Hybrid Warfare, Propaganda, Disinformation, and Pseudo-Information

Everyone knows what false information and misinformation are, right? False information is messages or signals that are false, or not true. Misinformation may involve an admixture of true and false messages (or, depending upon one's concept of information, messages that are proportionally or partly true), but with the overall effect that the receiving subject will likely not be well, or properly, informed (Floridi, 2006; Godfrey-Smith, 1989). They will be misinformed. Their epistemic and doxastic state (knowledge and beliefs) will not have improved overall due to the consumed message(s), and may in fact be worse. Disinformation is purposefully encoded misinformation: messages designed to be misinformation.

Information, misinformation, disinformation: check. So far, so good.

In the case of grey-zone conflict and hybrid warfare, disinformation is often precisely the objective of the compiler and sender of the message(s). There is currently a general consensus among political and military strategists that disinformation-based grey-zone hybrid warfare is an unavoidable and necessary strategy in hostile political and geopolitical settings (Almäng, 2019; Mazarr, 2015; Morris et al., 2019; Reynolds, 2014). The US and NATO are known to engage in it domestically and overseas.

A common primary element and objective of disinformation as a component of propaganda and hybrid warfare is something that I call pseudo-information. Pseudo-information implies the existence of an information source of a specific type or kind where in fact there is no such source. Essentially, it is a fiction-message that, for various reasons associated with how it is encoded and presented, is difficult to identify as a fiction, or pseudo-information. The most convincing disinformational fictions combine pseudo information from what I call a virtual source. This is a set of disparate sources combined to act as a single source. Such a virtual source can give the impression of the presence of another source that does not exist: a pseudo source. This is especially effective when the virtual source taps into sources internal to people’s background knowledge: facts that they already know.

Some pseudo-information is obvious. Take the average comic book villain or hero. There is no such person as Batman. There's never been a real Batman, and every mentally healthy person knows and understands this. We have lots of internal epistemic and cognitive sources to help us discern this (we know about comic books, fictions, and cosplay.)

Far more so for superheroes that have supernatural or magical abilities, such as Supergirl. There may conceivably have been someone like Batman. If we found out that Batman was closely based upon a real historical person, we would be extremely surprised. However, we would accede if presented with adequate evidence (Presumably we’d a lot of it. A note from Batman’s alleged Mum would not do the trick). No amount of evidence save being flown around the world in her arms or witnessing her laser eyes destroying concrete walls would convince us about Supergirl. (Even then - we would be checking the water for hallucinogens.) In the absence of such direct evidence we’d need a mountain of evidence from multiple heterogeneous sources. Or – would we?

Unfortunately, it turns out that we’re often not very good at this kind of discernment, even in cases that converge upon the Supergirl example. Most of us probably wouldn’t be fooled by a tabloid article claiming that Supergirl had appeared. However, if the story appeared in other fora, such as a couple of national newspapers (and it wasn’t April 1st), research reveals that a surprising number of us might not do so well.

The success of much propaganda and hybrid warfare narrative construction is based upon one key feature of human psychology: the inability to discern when one is presented with the right set of sources of information. We’re terrible at distinguishing true consensus from false consensus (Add it to the list of things we’re naturally bad at: formal logic, project estimates, probabilities, large and tiny magnitudes, avoiding psychopaths.)

Psychologists have long known that individuals tend to falsely perceive consensus with their own dispositions and views on the basis of bad inductive reasoning and ego bias resulting in projection (Krueger et al., 1993; Lee et al., 1977). Recent research has shown that there is an additional information theoretic basis for such error. People are notoriously bad at discerning what the right set of sources of information or evidence looks like.

When multiple information sources appear to be present a consensus, individuals tend not to distinguish sets with only one upstream source from sets with more than one input or upstream source. In other words, when there is only one original source feeding all of the others, we fail to see this as relevant to our inductive and deductive reasoning (Yousif et al., 2019).

What is the right set of sources? One in which the individual sources in the set are not all encoded from a common causally upstream source. If all of our friends tell us that George has a new Porsche, we'd be inclined to believe them, even if George is notoriously poverty stricken. Few of us would check to find out that a group email from George (whom we also know happens to be a bit of a drinker) is the source of the 'news'. Separate messages and statements from several friends stating that they had ridden with George in his new Porsche is a dramatically more reliable set of sources. However, most of us don’t see the difference between the two sets even when we know about the common source feeding the bad set.

Just as in the case of probabilities and logic, which we also tend to be naturally bad at, scientists and professionals have long since determined that scientific tools and discipline are needed to counter our errors. The principle that multiple disparately originating sources are a necessary condition for reliable information is well known among historians, archeologists, anthropologists, and journalists alike. One source of evidence or information is usually not enough for confirmation of a hypothesis or a theory, especially if the information has been encoded by human agents, with all of their confabulation, error, ideology, and biases. However, outside scientific settings, individuals tend to be heavily prone to consensus error due to source discernment failure.

Hybrid warfare is able to make good use of pseudo-sources because we’re bad at information theory. In architected gray zone disinformation, checking the origin of the source set is impossible. It is designed to be that way. Most of us probably wouldn’t check it anyway, and if we did – we’d miss the most crucial information about the information: whether it was all from one common upstream source.

References

Almäng, J. (2019). War, vagueness and hybrid war. Defence Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2019.1597631

Floridi, L. (2006). The logic of being informed. Logique et Analyse. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232383.003.0010

Godfrey-Smith, P. (1989). Misinformation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19(4), 533–550.

Krueger, J., Zeiger, ;, & Joanna S. (1993). Social Categorization and the Truly False Consensus Effect Measuring TFCEs Within Subjects Separating Adequate From False Projection Within-Subjects Versus Between-Subjects Measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Issue.

Lee, R., David, G., & Pamel, H. (1977). The “False Consensus Effect”: An egocentric bias on social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1145/2984751.2985729

Mazarr, M. J. (2015). Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict. Advancing Strategic Thought Series.

Morris, L., Mazarr, M., Hornung, J., Pezard, S., Binnendijk, A., & Kepe, M. (2019). Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression Below the Threshold of Major War. In Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression Below the Threshold of Major War. https://doi.org/10.7249/rr2942

Reynolds, A. (2014). Social Media As a Tool of Hybrid Warfare. In NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Exellence. https://doi.org/10.15308/sinteza-2014-715-721

Yousif, S. R., Aboody, R., & Keil, F. C. (2019). The Illusion of Consensus: A Failure to Distinguish Between True and False Consensus. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619856844