1. Thread. We're seeing systematic efforts to damage public confidence in the voting system. This is one example. This - Trump and Sessions warning of voter fraud without any evidence to support their claims - is another. washingtonpost.com/politics/witho…
2. @schneierblog and I have a new paper - schneier.com/academic/paper… - which sets out the general logic behind these efforts. Short version - democracy requires certain commonly held expectations if it is to work properly. This makes it vulnerable to "common knowledge attacks"
3. Our argument is as follows. There is a crucial difference between autocracies and democracies. Autocracies - if they are to be stable - require general agreement about who is in charge. They expend resources to ensure that their citizens expect that the ruling party/dictator
4. will be running things into the indefinite future. They also want to stop other political actors from building coalitions to topple them, and often play "divide and rule" games, while using control of media to stop potential opponents from attracting support.
5. Democracies, in contrast, rely on the fact that no-one knows who will be in charge after the next election to generate competition. But for this to work, they need reasonably stable expectations among citizens and politicians about who can be trusted,
6. how votes will reliably be translated into seats etc. This means that the two systems are vulnerable to different kinds of information attacks. Autocracies are vulnerable to information attacks that (a) undermine the certainty that the regime will be in power indefinitely,
7. or (b) make it easier for alternative coalitions to organize. Democracies are vulnerable to attacks that increase confusion and uncertainty about politics, destabilize people's expectations that voting is fair and so on. So here's the big takeaway for today:
8. As @mollyeroberts fantastic research has demonstrated, autocracies can stabilize their internal politics by "flooding" online debate with crap, confusion, lies, half-truths and so on, especially when this produces general cynicism about the possibility of political change.
9. But these kinds of "flooding" attacks, which stabilize autocracies, destabilize democracies. They lead to general confusion, chaos, paranoia and cynicism. Russian media attacks can be understood as an autocracy using the tools that have stabilized its internal politics
10. To destabilize the democratic systems that it sees as its rivals. But there's more. As per @zeynep and others, these kinds of techniques are likely _far_ easier for domestic actors than foreign interference operations to deploy successfully. And that is what we are seeing.
11. Who knows who is pushing the voting machine mythologies. Could be Russians. Could be Republicans. Maybe we'll find out. But we know exactly who is pushing the myths about voter fraud. Trump. Sessions. Kris Kobach. And we know who is pushing the bullshit about
12. Democrats hacking the electoral system in Georgia. Kemp may be trying to cover up his own incompetence as some have suggested. He may also be laying the groundwork for generating political confusion around an Abrams win, or making it more difficult to challenge his own
13. manipulation of the voting system if he wins a seat, so as to make it harder to generate challenges. The implications are pretty clear. 1. We need to start thinking of democracy as a kind of information system that can be attacked - and start looking at how to minimize the
14. attack surface. 2. We need to be aware that the threat model is _not just_ and plausibly _not primarily_ foreign interference. It is, instead, going to be driven by domestic actors, who have an interest in _less democracy_ when that makes it more likely they will be releected
15. Finally 3. We need to be careful in how we address these problems. There are obvious areas of difficulty where expectations-manipulation hits free speech (there also are low hanging fruit - at least from the perspective of these trade-offs - where we can e.g. close
16. access to dark money, limit the power of officials to shape election processes to advantage them or their rivals etc. We also need to be aware that panic about process can be weaponized by those who want to leverage it to undermine - rather than to fix - the existing system.
17. Finis (nb - all the above builds on my common work with Bruce but has not been approved by him - blame any specific stupidities on me and not him).
