Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication

by Robert W. Gehl, Sean T Lawson

Manipulative communication—from early twentieth-century propaganda to today’s online con artistry—examined through the lens of social engineering.


The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering , Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer.

The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology

344 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2022

About the author

Robert W. Gehl is an associate professor in the
Department of Communication at the University of Utah. His research draws on science and technology studies, software studies and critical/cultural studies, and focuses on the intersections between technology, subjectivity and practice. His book, Reverse Engineering Social Media (Temple UP, 2014), explores the architecture and political economy of social media and is the winner of the Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Book award. At Utah, he teaches courses in communication technology, software studies, new media theory and political economy of communication.

Reviews

[gbkMnkii · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I've never really considered mass propaganda as social engineering but this book shed a light on this fact. Unfortunately despite couple of good historical examples the book lacks cases to enforce the intention of the writers. The potential solutions or improvements of the current situation also very high level and does not convincing, but if someone interested in the topic it may find it as a useful introduction.

[EN - Kindle]

[Sami Eerola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb book on social manipulation, from lone hackers trying to penetrate a organisation to states mass information operations.

This book had everything that i needed and more. Especially it tied some previous knowledge that i had of propaganda, to a nice package that has proved my instinct right.

This is a essential book to understand how we got in this information chaos that we are in right now and how it is once again the fault of rich white men, be from US or Russia

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it's just me, but this wasn't as interesting as I had hoped. Cambridge Analytica/Russian interference fatigue didn't help.

The historical context was effective and really fleshed out my understanding of what phreaking was. I also thought the way they situated Kevin Mitnick was interesting.

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after chapter 2

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