What do you think?
Rate this book
Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives
Technology is breaking politics—what can be done about it?
Artificially intelligent “bot” accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these “lie machines” apart.
Lie Machines is full of riveting behind-the-scenes stories from the world’s biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives—including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and explains how to shut them down.
Artificially intelligent “bot” accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these “lie machines” apart.
Lie Machines is full of riveting behind-the-scenes stories from the world’s biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives—including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and explains how to shut them down.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published May 19, 2020
23 people are currently reading
327 people want to read
About the author
Philip N. Howard
14 books12 followersPhilip N. Howard is a professor and author of seven books, including Democracy’s Fourth Wave? and The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. He is a frequent commentator on the impact of technology on political life, contributing to Slate.com, TheAtlantic.com and other media outlets.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 15, 2020
This is a sobering exploration of the malicious ability of nation states and private companies to microtarget, monitor, and manipulate people through misinformation on social media. I really liked the author's focus on the production, dissemination, and marketing of political falsehoods, all of which entail different types of people and processes.
The book was full of sobering anecdata, like:
**It is estimated that half of all twitter conversations in Russian are conducted by bots.
**These efforts are not limited to Facebook and Twitter: A group of Labour Party activists in the UK created a Tinder bot and deployed it to areas where Labour candidates needed help. The bot would start out with flirty conversations but would soon talk about politics.
**It's not just state actors (although Russia, China, India, Vietnam, and Venezuela had large confirmed government lie groups and most democracies do some version of this as well). There are private companies that will run bots or have even invested to create thousands of fake people with profiles across platforms that are designed to friend and interact like an actual person, which may make persuasion more effective.
There are some great analyses of both the reach of fake news during the 2016 US Presidential Elections and a really interesting analysis of the UK Brexit vote that attempts to quantify how much of an impact the Leave lies had.
The most dismaying part of this book is what *isn't* in it; quality ways to solve the problem. Only about the last 8% of the book looks at potential solutions and most of them are incredibly impractical (I can't imagine social media companies are going to easily agree to or allow legislation to pass that totally destroys or even slightly hinders their business model).
So I was left with the knowledge that this is a huge and important problem and the overwhelming fear that there is nothing clear we can do about it. I hate feeling like democracy is screwed, so I'll keep looking for and supporting solutions, but I'm not sure what they are yet.
**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
The book was full of sobering anecdata, like:
**It is estimated that half of all twitter conversations in Russian are conducted by bots.
**These efforts are not limited to Facebook and Twitter: A group of Labour Party activists in the UK created a Tinder bot and deployed it to areas where Labour candidates needed help. The bot would start out with flirty conversations but would soon talk about politics.
**It's not just state actors (although Russia, China, India, Vietnam, and Venezuela had large confirmed government lie groups and most democracies do some version of this as well). There are private companies that will run bots or have even invested to create thousands of fake people with profiles across platforms that are designed to friend and interact like an actual person, which may make persuasion more effective.
There are some great analyses of both the reach of fake news during the 2016 US Presidential Elections and a really interesting analysis of the UK Brexit vote that attempts to quantify how much of an impact the Leave lies had.
The most dismaying part of this book is what *isn't* in it; quality ways to solve the problem. Only about the last 8% of the book looks at potential solutions and most of them are incredibly impractical (I can't imagine social media companies are going to easily agree to or allow legislation to pass that totally destroys or even slightly hinders their business model).
So I was left with the knowledge that this is a huge and important problem and the overwhelming fear that there is nothing clear we can do about it. I hate feeling like democracy is screwed, so I'll keep looking for and supporting solutions, but I'm not sure what they are yet.
**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
Read
July 13, 2020This is a good book to read because it exposes how bots, trolling armies, and peddlers of misinformation, disinformation and junk news work. They rely on many tactics, such as:
i) sowing confusion and division that bars swift political opposition ('are you sure Putin's admin killed Boris Nemtsov? Maybe his own party did it to incite political hate for Putin!')
ii)deleting or pushing down other posts ('now you can't see images of Hong Kong people being bloodied in the course of democratic protest')
iii) push polling that push false and convincing leading questions to sow confusion ('can you answer this survey about how you feel about Joe Biden as a wife-beater?')
iv) continuous testing of the effectivity of fake marketing in convincing susceptible people (A/B testing) and checking of conversion rates
v) buying 'lookalike' audiences from Facebook, that is, people whose profiles look like the profiles of voters who already support extreme positions (used by the Vote Leave campaign to hook people whose profiles were 35-55 years of age, opposed vehemently to immigration, etc.)
i) sowing confusion and division that bars swift political opposition ('are you sure Putin's admin killed Boris Nemtsov? Maybe his own party did it to incite political hate for Putin!')
ii)deleting or pushing down other posts ('now you can't see images of Hong Kong people being bloodied in the course of democratic protest')
iii) push polling that push false and convincing leading questions to sow confusion ('can you answer this survey about how you feel about Joe Biden as a wife-beater?')
iv) continuous testing of the effectivity of fake marketing in convincing susceptible people (A/B testing) and checking of conversion rates
v) buying 'lookalike' audiences from Facebook, that is, people whose profiles look like the profiles of voters who already support extreme positions (used by the Vote Leave campaign to hook people whose profiles were 35-55 years of age, opposed vehemently to immigration, etc.)
September 2, 2020
Sometimes it's really repetitive.
October 17, 2023
Dr. Howard knows his stuff. As Director of Oxford University’s Program on Democracy and Technology and a key figure within Oxford’s Internet Institute and its Computational Propaganda Project, he certainly knows the inner workings of the internet (https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profi... https://philhoward.org), and they are truly terrifying. As he summarizes, it will only get worse as AI is weaponized, unless drastic legislation, accountability, transparency, and oversight are enacted quickly.
This summer, Yale University Press (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/books/) had a book sale I happened to hear about. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I bought a stack of about 20 inches tall of hard- and softcover books directly from the publisher, which in itself is incredibly satisfying keeping the evil monopolies like Amazon out of my purchasing choices. I still enjoy an actual book in my hands, but I also understand the carbon involved, and—perhaps most importantly—I lament my inability to highlight or copy & paste easily like I can with an e-book. I also have limited shelf space, which forces me to make choices on which books I want to keep. So, more typing is involved, which I’m actually awful at.
In any case, the elevator pitch is this:
”The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, a range of government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in the media, public institutions, and science. At a time when news consumption is increasingly digital, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and black-box algorithms are being leveraged to challenge truth and trust—the very cornerstones of our democratic society” (pp. 143-4).
He backs that statement up with overwhelming data, and uses the Brexit vote to dissect just how the three main components of computational propaganda (a sociotechnical system made up of people and their tools) function— the actual people who first generate the lies, the distribution methods for lies to propagate, and the marketing/strategy plans by those who directly profit from disinformation campaigns (monetarily, politically, geopolitically, and personally).
I’m a former Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) specialist. I know how this stuff works, how easily people can be manipulated by what they see and read, the cognitive dissonance and schemata, the selective exposure and elective affinity, all the traps and pitfalls of our lazy, biased brains as we process increasingly fragmented, contradictory, and biased information and subconsciously string things together based on our own preconstructions of reality. I shed social media back in 2014 because I was seeing the signs and portents already. I get my news directly from the sources I trust, and donate money to those institutions as they fight to stay alive when so many cater to misinformation and disinformation proliferating freely: “We have found that people in the United States share more junk news than people in other advanced democracies” (p. 99). A lack of quality education, media networks dedicated to political warfare, social media platforms beholden to our digital oligarchs bent on squeezing every dollar they can from them, and aberrant narcissism with every eye-catching fool being a potential “influencer” of whatever they wish to say and promote. We live in a truly PSYOPed world and the evidence—once one looks into the code, once one traces the flow of disinformation through the Internet like Howard and his colleagues did—is irrefutable. As Howard titles a subsection to Chapter 3, “Cry ‘Havoc!’, let slip the bots of war” (p. 61), and as he warns, artificial intelligence will enhance the potency of bots exponentially: “machine-learning algorithms will soon be working with the vast amounts of behavioral data collected through the internet of things as well as through social media” (pp. 151-2). I’m prepared to read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four again, for kicks.
We are seeing this in real-time as Israel commits war crimes against Palestinian civilians while spreading weaponized disinformation in retaliation for a terrorist organization fed up with the historic oppression of the Palestinian people, and the cynicism and apathy of the world that refuses to help ameliorate the situation. We see this in autocratic regimes from China to Russia to the Philippines to Turkey. We saw this in Syria and Egypt and Brexit and Q and MAGA. We see this with filthy-rich a-holes buying up social media platforms to twist into their own demented echo chambers, bathing in the adoration of their mentally unhinged, morally bankrupt sycophants. (And as Fate would have, just today we now know that the DeSantis administration lied about COVID deaths with their “masks are medical tyranny” horse manure [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...]). This is all the GOP is now, a circus of lies that cost people their lives. I listened to a metal music podcast this morning talking about Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropo....), looking at who holds the power over life and death and how they wield it, who is considered worthy and not worthy, citizen and non-citizen, favored and dehumanized. It’s quite profound and can easily apply to Florida’s moronic authoritarianism, shipping stateless immigrants to New England for cheap political points with mouth-breathing Christian hypocrites, criminalizing and dehumanizing the LGBTQ+ community, persistently disenfranchising Black Americans, whitewashing history and banning books that challenge their precious fantasyland delusions. Who holds the power over life and death when it comes to public health? Moreover, Howard simply says as one point: follow the money. Who’s banking big off such disinformation campaigns? He’s not wrong there either. Look at where all the money is coming from to feed all the lie machines churning around the world.
The Computational Propaganda Project dissected social media in the UK while Brexit was happening. The money spent on the disinformation campaign to leave the EU certainly played a powerful role in shaping opinions, but as Howard surmises:
“Half a century of research reveals that, overall, most media effects are minimal and vague . . . [t]he problem isn’t that a fraction of the entire public is the target audience for misinformation. It is that a fraction of the public in particular towns, provinces, states, and electoral districts is the target. Lie machine can’t reach and confuse everybody. But they can radically mislead small numbers of us, confirming biases and activating citizens for the wrong reasons. And they can subtly guide large numbers of us to distrust the institutions of democracy” (p. 142).
It’s not just the proverbial village idiots that glom onto disinformation. It’s a wild assortment of people for a wild assortment of reasons. Eighty million Americans voted for a pathological liar and career grifter a second time thanks to the lie machines working in perpetual motion 24/7.
PSYOPs, when done well, is a carefully tailored system of providing information with specifically stated desires. It is words and images employed as weapons of thought-crafting. Some would call this “problematic information” and there are certainly gradations to untruths. The first official troll farm started in Russia in 2007. Now some 70 countries around the world have similar organizations, most often in hard-right autocracies. Then we have a wide network of companies and corporations pandering to these needs for profit. Then, of course, we have the social media platforms that only care about making money from shock and attention, millionaires and billionaires buying up their own digital megaphones. (For what it’s worth, PBS’s Frontline has a 2-hour documentary on egomaniac man-child Musk’s takeover of Twitter that’s worth a watch (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/do...). It illustrates how improbable it is to actively police up the internet with drooling trolls on one end and fragile snowflakes on the other, a recalcitrant congress filled with kindergarteners beholden to the upper crust, and toothless federal agencies unable to force rules of conduct on a domineering, ubiquitous, addictive medium that’s been around for three decades. As we crawl into an idiocracy, more and more people don’t want doom & gloom news, hard boring facts and hard boring science; they want spectacle and titillation, distraction and escape, laughs and rage. As the folks on that metal podcast mentioned, cynicism and apathy are the worst traits of humanity when it comes to thinking beyond our selfish selves and tackling existential issues that impact others.
Howard has a plan, a dream really, for how we as a collective can smash the lie machines and create better social media that informs as much an entertains humanity as a whole for the greater good. It’s audacious and beautiful, if not predictably impossible under current conditions. We SHOULD have control over how our personal data are used and monetized. The EU’s “General Data Protection Regulation” is an incredible starting point. We need bold, human-rights-centered legislation to take back our data, destroy these disinformation machines, create internet ethics, and make transparent and penalize the financial networks that are trying to undermine democracies around the world, including the terrorists within. While we’re at it, let’s hold truth and accountability to every elected official, every Supreme Court Justice, every police officer and lawyer and judge. Laws should be applied to everyone equally. Justice should be applied to everyone equally. Billionaires should not exist.
In the before-times, though almost a complete year after I returned from Iraq, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” and we all got a deep belly laugh from it (https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-c...). It ain’t funny anymore.
Playlist:
Demonstealer’s “The Propaganda Machine” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2QMh...)
Deathchant’s “Hoax” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqyVQ...)
Exodus’s “Clickbait” from 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Tuq...)
Johnny Booth’s “Deepfake” from 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giMr1...)
Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” from 1975 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S8wl...)
Vicious Rumors’ “Digital Dictator” from 1987 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94B5n...)
Lamb of God’s “Engage the Fear Machine” from 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUEq_...)
The Voynich Code’s “Slaves to a Machine” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux1J7...)
Queensrÿche’s “Screaming in Digital” from 1986 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvinL...)
Terminal Nation’s “Cognitive Dissonance” from 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5RC6...)
Armagideon Time’s/BlackLiq’s “Foxed in the Head” from 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKHB...)
Anti-Flag’s “Red, White & Brainwashed” from 1996 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDXvQ...)
Green Day’s “American Idiot” from 2004 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iMkn...)
Rise Against’s “Elective Amnesia” from 2008 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKq2_...)
Kreator’s “People of the Lie” from 1990 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYzSN...)
Dee Snider’s “Lies are a Business” from 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYO0...)
Otep’s “Smash the Control Machine” from 2009 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_7j...)
This summer, Yale University Press (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/books/) had a book sale I happened to hear about. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I bought a stack of about 20 inches tall of hard- and softcover books directly from the publisher, which in itself is incredibly satisfying keeping the evil monopolies like Amazon out of my purchasing choices. I still enjoy an actual book in my hands, but I also understand the carbon involved, and—perhaps most importantly—I lament my inability to highlight or copy & paste easily like I can with an e-book. I also have limited shelf space, which forces me to make choices on which books I want to keep. So, more typing is involved, which I’m actually awful at.
In any case, the elevator pitch is this:
”The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, a range of government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in the media, public institutions, and science. At a time when news consumption is increasingly digital, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and black-box algorithms are being leveraged to challenge truth and trust—the very cornerstones of our democratic society” (pp. 143-4).
He backs that statement up with overwhelming data, and uses the Brexit vote to dissect just how the three main components of computational propaganda (a sociotechnical system made up of people and their tools) function— the actual people who first generate the lies, the distribution methods for lies to propagate, and the marketing/strategy plans by those who directly profit from disinformation campaigns (monetarily, politically, geopolitically, and personally).
I’m a former Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) specialist. I know how this stuff works, how easily people can be manipulated by what they see and read, the cognitive dissonance and schemata, the selective exposure and elective affinity, all the traps and pitfalls of our lazy, biased brains as we process increasingly fragmented, contradictory, and biased information and subconsciously string things together based on our own preconstructions of reality. I shed social media back in 2014 because I was seeing the signs and portents already. I get my news directly from the sources I trust, and donate money to those institutions as they fight to stay alive when so many cater to misinformation and disinformation proliferating freely: “We have found that people in the United States share more junk news than people in other advanced democracies” (p. 99). A lack of quality education, media networks dedicated to political warfare, social media platforms beholden to our digital oligarchs bent on squeezing every dollar they can from them, and aberrant narcissism with every eye-catching fool being a potential “influencer” of whatever they wish to say and promote. We live in a truly PSYOPed world and the evidence—once one looks into the code, once one traces the flow of disinformation through the Internet like Howard and his colleagues did—is irrefutable. As Howard titles a subsection to Chapter 3, “Cry ‘Havoc!’, let slip the bots of war” (p. 61), and as he warns, artificial intelligence will enhance the potency of bots exponentially: “machine-learning algorithms will soon be working with the vast amounts of behavioral data collected through the internet of things as well as through social media” (pp. 151-2). I’m prepared to read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four again, for kicks.
We are seeing this in real-time as Israel commits war crimes against Palestinian civilians while spreading weaponized disinformation in retaliation for a terrorist organization fed up with the historic oppression of the Palestinian people, and the cynicism and apathy of the world that refuses to help ameliorate the situation. We see this in autocratic regimes from China to Russia to the Philippines to Turkey. We saw this in Syria and Egypt and Brexit and Q and MAGA. We see this with filthy-rich a-holes buying up social media platforms to twist into their own demented echo chambers, bathing in the adoration of their mentally unhinged, morally bankrupt sycophants. (And as Fate would have, just today we now know that the DeSantis administration lied about COVID deaths with their “masks are medical tyranny” horse manure [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...]). This is all the GOP is now, a circus of lies that cost people their lives. I listened to a metal music podcast this morning talking about Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropo....), looking at who holds the power over life and death and how they wield it, who is considered worthy and not worthy, citizen and non-citizen, favored and dehumanized. It’s quite profound and can easily apply to Florida’s moronic authoritarianism, shipping stateless immigrants to New England for cheap political points with mouth-breathing Christian hypocrites, criminalizing and dehumanizing the LGBTQ+ community, persistently disenfranchising Black Americans, whitewashing history and banning books that challenge their precious fantasyland delusions. Who holds the power over life and death when it comes to public health? Moreover, Howard simply says as one point: follow the money. Who’s banking big off such disinformation campaigns? He’s not wrong there either. Look at where all the money is coming from to feed all the lie machines churning around the world.
The Computational Propaganda Project dissected social media in the UK while Brexit was happening. The money spent on the disinformation campaign to leave the EU certainly played a powerful role in shaping opinions, but as Howard surmises:
“Half a century of research reveals that, overall, most media effects are minimal and vague . . . [t]he problem isn’t that a fraction of the entire public is the target audience for misinformation. It is that a fraction of the public in particular towns, provinces, states, and electoral districts is the target. Lie machine can’t reach and confuse everybody. But they can radically mislead small numbers of us, confirming biases and activating citizens for the wrong reasons. And they can subtly guide large numbers of us to distrust the institutions of democracy” (p. 142).
It’s not just the proverbial village idiots that glom onto disinformation. It’s a wild assortment of people for a wild assortment of reasons. Eighty million Americans voted for a pathological liar and career grifter a second time thanks to the lie machines working in perpetual motion 24/7.
PSYOPs, when done well, is a carefully tailored system of providing information with specifically stated desires. It is words and images employed as weapons of thought-crafting. Some would call this “problematic information” and there are certainly gradations to untruths. The first official troll farm started in Russia in 2007. Now some 70 countries around the world have similar organizations, most often in hard-right autocracies. Then we have a wide network of companies and corporations pandering to these needs for profit. Then, of course, we have the social media platforms that only care about making money from shock and attention, millionaires and billionaires buying up their own digital megaphones. (For what it’s worth, PBS’s Frontline has a 2-hour documentary on egomaniac man-child Musk’s takeover of Twitter that’s worth a watch (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/do...). It illustrates how improbable it is to actively police up the internet with drooling trolls on one end and fragile snowflakes on the other, a recalcitrant congress filled with kindergarteners beholden to the upper crust, and toothless federal agencies unable to force rules of conduct on a domineering, ubiquitous, addictive medium that’s been around for three decades. As we crawl into an idiocracy, more and more people don’t want doom & gloom news, hard boring facts and hard boring science; they want spectacle and titillation, distraction and escape, laughs and rage. As the folks on that metal podcast mentioned, cynicism and apathy are the worst traits of humanity when it comes to thinking beyond our selfish selves and tackling existential issues that impact others.
Howard has a plan, a dream really, for how we as a collective can smash the lie machines and create better social media that informs as much an entertains humanity as a whole for the greater good. It’s audacious and beautiful, if not predictably impossible under current conditions. We SHOULD have control over how our personal data are used and monetized. The EU’s “General Data Protection Regulation” is an incredible starting point. We need bold, human-rights-centered legislation to take back our data, destroy these disinformation machines, create internet ethics, and make transparent and penalize the financial networks that are trying to undermine democracies around the world, including the terrorists within. While we’re at it, let’s hold truth and accountability to every elected official, every Supreme Court Justice, every police officer and lawyer and judge. Laws should be applied to everyone equally. Justice should be applied to everyone equally. Billionaires should not exist.
In the before-times, though almost a complete year after I returned from Iraq, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” and we all got a deep belly laugh from it (https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-c...). It ain’t funny anymore.
Playlist:
Demonstealer’s “The Propaganda Machine” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2QMh...)
Deathchant’s “Hoax” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqyVQ...)
Exodus’s “Clickbait” from 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Tuq...)
Johnny Booth’s “Deepfake” from 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giMr1...)
Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” from 1975 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S8wl...)
Vicious Rumors’ “Digital Dictator” from 1987 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94B5n...)
Lamb of God’s “Engage the Fear Machine” from 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUEq_...)
The Voynich Code’s “Slaves to a Machine” from 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux1J7...)
Queensrÿche’s “Screaming in Digital” from 1986 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvinL...)
Terminal Nation’s “Cognitive Dissonance” from 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5RC6...)
Armagideon Time’s/BlackLiq’s “Foxed in the Head” from 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKHB...)
Anti-Flag’s “Red, White & Brainwashed” from 1996 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDXvQ...)
Green Day’s “American Idiot” from 2004 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iMkn...)
Rise Against’s “Elective Amnesia” from 2008 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKq2_...)
Kreator’s “People of the Lie” from 1990 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYzSN...)
Dee Snider’s “Lies are a Business” from 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYO0...)
Otep’s “Smash the Control Machine” from 2009 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_7j...)
June 22, 2020
This book is fantastically well-researched and is nothing short of a scathing expose on the systems that promote misinformation, disinformation, and deliberate political lies. Despite dealing with tense subject matter, it manages to be both engaging and supremely informative. Highly recommend!
December 14, 2023
I started listening to this book on a whim, expecting a lot more examples of bot farms, social media opinion machines and other mechanisms, like the use of guerilla marketing techniques, and how they can influence public opinion on critical issues. It delivered only partially on this promise, because none of the examples were something I hadn't heard of before, for example in the Netflix documentary about Cambridge Analytica.
There was one insight which intrigued me, however, one which I find quite disturbing. If one country wants to destabilize another country politically, they could use a mid to long term strategy of radicalizing every side of a divisive issue to increase friction and potentially generate violent clashes in the public sphere. They could pit radical christians against radical muslims and somewhere one of those sparks may eventually ignite a real fire.
A short book, a bit technical in style, and a bit too general in some cases, with a rather policy oriented outlook. The book cites a lot of sources in the endnotes, something that's missing from the audio version, and which could help remedy the scarcity of actual data for those more inclined to do the necessary research.
The solutions proposed are mostly systemic, and not oriented towards how an individual could protect herself or himself. They are sweeping changes which would generally need a solid legal framework in order to be enacted. Not bad, but, in my opinion, not really a good fit for the lay reader.
There was one insight which intrigued me, however, one which I find quite disturbing. If one country wants to destabilize another country politically, they could use a mid to long term strategy of radicalizing every side of a divisive issue to increase friction and potentially generate violent clashes in the public sphere. They could pit radical christians against radical muslims and somewhere one of those sparks may eventually ignite a real fire.
A short book, a bit technical in style, and a bit too general in some cases, with a rather policy oriented outlook. The book cites a lot of sources in the endnotes, something that's missing from the audio version, and which could help remedy the scarcity of actual data for those more inclined to do the necessary research.
The solutions proposed are mostly systemic, and not oriented towards how an individual could protect herself or himself. They are sweeping changes which would generally need a solid legal framework in order to be enacted. Not bad, but, in my opinion, not really a good fit for the lay reader.
May 19, 2020
I rate this book at 3.5 stars. Remember in the George Orwell's book they talk about big brother watching ? Not being a conspiracy theorist but with our fascination now days with social media and technology they are and big brother takes many forms. There is the government of course and places like google and facebook and various other avenues that are gathering information constantly about us. Things like what we buy and what moral and political beliefs we like, ones we forward to our friends and ones we comment on. Then are groups of live people, also computer bots and other forms of technology that format messages some truthful and some definitely not.
There are various examples in this book that are both good and bad about this system that is in our daily lifes now. Remember the Arab spring and how they used these formats to organize protest and gather demonstrations. Other examples of the bad side as when government's uses this to spread misinformation , spy on their own citizens or interfere in other countries politics.
The first ten to fifteen percent of this book seemed a little jumbled and repeated itself. It did tighten up and was informative. I received an ARC from Netgalley and Yale University Press for a fair and honest review.
There are various examples in this book that are both good and bad about this system that is in our daily lifes now. Remember the Arab spring and how they used these formats to organize protest and gather demonstrations. Other examples of the bad side as when government's uses this to spread misinformation , spy on their own citizens or interfere in other countries politics.
The first ten to fifteen percent of this book seemed a little jumbled and repeated itself. It did tighten up and was informative. I received an ARC from Netgalley and Yale University Press for a fair and honest review.
December 26, 2024
LIE MACHINES je knjiga u kojoj je Philip N. Howard dao vrlo solidan pregled botovskog delovanja, komputacione propagande i načina na koji su je koristili razni činioci, od Asadovog režima, preko Rusa, do Brexitovaca.
Ovaj milje se neprekidno menja, u odnosu na ovu knjigu već sada postoje nove tehnologije, deep fake je recimo jako napredovao, internet je postao neprikriveno bojište pa je samim tim izgubio svoju mogućnost da vrši neku "perfidnu" ulogu ali su mu se otvorile neke druge.
U tom segmentu, ova knjiga nudi neke anticipacije, ali pre svega svedoči o jednom vremenu koje je onomad bilo doba inovacije, a danas je to već sve rutinski, i nudi neke predloge kako da se ti problemi reše kroz regulaciju gde je Muskova kupovina Twittera opet dosta izmenila okolnosti i gurnula sve u pravcu deregulacije, naročito u sprezi s Trumpovom novom pobedom.
Sve to ne čini Howardovu knigu prevaziđenom, koliko ipak prevashodno istorijskim pregledom.
Ovaj milje se neprekidno menja, u odnosu na ovu knjigu već sada postoje nove tehnologije, deep fake je recimo jako napredovao, internet je postao neprikriveno bojište pa je samim tim izgubio svoju mogućnost da vrši neku "perfidnu" ulogu ali su mu se otvorile neke druge.
U tom segmentu, ova knjiga nudi neke anticipacije, ali pre svega svedoči o jednom vremenu koje je onomad bilo doba inovacije, a danas je to već sve rutinski, i nudi neke predloge kako da se ti problemi reše kroz regulaciju gde je Muskova kupovina Twittera opet dosta izmenila okolnosti i gurnula sve u pravcu deregulacije, naročito u sprezi s Trumpovom novom pobedom.
Sve to ne čini Howardovu knigu prevaziđenom, koliko ipak prevashodno istorijskim pregledom.
August 28, 2020
Interesting and insightful study of "lie machines" - the mechanisms of manipulation created by different power brokers, using social media. Author, an expert on new technologies and their impact on political life from Oxford, describes in details this murky world and gives many fascinating examples from all over the world, not only famous ones, like Russia or Myanmar, but also Poland, Brazil or Hungary. Recommended for everyone who is interested in the future of democracy and free speech.
Thanks to the publisher, Yale University Press, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.
Thanks to the publisher, Yale University Press, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.
April 18, 2021
Although the topic is interesting, the content is by no means revelatory or particularly world-altering in nature. That is to say, I think I absorbed a lot of great information on a topic already fairly well-established.
This book also reads like something I'd be assigned in a communications course on politics and technology, but not necessarily one I'd read again for fun. I think the solutions presented are realistic, but relatively idealistic as well.
This book also reads like something I'd be assigned in a communications course on politics and technology, but not necessarily one I'd read again for fun. I think the solutions presented are realistic, but relatively idealistic as well.
January 6, 2021
This is a good introduction to the topics of computational propaganda, malicious data mining, and the dangers of social media. I was hoping for more substance, but this would be a good book to read if one is unaware of the initiatives to use their data in order to manipulate their political beliefs and voting intentions.
October 5, 2020
It seems like parts of this book were repeated just to add to the overall page length or it was a series of essays that were combined together as a book.
Overall it’s an interesting topic and worth the read I wish there was more to the book itself especially around the case analysis.
Overall it’s an interesting topic and worth the read I wish there was more to the book itself especially around the case analysis.
March 26, 2021
Insightful and scary. Interesting conclusion that *more* shared social media data on opinions and behavior could help other civil agencies better serve the public rather than it being held solely by data companies and political actors.
July 15, 2022
This book was certainly well-researched and i found it to be interesting yet frightening to see how a small number of people have ways of manipulating outcomes for entire populations.
Definitely an enlightening read!
Definitely an enlightening read!
May 6, 2022
Very light in the information present and it felt like alot was just repeated over and over. Didn't seem like there was much evidence to back up the authors opinions.
November 10, 2022
Rewrites every view of global politics in only 7 chapters
September 29, 2025
It was an informative read
July 21, 2024
This book sheds light on the increasingly active computational interferences in the digital environment that have the express role of corrupting the citizens of Western democracies so that they lose faith in mainstream parties and liberal ideology per se. What initially started as a digital mobilization against dictatorships in Africa and Asia (the Arab Spring) was based on young protesters, usually under 30 years old, who were united by the single ideology of fighting against dictators like Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt. Thanks to the digital platforms they had access to in the early 2010s, these young people had actually understood that a democratic society was one that was completely foreign to the one they had lived in since they were born, but it was essential that this information reached as many young people as possible. However, in the words of Philip Howard: supporters of democracy learn tricks from each other, but so do dictators. As expected, the institutions that legitimized the dictatorships also began to have an increasingly active presence in the digital space, minimizing as much as possible any civic mobilization against them. Given that pro-dictatorship actors cannot be fast enough to respond to tens of thousands of online critics simultaneously, it is certain that a computational response was needed, at which point such actors understand the utility of bots. Bots are non-human accounts that are specifically programmed to send certain messages periodically, or to respond in certain ways when they detect a message that contradicts their perspective. One of the main political conflicts where bot activity has been used since its inception took place in Syria, with the massive protests to oust dictator Bashar al-Assad. Although he had lost the battle for public opinion by a long way around 2013, Bashar al-Assad had a very loyal army of bots that his loyal soldiers were actively working to influence the real-time update of events present with the help of hashtag #Syria on Twitter. Similarly, Philip Howard talks about how social media platforms played a crucial role in narrowly winning the Brexit vote, through a combination of factors such as the breach of digital advertising law (by the Vote Leave camp) but also the allocation amounts well above the threshold allowed according to the campaign rules.
February 19, 2021
A very readable analysis of the fake news industry which is growing very fast and spreading around the world. Democracies, dictatorships, third world countries, are all getting into the act. Companies like Cambridge Analytics know more about us then our own governments and they are using the information to manipulate us into believing and doing whatever their clients want, e.g vote for Trump or fear immigrants.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews