The Jordan Harbinger Show 172: Clint Watts | Surviving in a World of Fake News
Mar 14, 2019
Clint Watts, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and expert on online extremism, dives into the troubling world of fake news and social media manipulation. He discusses how cognitive biases are exploited to destabilize trust and democracy. Watts reveals how groups like ISIS use social media for recruitment and the tactics that external forces like Russia employ to sow division. He also explores the allure of extremism and the challenges of combating misinformation in our digital landscape.
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Preference Bubbles & Manipulation
- Social media optimizes for preference bubbles, giving users what they want and reinforcing existing biases.
- This creates shared perceptions but not shared realities, making manipulation easier.
Russian Disinformation Tactics
- Russia's disinformation campaigns are not morally equivalent to U.S. actions, as they involve hacking, propaganda, and manipulation on a different scale.
- These campaigns target vulnerabilities in trust and exploit social media's design.
The Bin Laden Raid Analogy
- Watts compares dismissing Russian disinformation to dismissing the Bin Laden raid based on observations at one military base.
- He emphasizes that influence operations don't need sophistication to succeed.
