OP-ED – Basil Williams’ E-mail and the Evolution of Social Media Propaganda
Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams SC
Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams SC

By Ruel Johnson
LAST week, a story began circulating on the Internet about a screenshot of some e-mail

Cultural Policy Advisory, Ruel Johnson

purportedly sent by Attorney-General Basil Williams. In the e-mails, Williams was supposed to have outlined coalition re-election strategy that included things like reversing unpopular measures and pushing the line of the PPP as a racist party, as if the pronouncements of the party itself needed help in that regard.

The story was not only picked up by PPP scandal sites but by more mainstream media and shared extensively on social media. I had to caution one young state media reporter about the lack of professionalism in a comment he made essentially giving credence to the story. My experience with the sort of strategy at play was not new.
The better part of a decade ago, in 2010 I believe, a then senior political activist brought a ton of information to me, essentially proving the existence what was then known in media circles to be a clandestine blogging operation set up by the People’s Progressive Party, something called the New Media Unit, operating out of the Office of the President during the Bharrat Jagdeo presidency.

I spent a few weeks diving through the raw data, consisting primarily of chat logs between the members of the unit and “monitor sheets” for one blogger in particular, said sheets being basically the documentation of the monitors’ engagement of government critics on social media sites, message boards and blogs. For example, in response to a user on a message board, who queried what seemed to be inordinate attacks on the PNC, NMU blogger Dood responded: “The nuances of the political landscape dictate that the PNC’s notorious , despotic reign being made public. WHAT this people did cannot be forgotten, it has be brought to light. Our children, grandchildren etc have to know their country’s history. AND unfortunately the PNC is part of that history when Guyana experienced it’s own “dark age”.”

This was filed in a blogging report dated September 29, 2009 under the thematic area “Owning the Dogs – PNC and Anti-Indian Violence.” From the chat logs, I was able to source a username and password to one of the unit’s blogs and an e-mail account, one linked to a then, and still employed, senior staff member of the Office of the President. Five years later, the New Media Unit was still in existence. Investigative website, GTMosquito.com originally broke the story late May of 2015 that there were ten persons on NCN’s payroll, earning roughly $44,000 per month to attack government critics using fake profiles on social media and news sites. Some of those people are still in the employ of government although the machinery was dismantled and the payments stopped.

It was therefore with no small amount of amusement that I read a few months ago of none other than now opposition leader, Jagdeo levelling the charge that the current administration was engaged in employing fake bloggers and that he would soon release evidence of same. Jagdeo, who started the indecent scandal and misappropriation of public resources that was the New Media Unit, was essentially Donald Trump calling the New York Times fake news while having built his political career on the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the US. Of course, that evidence never came and the media has not seemed inclined to follow up with Jagdeo on it.

This is not to say that this sort of thing is funny or not actually dangerous. The Internet has increasingly been the primary political staging ground for political warfare in recent years and while it has been critical in toppling or shaking ostensibly autocratic regimes, as seen during the Arab Spring revolutions of a few years ago, it has also been used in conjunction with deliberate distortion to influence political outcomes in more democratic countries.

While the Russian influence in the recent US election is a clear influence of that sort of strategy at work, it actually goes back further than that to the Bush-Kerry presidential battle of 2004. With a faltering Bush embroiled in the controversy over the manufactured case for the war in Iraq, Kerry was seen as a strong contender with a solid military record versus the draft-dodging incumbent. Suddenly some ads appeared by a group of Vietnam war veterans calling themselves Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, attacking Kerry and challenging his claims about his military record. While the television ads were the core strategy, the controversy would find real traction in what was the pre-social media battleground for online political discourse, the message boards. Kerry lost the election and the term swiftboating was coined.

Years later, Donald Trump would both feed into and expand the social media conspiracy that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was thus ineligible to become President of the United States. And while there has not been yet any proven collusion between him and the government of Russia, there is increasing evidence of the sophisticated use of social media in influencing the outcome of the recent US election. According to an article published last month in Time magazine:

“In one case last year, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, a Russian soldier based in Ukraine successfully infiltrated a U.S. social media group by pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife and weighing in on political debates with specially tailored messages. In another case, officials say, Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence.”

One of the challenges of the current political administration remains quite frankly the issue of age, particularly at the level of Cabinet. I don’t mean this in the pejorative sense that automatically disqualifies them due to geriatric prejudice or any such thing but from the perspective that when it comes to managing the engagement with and dissemination of information, Cabinet as a whole is arguably ill-equipped to operate in an environment in which social media plays such a critical role in politics.

I’m currently reading two books – the Pulitzer-shortlisted: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and The Information by Thomas Gleick – both of which explore the seminal impact of the Internet on human thinking, unprecedented in history at the rate it is happening, and how current generations will be markedly different in how they fundamentally process information than their immediate predecessors. This is something that has serious implications for how we plan for education in this society, but I digress. When it comes to senior government capacity, there are more basic problems.

A prime example relative to the Williams case is part of his original defence that the e-mail was fake, that it featured an uppercase B instead of a lowercase b. While a subsequent explanation by Lenno Craig of how the screenshot was forged sort of vindicated him on a technicality due to a mistake by the forger. For all intents and purposes, the AG was wrong in the sense that most e-mail addresses are not case-sensitive, so it doesn’t matter if you type ruel.johnson@gmail.com or RUEL.JOHNSON@gmail.com, the mail is still going to come to me. The faultless flaw in the AG’s defence notwithstanding, to an expert eye, the ‘e-mail’ was clearly a forged screenshot. Craig pointed out, for example, that the Inbox link was highlighted when it should have been the Sent folder if the mail was purportedly one sent by Williams. Another social media user, Ferlin Pedro, pointed out a list of other inconsistencies, including the use of fonts not available to Yahoo users.

My assessment was not technical in that sense but from the perspective of someone involved in both fiction and politics. What was clear that it was the work of a middling clever writer of political false narrative – in brief, what you had was a laundry list of purported alliance ‘strategies’ that were in essence a vindication of PPP claims and the PPP itself. It was the same New Media Unit rhetoric, adjusted for the shift in political fortunes of Freedom House. Basically, what Russian agents were allegedly engaged in according to the Time article, someone was doing on behalf of the PPP.

The Williams e-mail hoax, as clumsily constructed as it was eventually proven to be, is still a significant leap forward in Freedom House’ evolving involvement of the Internet in its core political strategy of misinformation and ethnic pandering. It has the element of relatively heightened sophistication both in terms of the aesthetics of the forgery and the crafting of the fictive narrative.
The question is, how do you counter it? Clearly, establishing a counter-unit to engage in the same thing is not an option. This is a strategy that works almost exclusively in the interests of deconstruction of existing established political power, not defensively from a position of incumbency, the swiftboat campaign being an early phenomenon anomaly.

Moreover, it presents the sort of sliding slope ethical quagmire that no government serious about good governance and meaningful democratic systems wants to find itself in. Whatever the countermeasures, here is the thing. We live in an age in which information technology has become the most ubiquitous force in human interaction. According to a recent article published in The Economist, data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable resource.
It is a development that has serious implications for Guyana at present.

While the administration is rightfully dedicating a great deal of energy towards preparing this country for entry into the oil industry, too little attention is being paid to the socio-political implications of data ownership, control and processing into information. A 1980s approach to information in the year 2017 is as useful as a Stone Age implement in 1917. Through the alleged Russian intervention using social media to push plausible fictive narratives in specifically targeted communities, Donald Trump was able to wrest what was supposed to be a sure victory away from Hilary Clinton. Ignoring the implications of social media propaganda is not a luxury that a tenuous coalition with a one-seat legislative majority can continue to afford.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE :
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All our printed editions are available online
emblem3
Subscribe to the Guyana Chronicle.
Sign up to receive news and updates.
We respect your privacy.