1/ Just finished the rundown for my @HiddenForcesPod recording w/@RidT on his book "Active Measures." I have a hard time categorizing a work like this. It falls into a broad bucket of contemporary books dealing with politics, sociology, information, warfare, & the Internet. 
2/ Books like @andrewmarantz's "Antisocial," @yaffaesque's "Between Two Fires," @a_greenberg "Sandworm," Kilcullen's "The Dragons & the Snakes," @bartongellman "Dark Mirror," @peterpomeranzev's "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," etc.
3/ What makes @RidT's book unique is not only the scope of its analysis but the way in which the material assaults our sense of reality. What does it mean to study the “secret history of disinformation?" The phrase is a contradiction. And yet, we know history is full of lies.
4/ "Surviving our age of organized, professional deception," writes @RidT, "requires a return to history. The stakes are enormous—for disinformation corrodes the foundation of liberal democracy, our ability to assess facts on their merits and to self-correct accordingly."
5/ But how do we "assess facts" when our notions of truth are themselves in question? How do we achieve political consensus without agreed upon frameworks for verifiability? The problem seems only to be made worse by the hypocrisies it exposes.
6/ What most concerns me is that our discord makes us vulnerable, not only to the whims of foreign enemies, but also to the malign objectives and siren songs of autocrats and demagogues. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
7/ As Rid explains: "At-scale disinformation campaigns are attacks against a liberal epistemic order, or a political system that places its trust in essential custodians of factual authority. . . . Active measures erode that order. But they do so slowly, subtly, like ice melting.
8/ This slowness makes disinformation that much more insidious, because when the authority of evidence is eroded, emotions fill the gap. . . . The line between fact and lie is a continuation of the line between peace and war, domestically as well as internationally."
9/ This is precisely what we have seen in our collective response to COVID-19. Opinions are increasingly informed by emotions and political affiliations, not facts and analysis. fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-b…
10/ I'm not sure what the solution to all this is, but I'm confident that journalists, media outlets, and anyone involved in public debate on social media must hold him/herself accountable. To that end, @RidT's book should be mandatory reading.
amazon.com/Active-Measure…
amazon.com/Active-Measure…
