Vicious role of weaponized information, misinformation, and disinformation.

The question is:

What are these entities? and how these are being used to bring the countries to collapse, crumple, or disintegrate?

Answering the question will be eyeopener for those who matter in this country and their sponsors elsewhere.

Everyone knows that there always are some forces everywhere who try to modify the system through managing the policies or the results of elections. There are four known ways to do this.

1. Through political workers who raise funds to influence election results and future policy.,
2. Stake holders themselves provide heavy funding to the parties to get their choice nominee elected and the choice legislation approved to safeguard their interests.,
3. Continuously funding a “specific party” hoping that one day the party will come to power, and they will reap the benefits of their funding with windfall., and
4. Finally, by manipulating the election results through fake accounts used to send weaponized messages to the voters feeding them with fake stories of crimes such as corruption, money laundering and possessing assets apparently beyond the legitimate means of the opponents. The opponents also bear the burden to proof the allegations wrong. By the time they are cleared, their reputation gets corrupted more than their so-called crimes because the malicious campaign initiated against them gets intensified through weaponized information spread through open use of social, print, and electronic media. Sometime the opponents are sent behind the bars to stop them from contesting the election.

This is the most dangerous aspect of election and Pakistan has witnessed the worst of types 3 and 4 and the later versions in elections 2018 for which a very heavy price is being paid by the country but there is no way out.

 

One may say that it happened in Pakistan because she is one of the peripheral countries where governments remained unstable, literacy rate is exceptionally low, health systems are poor, industrialization and state of the art technology is no to exceptionally low and perception and understanding of the world’s system is negligible. But it also happens in the core countries (civilized, industrialized and educated) where most of the population is not expected to be influenced by the propaganda because their perception and understanding of the world and the country is based either on direct observation or on what the voters gets from their social interactions (not social media). People knows that social media is loaded with misinformation, disinformation, weaponized information, fake stories, and black propaganda. They know they are being influenced by bots, fake news, leaked documents (mostly falls) and rhetoric which help changing (sometime radically) the voter’s perception and thereby selecting a policy maker who made a different policy. Similarly, every time, the perception of the world changes (in fact it is continuously changing) selection of the policy maker and the policy itself changed automatically, and the cycle goes on (US elections of 2016 and 2020 are best examples of the two situations respectively).

How this happens? Nobody knows because till to date, we do not have tools and means to analyze that.

Adversarial example is one of the ways to understand a bit of this.

This is an input to machine learning models designed intentionally by the attackers to force the machine to make a mistake.

An adversarial attack focus on subtly modifying by adding to or deleting the pixels from the original image in such a way that the changes are almost undetectable to the human eye. The modified image is called an adversarial image, and when submitted for identification it will not be recognized or will be misclassified while the original one will be correctly identified. An adversarial input, overlaid on a specific image, can cause a classifier to miscategorize:

• A panda as a gibbon (a small ape with long arms that lives in trees in the forests of South Asia).
• A road sign can force self-driving cars to behave oddly, and the driver will not understand why it is happening.,
• Can modify financial trading algorithms into making certain trades possible/successful in stock exchange business.

Apparently, it is a computer problem because it is not causing any harm to the reader, but it is the same process of misinformation and illusion which changes the voter preferences, his/her selection of representative and ultimately the policy decision.

 

Now, in a way analogous to adding or deleting the pixel from the original image, adversarial attack can be focused on subtly modifying the behavior of the population. What needs to be done for this is, to identify key belief of the population through information collected from data breaches or from various surveys conducted online to get the public opinion on any issue of vital importance (such surveys are conducted on daily basis in Pakistan). The attackers will then try to change these key beliefs by sending chaotic messages that can create rift among groups and amplify the division (similar to that of Rodrigo Duterte of Philippines) but their ultimate target is creating real policy changes the same way the addition and deletion of targeted pixel results in image modifications.

This is exactly what happened in Pakistan in 2018 election.

An adversarial image was created for the sitting government and misclassified by the voters which helped changing the successfully running government and brought into power, a government who was expected to produce wonders in the country but, just like a road sign is misclassified or modified by the attacker that force self-driving cars to behave oddly beyond comprehension of the driver, and making certain trades possible in stock exchange business, the country’s 5.6 % GDP plunges into negative beyond comprehension of everyone.

 

Neither public nor the affected party understood in letter and spirit how the public perception and belief were radically changed? The attackers used fierce propaganda, physical campaign, targeted massaging, weaponized information regarding religious beliefs, disinformation through fake news, bots and trolls on social, print, and electronic media. The one and only objective was to prove the government functionaries’ criminals, looters, plunderers, money launderer and corrupt who pushed the country to the verge of bankruptcy, destroyed all institutions of public utility, all essential and vital services including the most vital ones such as health, and education and are responsible for inducing large scale poverty and hunger in the country.

They used illiteracy and ignorance of the people as a tool to sell their arguments and ensured the huge crowed of uncouth people that the incoming government would be the only savior of this country, thus a change is necessary to ensure the availability of all the basic rights to the public.

Interestingly, as an aftershock, all those who helped bringing the change also proved equally ignorant and illiterate because even they could not fully understand and grasped the power of weaponized information and the underlying nefarious objectives.

Within months, the country plunge into deep chaos, bad governance and gross incompetence exposed the philosophy of change to the public and realization spread like flash flood washing away everything across the board.

The quirk of the fate is that nothing has yet been proved concretely in the court of law against those who were victim of fierce propaganda campaign however, within three years, the situation becomes worse compared to the one before 2018 elections which created a dangerous rift among people that evolved into divergence of political attitudes that has reached to the so-called ideological extremes and plunge the country into whirlpool of intrigues, adulterated perceptions, uncertainty, and chaos from where it will never be easy to recover.

This is a textbook example of

• how the dark forces changed certain pixels in the original image of the opponents thus changing their entire image which is misread by the voters, and
• how they accomplish their agenda in countries vulnerable to disinformation, and
• how disinformed people with adulterated perception can be used to achieve this objective.

That is how the policy changes occurs. The perception attached with the distorted image will stay there forever and will kept haunting the bearer whether to participate in the election or not: a potent way to keep the competent people out of the game. Isn’t it?

This is what weaponized, misinformation and disinformation, and dis-informed people can do to the societies in general and political arena in particular.

 

See you next week dear readers. Take care, Bye.

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