The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation - The Atlantic

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...

I was surprised by the effect it had on me... found myself reflexively questioning every headline... truth itself... felt more and more difficult to locate...

illiberal political leaders ... jamming the signals, sowing confusion... censorship through noise ... a dystopian ... general election ... shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting ... Trump ... planning to spend more than $1 billion ... could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history...

lagging badly [in 2016] ... campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded... June to November... ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000 ...

sprawling disinformation architecture ... Central is ... micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear ... weaponization... pioneered ... at Cambridge Analytica ... with the right kind of nudges people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking... the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come ... reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America... a texting platform... to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission ...

scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists ... into a dossier... gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times ... appropriating call-out culture... destroy the mainstream media altogether... fact-based journalism ... just one more drop in the daily deluge of content ... 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media ... a new front in this war: local news... pay to have their desired headlines posted on ... Potemkin [local] news sites ...

nebulous networks of trolls and bots ... simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square...

disinformation will continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility ...

alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia... inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself... nothing can be trusted ... The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result... a referendum on reality itself