizens as content producers; participatory propaganda van Wolferen, Karel, 422, 426, 436–7, 437–8 Venezuela, 480, 483, 484, 485, 486–7 verification, 296–7 Verstraete, M., 304 vertical coherence, 47 Vickery, Chris, 539 Vietnam, 376, 379–80, 383, 398 Vietnam War, 35, 257, 381, 390–3 violence, 190 cultural, 190 ISIS, 561–2 psychological, 199 Soviet propaganda, 198–200

Index

symbolic, 147–8 see also propaganda of the deed (POTD) violent extremism, 551 Violent Image, The (Bolt, 2011), 4, 17 viral agitpop, 162 viral marketing, 160–1 viral propaganda, 155–6, 167–8 memes, 163–6 metaphor, 159–63 metaphorical memes, 166–7 see also computational propaganda; digital propaganda Virdee, S. and McGeever, B., 540 visual propaganda, 126–34 Israeli-Hamas conflict, 127–8, 129–31, 174 Syria, 129, 131–3, 174 visual representation, 166–7 Volchek, D. and Sindelar, D., 288 Vosoughi, S., 292, 313 Vote Leave, 536, 540–1 voter apathy, 497 Wakefield, Andrew, 57 Wall, T. and Mitew, T., 163, 165 Wall Street Journal, 407, 417 Waller, M.J., 360 Waltzman, R., 117 Wanadi, Jusuf, 408 Wang, Z., 408 Wang Jiayu, 407 Wang Xiaohui, 411 war, 441, 445 War on Terror, 38–9, 39–40, 45, 48 War Propaganda Bureau, 265 Wardle, C., 290, 304 Wardle, C. and Derakhshan, H., 305 Washington Examiner, 451–2 Washington Post, 90, 311, 451, 482, 522 Watson, T., 139 Watts, J., 483 Wayston, Elizabeth, 468 Weber, Max, 148 websites, 580–1 Weekly Disinformation Review, 290 Wei Da, 414 Weimann, G., 227, 580 Weimann, G. and Winn, C., 579 Welch, David, 22, 27 West, Geoffrey, 23 WhatsApp, 67, 581 white widow, 231–2 Why Britain Went to War, 33 Wiggins, B.E., 162–3 Wigmore, Andy, 537–8, 539, 540, 542 Wikipedia, 114 Wilhelm I, Kaiser, 4 Winkler, C., 567

611

Winter, C., 358, 568 Winter, Ofer, 282 Witte, K., 340, 341, 342 Witte, K. and Allen, M., 340 Wladawsky-Berger, I., 74 Woody, C.H., 352 Wooley, S.C. and Howard, P.N., 87 ‘Work and Victory Week’, 459, 461, 466–71 World Socialist Web Site, 311 World War One, 4, 86–7, 113 atrocity propaganda, 22–3, 56 anti-propagandists, 267–70 architects of, 27–8 concept and theory, 23–6 impact on Australian population, 30–4 international law as, 28–30 the ‘rape’ of Belgium, 265–7 Bryce Report, 27, 29, 263–4, 265, 266, 268 German invasion of Belgium, 262–3 propaganda versus disinformation, 248–50 World War Two, 66, 252–3, 375, 425, 462 Wylie, C., 89 Xi Jinping Chinese Dream, 405, 408–9, 417–8 19th CPC Congress, 406, 410–11 current situation and predicament, 413–17 propaganda to policy, 411–13 Xiangping, M., 408 Xifra, J., 140, 145 Xifra, J. and Heath, R.L., 142 Xinhua Daily, 406, 408, 409, 410, 415, 416 Yellow Vests Movement, 111 Yeltsin, Boris, 492, 495 Yom Kippur War, 278 Yomiuri Shimbun, 432 Yoshimura, Hirofumi, 423, 424, 425, 427 youth organizations, 194 YouTube accessibility, 115 Al Qaeda, 395 Arabic language videos, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329 Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), 395 Columbian Chemicals, 105 fake accounts, 115 Hamas, 272–285 InfoWars, 316 ISIS, 126, 395, 583 Islamist propaganda effectiveness, 226, 228 Israel, 129 Michael Gove, 75 Syrian conflict, 131 US Presidential election 2016, 504 users, 581 Vladimir Putin, 499 Yu Zhengsheng, 414

612

Zabecki, David, 22 Zasulich, Vera, 12, 16 Zelin, A., 567–8 Zeta Global, 89 Zhang Lifan, 409 Zhang Weiwei, 414 Zinoviev letter, 61, 250–2

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA

Zionism, 280 Zionist International, 61 Žižek, S., 190 Zollmann, F., 443–4, 444 ‘zombie talk’, 165 Zuckerberg, Mark, 58, 587