Tag Archives: fake news

Fake News circa 1960

Lawrence Martin-Bittman created fake news for the Czech Communist Party in the 1950’s and 60’s. Sharon McConnell tells his story in “The Founding Father of Fake News (Writer’s Digest, March/April 2019).

Martin-Bittman joined the Communist Party in 1954 at age 15. After studying law and journalism in Czechoslovakia, he became an official in the Czech disinformation service. He became a press attaché in the Czech embassy in Vienna, working to distribute false news stories to journalists. His purpose was to poison the relationships between the United States and Western Europe.

In at least one instance, he used blackmail to force an Indonesian diplomat to feed false information about a U.S. “plot” to his home country of Indonesia. As a result, anger against Americans severely damaged American influence in the region.

In another instance, he captured signatures of American diplomats from Christmas cards and placed them on false documents.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, horrified him and led him to change his mind about his communist beliefs. He fled with his wife to the United States.

After a year of debriefing in Washington, D.C., he eventually became a professor of journalism at Boston University.

McConnell writes, “Think about all the damage Martin-Bittman and his cohorts managed to cause before the internet existed. . . . As a reader, it’s important to approach headlines and text with a healthy sense of skepticism . . . considering the source . . . and looking for objective sources.”

Amen.

Land, Sea, Air, Space, and Now Cyber

In the American Revolution, George Washington and John Paul Jones fought on land and sea. In World War I, air became a new sphere of warfare. During the Cold War, space joined the others. Within the span of a U.S. election, cyber warfare has thrust itself into national consciousness.

Alarmed by Russian meddling in U.S. elections, Congress and the Justice Department have launched investigations. Recent indictments have been handed down against Russian citizens accused of using social media to foment dissension between Americans of different political beliefs.

Recently, evidence points to foreign attempts to spark controversy over gun rights immediately after the tragic school shootings in Parkland, Florida.

We have entered another theater of war. Playing requires intelligence resources, not big bombs and missiles. Other nations unable to match our military might have intelligence capabilities and a population of educated players.

Misinformation (including fake news), cyber leaks, and danger to utility and other systems are new theaters of war.

Compare the new methods to irregular warfare as practiced by Francis Marion, the “swamp fox,” during the American Revolution, or Che Grevera in Cuba, overcoming stronger conventional armies.

Our defense? A refusal to use social media as a source of news is a good start. Take advantage of the country’s well established newspapers from different shades of the political spectrum.

Convinced Against Our Will

“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

–old saying, used by Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People

The newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts explored a few fake news items of the recent past (“Truth, sadly, is not something we all value,” The Seattle Times, Oct 8, 2017).

One fake story led to a shooting in an innocent pizza parlor by an individual who believed ridiculous stories about the business, repeated on propaganda sites.

The fact that Barrack Obama has a legal birth certificate from Hawaii or that his birth was reported in a verifiable news item does not stop birther stories that he wasn’t born in the United States.

Pitts lists reputable groups (newspapers, schools of journalism, fact checking sites) all attempting to bring discernment to our decisions on what we read and believe.

He’s a pessimist, pointing to research suggesting that people tend to “double down on the false belief” when facts prove them wrong.

Our worth seems tied to what we believe. We find it difficult to think that we can be imperfect, that we can be duped. We seek, not truth, but validation of our perfection.

We are in need of listeners. We need to listen, not just to what our neighbors say they believe, waiting impatiently to argue our side. We need to understand why our neighbors believe as they do, to be touched by the needs they express. If we understand each other, we may be able to move closer to finding truth.

Not Your Grandmother’s Cold War

“I Led Three Lives,” a TV show in the 1950’s, was based on the story of an actual person, Herbert Philbrick. He lived as an American businessman, a Communist spy, and an American counterspy for the FBI. In those old days of the Cold War, the different sides used espionage and radio broadcasts.

Today, hacking and cyber warfare have overtaken the earlier methods.

Some worry that politics surrounding the testimony of former FBI director James Comey will blind Americans to Comey’s warnings about the serious Russian intrusion into our elections.

“The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle,” Comey said. “They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government.”

Whatever Donald Trump and his election team did or did not do, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates the interference of a hostile power in our election process. European democracies have also been attacked. These attempts should be taken seriously by all political parties.

It seems like an age since the end of the old Cold War in the early 1990’s. Today’s young people weren’t around, and the over thirty crowd have forgotten the euphoria in Europe and the United States when Eastern Europeans danced in the streets and reclaimed their countries from the Soviets.

Americans were going to have a peace dividend and beat their swords into plowshares. Russians were going to have free elections and a free press and join the rapidly escalating democratization of the world.

Instead we seem to have fallen, like Alice, through a rabbit hole into a crazy place of fake news, hacked political systems, and the rise of strong men with dictatorial powers, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Our governments, national and local, are tasked with developing technical methods to neutralize cyber attacks. Citizens, however, have the duty of reading widely and responsibly. Fake news disappears without followers.

 

Actually Leaving Facebook?

A news columnist, Froma Harrop, announced her intention to leave Facebook. She’s leaving because she believes Facebook has become a platform for fake news.

At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, has posted (on Facebook) an announcement that his company is acting to curb false news stories. It is, he said, developing new tools to detect and classify “misinformation.” Further, he has said, the company won’t accept adds that are “illegal, misleading or deceptive.”

Possibly the problem is with the “friends” concept. Facebook may fit comfortably among a group of actual friends, brought together by some kind of kinship. It runs aground when it becomes an advertising center for businesses or political parties. Calling customers or potential voters our “friends,” when we do not even know them, degrades the word.

For the moment, I am still on Facebook. I have decided, however, that I will not like or click approval of any product or any unknown opinion piece. In fact, I will limit my viewing to personal notes from actual friends. And my time on Facebook will be minimal.