Informational force multipliers

Social media is an informational force multiplier that favours individuals and social movements, but my working hypothesis is that it significantly favours small individual agents presenting good (heterogeneous) evidence from multiple type-heterogeneous sources:

HYP1: Social media is an informational force multiplier that favours individual informational actors

The analogy I will draw at the end of this post is a military one. I will compare individuals using social media like Twitter against large media and government organisations to individual Afghan militants using RPGs against Soviet Mil and Hind helicopter gunships (the RPG was a cheap and highly effective force multiplier).

An adjunct hypothesis is that pseudo-information sources will be revealed by mass scrutiny. The Big Lie strategy can no longer survive as it did with broadcast media.

How does this informational force multiplication work? Someone like fundamentalist, religious zealot Adrian Zenz can use social media as an informational force multiplier. However, with massive scrutiny of misinformation sources (those that combine encoded pseudo-information, or fiction, with information) will result in corrective effects because of the application of critical analyses and critical thinking (including basic premise checking.)

Another problem for someone like Zenz is source homogeneity. His sources are largely of the same type. This is source type-homogeneity (for example: all based on witness testimony.) However, a related and potentially greater problem is source memetic, or memetic narrative, homogeneity. This means that the semantic content of the information encoded at the source set has the same ideological, cultural, and prevailing narrative basis. For example: all of the witnesses are of the same fundamentalist megacult and are subsumed to the same memetic megacult narrative. Moreover, they all have in common serious doctrinally underwritten ideological opposition to the CPC and to infidel (faithless, or atheists.)

This latter kind of semantic homogeneity constrains the encoding of the messages from all of the sources in the source set. It's one of the most common examples of what is called the illusion of consensus, but the causally upstream source is an overarching memetic metanarrative (the religious metanarrative) that has been cognitively imprinted on, and replicated in, all of the 'witnesses'.

Neither misinformation nor any associated illusion of consensus can survive that the potential huge number of eyes on the problem domain and source set. There are just too many ways things can go wrong for the misinformational source set (the set of sources that includes fiction or encoded pseudo-information).

The concept of informational force is best understood as the measurable amount of effect wrought causally by an information source and the semantic information associated with it. Note that there are many theories about the nature of information and semantic information, but there is little question that signals and transmissions, and the encoded messages they carry, are physically causal. This includes the neurological underpinnings of cognition in group epistemic/doxastic updating.

The correction (of - say - a megacultist, memetic, propaganda narrative) may take some time if the misinformational narrative has some existing traction. Additionally, the other memetic narrative still has > 0 informational force. There are all kinds of interactions to account for: culture, regional access to different kinds of social media channels (FB, WeChat, Weibo, Twitter etc.). There will also be correlations with larger broadcast media narratives and governmental narratives.

However, what is different with the individual-enabling informational force multiplier of social media is that the average citizen can configure their own social media feed(s) and channels to access local reportage and information sources 'on the ground' in a region like Xinjiang. These sources can be judged on their merits, and taking confounding influences into account.

For example, because the average person knows that large megacults have significant influence over the opinions of their members, and have a tendency to ellicit biased testimony from those members on the basis of doctrinal and cultural commitments (as well as community cohesion), they can adjust their credence in the local sources and reportage appropriately. If enough people are doing this, one ends up with a very different situation to that which we had before high-saturation social media (say - the first Gulf War in the early 1990s and earlier). Put otherwise: if we were in a 1970s-1980s type broadcast media environment, then there would be little to no access to corrective on-the-ground sources in a place like Xinjiang. The granularity and heterogeneity - that's both type-heterogeneity and semantic/ideological heterogeneity - of the mass of accessible source sets, statistically ensures that there will be too many cross referenceable sources for misinformation to easily prevail, or to prevail at all.

Additionally, with the right tools an individual can exert significant influence compared to a large media organistion that has far more money and resources. Malcolm McGregor is a good example. His credentials and situ, and willingness to challenge prevailing Western megacult, military industrial complex, and big-media, narratives, achieves significant informational force comparatively very cost-effectively in terms of time and resources (although I am sure That Man in the Pub enjoys putting in quite a few hours of effort.)

Another way to think about it in more familiar terms is to consider the rise of social media activists like Alex Jones (information wars).

Not only was Jones' influence immense, but his narratives were frequently countered easily by citizen-responders.

Much smaller actors like McGregor (and Georg Rockall-Schmidt) can be very effective in terms of causal informational force. A McGregor or Rockall-Schmidt can effectively informationally outpower a Jones - or even a big-media organisation like the BBC. It's a similar effect to that achieved by Whistleblowers that manage to get an audience. Recall the impact of Wikileaks release of the US helicopter assault (on journalists) video. I remember retweeting that the week it was released. It seemed it would be inconsequential at the time, even though it was obviously bad.

So big media narratives and propaganda still have influence, but by no means to they 'have their way' like they used to be able to. Social media channels, plus crowd responses (sometimes including crowd funding), and viral tweets, have an informational force incommensurate with the tiny resources and skill required to use them.

It's not the first time in history technology has been a force multipler of one kind or another. By way of analogy - consider machine guns and RPGs, for example. It's notably not just about audience size either. It's about getting access to the right social media thread or stream in the right place at the right time, with the right critical thinking, rhetorical approach, discourse, and/or evidence (heterogeous and material/direct is best).

The Soviet army's biggest headache in Afghanistan - apart from the geography and terrain - was the RPG (designed and manufactured by the Soviet Union itself). One militiaman (or goatherder, or child, for that matter) could bring down a Mil or Hind helicopter gunship. The cost and fire-power ratios were hilarious. Twitter is like an informational RPG. This is especially true if the user is skilled, but - importantly - they don't have to be extremely skilled. Timing and being in the right place (feed) at the right time with the right (type-heterogeneous and memetically-heterogeneous) evidence matter.