Messing with the Enemy Quotes

“America sucks at information warfare, absolutely sucks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Democracies are marketplaces of ideas. We stand for freedom, liberty, human rights, and peaceful protest, so stopping one thing, like the violent views of terrorists or nefarious Russian influence of homegrown Americans, gets quite tricky. American values and those of other Western democracies are their greatest strength when shared and promoted—and a major vulnerability in the eyes of those who seek to exploit them. Suppressing ideas undermines American values. And so countering bad ideas, like those that fuel terrorism or authoritarianism, proves vexing, as we tend to believe that the remedy to be applied is more speech, even though we are not entirely sure what to say, how to say it, or who should say it.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“The hecklers weren’t hacking people’s computers; they were hacking their minds, in two ways. In one sense, they sought to change a target audience’s perception on issues, nudging audiences toward preferred foreign policy positions and influencing experts, politicians, and media personalities toward a pro-Assad or pro-Russia stance. When not shaping audience conversations through a barrage of slanted content and supporting banter, hecklers sought to batter adversaries off social media platforms through either endless harassment or compromise.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“year after Trump’s election, the Associated Press analyzed his forty-three nominees in science-related positions and found that 60 percent held neither a master’s degree nor a doctorate in a science or health field.5”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“cursory look at the Columbia Journalism Review’s media map demonstrates how social media encourages information bubbles for each political leaning. Conservatives strongly centered their consumption around Breitbart and Fox News, while liberals relied on a more diverse spread of left-leaning outlets. For a foreign influence operation like the one the Russians ran against the United States, the highly concentrated right-wing social media landscape is an immediate, ripe target for injecting themes and messages. The American left shows to be multipolar, littered with fringe outlets and causes, making concentrated foreign influence more challenging; spreading the Kremlin message thus requires influencing many outlets rather than one or two.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“The Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the news outlets most frequently shared by supporters of Trump and Clinton. Fans of both candidates demonstrated a proclivity for outlets supporting their political biases, but the differences between the two camps were stark. On social media, Clinton supporters shared the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and New York Times the most. Trump supporters far and away preferred Breitbart, the Hill, and Fox News. Further down the list, Clinton supporters gravitated to a wide range of liberal outlets, most fairly well known. Trump’s camp, though, included a long list of lesser-known outlets, including the controversial Infowars, a media organization known for denying the occurrence of the Sandy Hook shootings and one I’d witnessed routinely regurgitating Russian propaganda.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“Social media nationalism and clickbait populism have led to a third phenomenon that undermines the intelligence of crowds, threatening the advancement of humanity and the unity of democracies: the death of expertise. As the barriers to internet access got lower and lower, anyone, regardless of education, training, or status, could explore information and voice their opinion in debate. This would seem, on the surface, to be good for democracies, as increased information, awareness, and voice would seem to encourage more civic engagement and debate and better collective outcomes. Instead, social media users, in their relentless pursuit of preferences, have selectively chosen information and expertise they like over that which is true or even real. Social media users participating in the crowd have chosen to be happier and dumber by not just challenging McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s core but also by seeking to destroy it.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

“RT has something for every American if it means weakening support for the U.S. government and its institutions. RT’s tagline is “Question More.” Of course, it seeks to provide not answers, but doubt. How do you know? Could it be this instead? Can you really trust the government? Isn’t the U.S. government hypocritical? The net takeaway of RT coverage is that nothing can be trusted, and if you can’t trust anyone, then you’ll believe anything.”
― Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News