Based on what we saw here, I’m pretty sure a few of them had your blog bookmarked!

This exploits the Small World property, which says that in a system where some nodes are more highly connected than others, there is only a short distance between any two nodes in the system because nearly all of them are joined to a fairly small number of key nodes. This property was exploited by counter-insurgency experts in taking down al-Qaeda.

What it also means is that if you poison a few key nodes with disinformation then the poison spreads to the very ends of the earth. “I saw it on Global Voices, Huffington Post, the Belmont Club, etc …” — choose your vector — and the lie is off and running.

I gave a talk in late 2005 describing how the Internet works as an amplifier and filter for memes. The “amplifier” part is important to enemy disinformation. They tailor a message which will pass the host filter (if you feed the Guardian or Huffington Post a piece that blames America, for example) then it will zip past the gates and be amplified. A site’s very traffic can be used against it.

Against this you can set the “wiki” effect which you can observe on the Belmont Club. After a piece of information is posted, the various skeptics begin to examine it for accuracy, consistency and logic. And often the lies or mistakes are thereby unmasked. One of the reasons I try to encourage a diversity of commenters on this site is to make the filter unpredictable. When there’s too much groupthink, then you are a sitting duck for a piece of engineered information.

But we’ll never win this war through purely defensive measures. We need to push forward into enemy cyberspace, as it were, to deliver our own memes. More on this when I think about it.