Bots and divisiveness with COVID-19

Divisiveness has only increased in this pandemic, and it has undoubtedly cost lives. This is the 9th installment in my series about COVID-19.

Photo from https://news.usc.edu/177963/election-2020-twitter-social-media-bots-foreign-interference-usc-study/

People are extremely divided

The United States is at a historical level of political division.

Identity plays an increasing role, where people are more concerned with being part of Team Red or Team Blue, and being against the other side, than has historically been true.  People on the other side are not just wrong, they are bad.

There are multiple reasonable approaches to handling the pandemic

No leaders knew exactly what to do at the beginning of the pandemic. Some Asian countries, with recent experiences with MIRS and SARS, immediately masked up and used their cultures' larger social distance to their advantage. New Zealand found the island and people amenable to a lockdown, and that has obviously been pretty effective. Sweden went the opposite approach and, until relatively recently, tried to lean on liberty and individual choice.

There are definitely open questions about downstream impacts of shutdowns and restrictions. Do shutdowns give people confidence that decrease long-term economic problems, or do they create sufficient economic damage that mental health, lack of philanthropic support, and poverty overwhelm any good that the lockdowns cause?  People continue to debate this, and scholars will have tons of material for years to come.

Because of this confusion on the best course, there were multiple reasonable approaches that leaders could have taken. They did not do so in the United States; there was and is no consistent leadership, and so this confusion stayed, and continues to stay, in the general populace, even though there has been a consensus among health leaders for many months about how to handle the pandemic.  

What is causing the divisiveness

Already divided

For the last three decades, Americans have been sorting themselves in like-minded communities in the so-called Big Sort. 

Partisan gerrymandering is something that leaders and the general public have long agreed was a bad thing. It leads to primaries being the only elections that matter in most districts, and that means each politician is incented to be more and more extreme and less and less amenable to compromise. As Schwarzenegger memorably pointed out in a video definitely worth taking a couple minutes to watch, Congress is less populator than hemorrhoids, cockroaches, and herpes. They can't get anything done because compromising is siding with the enemy, and those people that reach grand compromises ... get primaried out.

So, we were already divided.

Unrest

And the division came to a crescendo in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Protests grew, and those were often accompanied by riots. On the left, people viewed the protests as the logical outpouring of emotion after years (decades ... centuries) of oppression and systemic racism, and very little attention was paid to the damage and fear caused by those riots. On the right, the rioting was seen as the problem, as an abandonment of society and America, and very little attention was paid to the instigation and violence on the right. Somehow there was no middle ground. It could have been influenced by the fact that everyone had been cooped up in their houses for a month.

All this left us locked into our echo chambers. 

Bots and trolls

Based on the title of the post, you were probably expecting this.

Russian web brigades are a known, long-standing, big problem. They aren't your regular trolls that use insults and poor English to pick fights with libtards.  They make feel-good posts to get followers and then use spin and subterfuge to influence. They have been working on disinformation since 2003 or earlier, and they have a tried-and-true approach in a social "kill chain": "create an online persona, seed social media with a message, game platform algorithms to amplify it, win shares from real people, see mass media pick up the message." There are certainly other countries that engage in this behavior (Iran and China, for example), but Russia is by far the biggest player, and their bots focus on external divisiveness instead of simple pro-Russia stories (unlike the majority of Chinese posts, for instance).  Russia continue to focus most of their destabilization efforts in the US toward influencing the conservative right. (Buried in all of this behavior has also been actual hacking by Russia, the likes of which has never been seen.  That will almost definitely end up having long lasting impacts.)

Bots succeed through amplification and the appearance of being reliable. In the COVID era, Russian bots have had a few targets. First and probably most disturbing was the notion that COVID was created in a lab, which dovetailed with President Trump calling it the "China Virus" and implying some sort of bad behavior by the Chinese. Second was the odd but somehow effective linkage to the release of 5G. These eventually were brought into the ongoing insanity that is the QAnon conspiracy, where the Democratic party is secretly run by satanic liberal leaders devoted to eating children. I wish that were in any way hyperbolic. Think that nobody you know would be foolish enough to get hooked? Here are some QAnon-associated conspiracy theories: Hear anybody talk about the "deep state"? If you think that is too main stream, how about China starting the pandemic and that Democrats helped engineer it to derail the President? Maybe that Bill Gates had something to do with engineering it? Maybe that the CDC said that COVID wasn't that bad, after all?

What about all the push over the summer to fight against pedophilia? I mean, who is PRO pedophilia? It was click bait, trying to get eyes on QAnon posters. These stole the hashtag "savethechildren" and took valuable resources from those, you know, actually trying to stop pedophilia. Do you know any people that shared THOSE? (Hint: you do.)

So QAnon spreads divisiveness. And, of course, Russia amplifies QAnon. And your uncle retweets them.

But what does this have to do with COVID?

Fair question. What does being divided have to do with COVID? Well, if you are an enemy of the United States, or of basically anybody that is not you, how awesome would it be if you could sow dissension and use of resources and actually get people killed, without firing a single shot? If the people of the US had simply come together and worn masks from the beginning (or heck, even from just in November), well over a hundred thousand lives would likely have been saved. Even if the deaths themselves are not desired (though I don't know why we would question whether Vladimir Putin would be against the deaths of people that might disagree with him), division has long been a tactic employed by Russia toward the United States. The KGB said effectively spread disinformation for years, such as that the US caused AIDS or that the CIA was behind JFK's assassination. Agencies have once again found that they are spreading disinformation about COVID (many embedded links).

And they are winning. We are divided. And even if you don't believe that anybody is helping us along ... we are still divided. And it is literally killing people.

Please realize what's going on. Look for the ultimate source of the information you get, and if it feels like it is what the crazy other would do, and makes you feel self righteous ... question it.  Yes, there are crazy people out there, but there is no huge movement doing ... whatever crazy thing your uncle shared on Facebook. Use empathy, common sense ... and maybe some good googling techniques.

Made it all the way to the end of this post?  Wow. I barely made it this far. One more entry, and it will be done! 

(One small post script: the uncles mentioned above are entirely hypothetical; as far as I'm aware, none of my uncles even know social media exists.)