[The Library Information Warfare] Simple Deception: Hide Your Motive
This post seems incredibly simple.
Hide your motive? Of course you should. It seems simple. The best way to ensure your motive succeeds is to hide it from those who may seek to ruin your plans. This bit of deceptive reasoning has been ingrained in us since childhood. You want a cookie from the jar before dinner? You have to find some way near the jar without letting your mother know why you're there.
Truly though, this portion of Information Warfare can be used to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success. I think it is unbelievably important, though, in the beginning stages of any Information Warfare campaign, to place a lot of importance on concealing your motive.
From the Bottom Up: Concealing That You Have a Motive
From the beginning of any Information Warfare campaign, it would be incredibly advantageous to hide the very existence of a motive in the campaign. You can see this in IW agents that insist on nonpartisanship, lack of bias, or no spin. This can be seen in Faux News, the front-running extremely right-wing news agency, including and especially their former show, the O'Reilly show.
Good ole Bill, before being fired for sexual assault allegations, insisted on his show's motto of a "No-Spin Zone", when in reality it was a pretty obvious, thinly veiled conservative talk show where O'Reilly took to his soap box to speak over his guests, bully them into corners, and spin his narrative by making the opposition look foolish.
CNN has plenty of equivalent programs, insisting on non-bias when in reality campaigning for leftist thought over the airwaves. Rachel Maddow is a close equivalent a left leaning O'Reilly, making up her lack of bullying power in "hard-hitting" leftist slams to fill up the media with sound bites.
Both of these outlets, including myriads of others insisting on unbiased coverage and fair reporting, are thinly veiled Information Warfare Agents. While their efforts to conceal motive fail after about five minutes of observation, the fact that this is a common tactic in real IW shows the importance of this tactic.
Deception By Obfuscation: The Multi-Motive Approach
One way to hide your motive in an IW campaign is via obfuscation. Obfuscation is the idea of hiding the needle in the haystack, hiding your motive in plain sight by mixing it in with other possible motives. While this won't likely work in a murder case, it is incredibly valuable in IW.
Let's take media outlets for example. I haven't seen a solid, definitive case of this "in the wild", possibly because of its effectiveness, but it would be equivalent to a left-leaning outlet releasing intentionally right-wing articles to seem unbiased, or vice versa.
The disadvantage of this is that it can be detected. If I can identify the motives behind individual articles, I can see which bias is the most common. One of my favorite way to combat this disadvantage is to ensure you release articles with 50/50 bias, so 50 percent left and 50 percent right bias for example, but hide logical fallacies, false information that can easily be confirmed, or false points that can easily be disproved, undermining the entire narrative in articles that are aligned against your narrative. A simple example of this would be using bad sources on articles with a left lean, while using cited, well researched sources with those with a right lean. This ensures that the left leaning articles are either refuted, shot down, or revealed to be biased while the right leaning ones stay believable and popular. This way, if played correctly, you seem unbiased but your motive can still be successful.
In Conclusion: Conceal Your Motive, Figure Out the Others
Concealing your motive is a great way to ensure you are launching a successful IW campaign. You appear to be an unbiased source. At the same time, assume unbiased sources don't exist. They don't, or at least are extremely rare. Find the motive of your enemy, and act accordingly, at the same time hiding your own by obfuscation or trade craft. Using this valuable technique, you add another layer of deception on top of a soon-to-be successful IW campaign.
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