1

The Science and Technology

of Lie Machines

H
ow is it possible to make convincing arguments,
without evidence, about the causes of or solutions
to important social problems? Lie machines do this
work, and they seem to be more and more active
in public life. These social and technical systems generate and
spread political lies by subverting the people, organizations,
and institutions in which we have most confidence. We tend
to trust our instincts for evaluating the truth, and we tend to
trust friends and family as sources of good information; as
sources of news, many of us prefer social media to professional
print media.
Lie machines vary in size and scope. Some are large and
permanent, others more liminal—temporary teams formed for
a campaign or an election. But the inventory is growing, and
in authoritarian regimes lie machines are often partnered with
overt political surveillance initiatives. China employs two mil-
lion people to write 448 million messages a year. The previous
Mexican president had seventy-five thousand highly automated
accounts cheering for him and his policies. Vietnam has trained

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ten thousand students to deploy as cyber troops to  combat

online dissent. The Thai government runs a special program
rewarding children who report on any neighbors and family
who protest using social media. Huge bursts of automated
activity occur whenever the presidents of the Philippines or
Turkey score political victories.
Unfortunately, these massive mechanisms for social con-
trol don’t only operate in authoritarian countries. In democra-
cies, the surveillance is done by the social media firms them-
selves and not directly turned over to the government. However,
the data gleaned by surveilling social media activity is still
packaged and analyzed—it’s just that the customers for this in-
formation are politicians, lobbyists, political consultants, and
advertisers who are interested in what we’re thinking about.
Since 2016, every major democracy has suffered in some way:
policy conversations go off the rails because of fake news; pub-
lic understanding of critical issues is warped by well-advertised
misinformation; surprising domestic political outcomes are
shaped by hostile foreign actors.
Lie machines are large, complex mechanisms made up of
people, organizations, and social media algorithms that gener-
ate theories to fit a few facts, while leaving you with a crazy
conclusion easily undermined by accurate information. By
manipulating data and algorithms in the service of a political
agenda, the best lie machines generate false explanations that
seem to fit the facts.
Lie machines have three main components, and if we
examine the parts and understand how they work together,
we can devise ways to take them apart or even prevent them
from being built. The first component is the producer of lies
that serve an ideology or the interests of political elites. These
producers are often political candidates, campaign teams, po-
litical parties, and agencies of authoritarian governments, but

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 3

they can be marginal political actors who just want to disrupt

public life. The second component is the distributor of lies:
the algorithm that social media firms provide for spreading
content. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
and WhatsApp—and the data they collect about our political
preferences—are the distribution system for political lies. The
third key component is the marketer of political lies, usually
a consulting firm, lobbyist, or political hired gun who profit
from selling, amplifying, and promoting disinformation. Big
lie machines have production, distribution, and marketing sys-
tems that cross international borders, and in the chapters ahead
we’ll examine each component and evaluate how it works.
Large data sets have revolutionized politics by making it
easier for politicians to understand what voters want. For de-
cades politicians have used polling data and surveys to inter-
pret what voters are thinking about. But traditional polling
methods have always had limitations. And the polling data
they gathered was either attitudinal (what people think) or
aspirational (what people hope for). Now we have behavioral
data about what people actually do, so lobbyists, campaign
managers, and politicians can make much more powerful in-
ferences about voters: Do you say you are pro-life on abortion
issues but use your personal credit cards to buy contracep-
tives? What kinds of magazines do you subscribe to, and which
online news sources do you spend the most time reading?
How might your shopping choices reveal something about
your thinking on environmental issues? All this data yields
political information.
Lobbyists, political campaign managers, and politicians
use social media to communicate directly with voters. Tools
like Twitter and Facebook allow campaigners to communi-
cate without worrying about how journalists and editors may
change or interpret the campaign messages. And increasingly,

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campaign managers employ automated tools to do this, with

data generated by technology users—by us. Such automation
allows a campaign to plan its communications far in advance,
so that a greater volume of personalized, prefigured content
can be sent to each voter even more quickly. Sometimes we are
aware of the data trail we leave behind, but rarely can we see
how it gets aggregated and merged with other data sets. And
seldom do we see how it is made relational—put in context
with data from our neighbors, friends, and families.
It can be hard to fully grasp where all that data comes
from. Even though we are aware that our smartphones and
computers keep track of our activities, we rarely think of the
smart refrigerators, cars, lightbulbs, and other everyday ob-
jects that increasingly track our behaviors. And seldom do we
see how this data is applied or passed to sophisticated artificial
intelligence for analysis. Globally, each day, we generate five
hundred million tweets, send 294 billion emails, put four peta-
bytes of content on Facebook, send sixty-five billion messages
on WhatsApp, and do five billion searches on Google. That’s
a lot of data about our thoughts, feelings, and activities. Yet
there is even more data that connected devices around us
collect—details that can also reveal much about our behavior.
For example, every day each connected car generates four tera-
bytes of data about how the engine is performing and where
it is taking the driver. Our cellphones and portable electronics
generate similar data about performance, contents, and where
we take them.

The Great Transformation

The internet has always been a powerful tool for political com-
munication. But the tone and timbre of what was communi-
cated, and for which purposes, has changed over time. In the

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 5

early days of the internet, when lobbyists wanted to push a

piece of legislation or candidates ran for election, they could
use the web to publish their platform, buy online banner ads,
and trade messages with voters and supporters. This was still
a one-to-many mode of communication, in that the political
campaign would put content online and anyone could visit the
webpage or consume the content if they were interested. More
recently, social media platforms have introduced new mecha-
nisms for political communication, including ways for users
to involve their own networks of family and friends in clusters
of political affiliation, content sharing, and data mining.
The people who follow your social media accounts are
interested in what you say, and social media firms sell access
to your entire network of family and friends. More impor-
tantly, social media platforms allow your followers to pass
content to their own networks of family and friends. Cam-
paign communications conducted over the internet can in-
volve generic messages. But many messages that arrive on so-
cial media often look like personal communication because,
by definition, we’ve included our friends and family in our
social networks.
Political campaign managers have quickly made use of
the networks of trust and reciprocity we reveal to social media
firms. And many kinds of campaigners have taken advantage
of network effects to spread appeals for support. During the
2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama’s campaign or-
ganization used social media networks with great success. The
campaign’s technology strategy allowed supporters to network
among themselves, offloading the organizational costs of cam-
paigning onto energetic volunteers. And during the Arab Spring
protests of 2010–12, democracy advocates used social media
networks to support one-to-one communication on a large
scale to coordinate massive protests that brought down author-

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itarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Regimes

that didn’t collapse were forced to make a range of political
and financial concessions to appease popular demands. Hav-
ing seen activists use social media as a mechanism for social
mobilization, powerful lobbyists and authoritarian regimes
began using the very same technologies for social control and
to advance their causes.
Microtargeting is the process of preparing and delivering
customized messages to voters or consumers. Television,
newspaper, and radio advertising can be targeted at broad cat-
egories of people. For example, men generally respond well to
certain colors, keywords, pictures, and narratives, while women
respond to others. Political campaign messages can be scripted
to contain cultural cues that might attract or be familiar to,
for example, urbanites, retirees, college students, or pregnant
women. Campaign ads can be targeted using several demo-
graphic categories at once. As a concept, microtargeting in-
volves preparing and delivering a message that is customized
for particular individuals. With the right data, microtargeting
can even design—in real time—ads customized to certain in-
dividuals. By assembling data from our personal credit card
records, the national census, and our social media use, political
campaigns can make some good guesses about our opinions
on the issues of the day.
Some of the most effective lie machines, however, are
built by political parties, authoritarian regimes, and radical
social movements. Organized parties and movements attract
supporters by using as much personal data on people as possi-
ble, whether targeting constituents, voters, members, consum-
ers, or any other group of people. Sometimes this data is used
for what I elsewhere term political redlining. This is the pro-
cess of deciding which people your campaign doesn’t need to
engage with. If, for example, people of color under a certain in-

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come level rarely vote, or if they always vote for your oppo-
nent, it may not be worth spending time in their neighbor-
hood trying to convince them to vote for you. If a city has
consistently voted for one party for decades and there’s no
evidence that public sentiment is changing, why put cam-
paign resources into advertising there? Of course, this is a
rhetorical question, because it is healthy for civic life to have
consistent, high-quality information and debate running in
every neighborhood.

Bad Prospects
For the most part, when authoritarian governments, industry
lobbyists, and shady politicians get hold of personal data, it is
because they want to figure out how to build an effective cam-
paign for winning support and legitimacy. Sometimes such
data helps a politician or lobbyist better understand voters.
When a crisis emerges or a major decision is needed, this data
can allow political leaders to take the pulse of the community
they serve. But usually personal data isn’t used for substantive
engagement; instead, it is applied for strategic reasons, to mo-
bilize supporters and deepen existing commitments. Social
media platforms are the delivery mechanism for the misinfor-
mation, for maneuvering or manipulating the individuals in
the data set. In the chapters ahead, we’ll see how many kinds of
strategies, purposes, and outcomes there can be.
Most citizens don’t know how much information about
them is being used: it is bought and sold by campaigns, adver-
tising firms, political consultants, and social media platforms.
Sometimes political campaigns have clear sponsors and de-
clare their interests, but at other times such motives are hid-
den. Sometimes the public can trace who is spending what
resources on which ads during a campaign season, but at other

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times the advertising is discrete and directed and not archived

anywhere. Most democracies have independent elections reg-
ulators tasked with ensuring fair play, but not all such agencies
are well funded. Sometimes campaigns deliberately spread mis-
information, lies, and rumors about rivals and opponents that
poison public life.
As far as I have observed over several years of investi-
gation, political campaigns in the United States—and many
other democracies—rarely give much thought to managing
the data they collect. They don’t have data management plans
the way hospitals, government agencies, or even private firms
do. Usually individual campaign managers and consultants
maintain their own data sets, and this data travels with them
from campaign to campaign. Political campaigns that are well
resourced may commission surveys and political polls, and
sometimes the polling firm will provide copies of the raw data,
but usually the pollster writes up summary reports and inter-
prets the trends for the campaign. Political campaigns that are
very well resourced will hire consultants to build and main-
tain specialized political data sets that merge data from many
sources: campaign contact records about voters, party mem-
bership information, public records, survey results, census
data, social media data, and credit card data. Usually the con-
sultants treat this information as their intellectual property
and the political client doesn’t have access to the raw data.
Some consulting firms build trusted relationships with a polit-
ical party so that strategic information that the party contrib-
utes stays among groups that share a political agenda.
Political campaigns have few systematic safeguards to
protect data. As the 2016 Russian hack of the US Democratic
Party, or the 2019 Russian hack of the UK Conservative Party
illustrates, even the wealthiest political parties have trouble

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keeping personal records secure. Some countries have privacy

commissioners, but only since the Facebook–Cambridge An-
alytica scandal—in which millions of Facebook users’ personal
profiles were data mined and used for creating political ads—
have countries started looking deeply into campaign practices
around data. Most organizations and websites, such as social
media platforms, credit card companies, and campaigns, have
terms of service agreements. But usually these make a weak
commitment to keeping data safe, saying that they will share
data only with third parties they have evaluated for trustwor-
thiness. In my experience, when you look at the list of third
parties, you’ll see quite a long list of subcontractors, individual
consultants, and small ad agencies with their own inadequate
data management practices.
If you want to explore what kind of political inferences
can be made from the data you have been generating over the
years, simply review your credit card records or get a copy of
your credit history. First, know that this collection of data is
only a fraction of what exists about you. It is sometimes called
core data because along with demographics such as your age,
gender, and race, it is a very basic set of facts about who you
are, where you’ve been, and what you’ve been doing. It proba-
bly contains straightforward information about your address—
probably all the addresses you’ve ever had—and that informa-
tion is used for direct mailing campaigns. But core data usually
also includes telephone number records so consultants can
make robocalls or have third-party call centers contact you.
Depending on the country you live in, there may be publicly
available records of the political donations you have made
or the political parties you belong to. When information about
your political affiliations is married to your credit card rec-
ords, a campaign professional has the data to make a whole lot

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of inferences about how to organize the facts into a theory you

are likely to believe.

Democracy Encoded
New technologies always inspire hot debate about the nature
of politics and public life. When activists used Facebook to
organize protests across North Africa, journalist Malcolm
Gladwell argued that only face-to-face interaction could make
a true social movement and a real revolution. Technology
writer Clay Shirky countered that it no longer made sense
to  distinguish street politics from internet politics. Evgeny
Morozov of the New Republic agreed that the internet was
useful in politics, but mostly for dictators, internet activist Eli
Pariser argued that too many of us were using technology to
immerse ourselves in information bubbles that protect us from
exposure to challenging new ideas. I argued that everyone
was focusing on the wrong internet—that we should be con-
cerned about data from our own devices shaping politics, not
content from our browsers. This was the means by which
political elites would “manage citizens” in the years ahead.
Unsurprisingly, research has disproved some of these
claims and confirmed others. Gladwell was wrong in that so-
cial media proved to be a sufficient cause of several contempo-
rary political uprisings and revolutions. Shirky was prescient
in identifying the ways in which the internet supported new
modes of organizing, modes that could catch dictators off
guard. Morozov was correct in suspecting that the bad guys
would quickly learn to use new technologies in their organiza-
tional efforts and would work to catch democracy advocates
and put them in jail, though his fatalism muddled his think-
ing. But as we’ll see in the chapters ahead, it turns out that the

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big, modern mechanisms for political manipulation depend on

both our social media output and device-level data about our
behavior: algorithms use such data to render the best models
for doing targeted political advertising and organizing voter
contact.
Despite all the debate about the impact of the internet on
politics and public life over the past decade, no one thought
that social media could be used to threaten so deeply the pri-
mary exercises of democracy: elections and referenda. Spread-
ing vast quantities of political misinformation before voting
day, in cleverly targeted ways, was not what social media was
built for. Social media platforms were created from the ground
up for advertising, but not to sell us political candidates. Yet as
these platforms sought ways to monetize their assets—peoples’
attention—they purposefully took advantage of our cognitive
biases. More specifically, social media platforms served up our
cognitive biases to political and ideological projects. At first,
it was the toughest strongmen in Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan
who used social media as an instrument for social control. In
democracies, far-right and far-left parties occasionally pushed
the envelope with campaign tricks that either broke the law
or violated the spirit of democratic discourse. What we didn’t
anticipate was the degree to which mainstream politicians in
established democracies would use social media to manipu-
late their own publics.
In 2016, the campaign to have UK voters reject the Euro-
pean Union generated unusually bold lies about the costs and
benefits of being an EU member. This campaign effectively
used social media to poison debate and muddy issues. In the
United States, pro-Trump bots, trolls, and ad buys greatly in-
flated a range of sensational, conspiracy, and extremist myths
about Hillary Clinton. The Russian government and domestic

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groups sharing political affinities sank significant resources

into the distribution of polarizing content over Facebook and
Twitter, expanding to include other social media platforms
such as Instagram and YouTube in the years after the election
of Donald Trump. Globally, many democratic elections since
2016 have suffered from some loss of credibility because of the
operation of similar lie machines. In countries such as Brazil
and the Philippines, populist leaders have embraced the same
social media strategies used by authoritarian governments.
Even in strong democracies like Canada and Germany, a few
shady politicians get caught using these tools to suppress voter
turnout, misinform voters, and undermine public confidence
in electoral outcomes.
My research team at the University of Oxford has mis-
information trends on social media in dozens of countries.
During the presidential election of 2016 in the United States,
there was a one-to-one ratio of junk news to professional news
shared by voters over Twitter. In other words, for each link to
a story produced by a professional news organization, there
was another link to content that was extremist, sensationalist,
or conspiratorial or to other forms of junk news. This is the
highest level of junk news circulation in any of the countries
we have studied. Critically for politics in the United States,
this misinformation was concentrated in the most competitive
districts—where small shifts in popular opinion had big con-
sequences. Moreover, the audience for misinformation was
primarily Republican voters who supported Trump. Misin-
formation campaigns are often launched using highly auto-
mated accounts and fake users, and such accounts promoted
significant amounts of content from Russian news sources,
links to unverified material on WikiLeaks, and other forms of
junk news. We have found that it is not just bot accounts that

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 13

spread junk news; at the right volume level, junk news can
permeate deeply into networks of human users.
Just a few months after the 2016 US elections, we dem-
onstrated that disinformation about national security issues,
including from Russian sources, was being targeted at US mil-
itary personnel and veterans and their families. During the
president’s State of the Union address, we learned that junk
news is particularly appetizing for far-right white suprema-
cists and President Trump’s supporters (though not “small c”
conservatives). Some of this junk content originates in ac-
counts managed by foreign governments.
Foreign intervention in politics, using social media, is
ongoing, and it doesn’t just involve the Russian government.
As protests started rocking Hong Kong in 2019, Chinese gov-
ernment propagandists activated their social media networks
to convince the world that the activists were violent radicals
with no popular appeal. By 2020, seven countries were run-
ning misinformation campaigns targeting citizens in other
countries: along with Russia and China, there were similar
operations in India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Vene-
zuela. Whether built to target neighboring countries or do-
mestic voters, these mechanisms do the same thing—they
produce, disseminate, and market lies.

What Is a Lie Machine?

A lie machine is a system of people and technologies that dis-
tribute false messages in the service of a political agenda. The
system involved can include many kinds of organizations, indi-
viduals, and relationships, from formal paid-employment rela-
tionships to those of volunteer associations and affinity groups
who produce content and share it over networks of family and

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friends. The people producing this have either a political or a

financial incentive to do so—they work for political parties or
they are political consultants and lobbyists for industry groups.
But the most important people in these networks are citizens
who make the mistake of passing a piece of misinformation
from a junk news source, fake user, or political shill to broader
networks of real citizens and voters. Some of the people in-
volved in the mechanism are programmers who set up vast
networks of highly automated accounts. These citizens have
a disproportionate share of the public conversation because of
the fake user accounts they control.
Social media platforms, search engines, and myriad de-
vices provide the technology and infrastructure for delivering
misinformation directly to citizens at key moments in a public
conversation. Usually several technologies are used in a lie
machine. For example, data from your credit card purchases
may be used to create a digital political profile of you as a so-
cial media user. Then several of the platforms and websites you
visit display political ads that are likely to trigger your interests
and attention.
Whether through accidental sharing or purposeful dis-
tribution, an array of political actors and average citizens dis-
tribute and disseminate content by liking, retweeting, repur-
posing, and repackaging the content. Subtle alterations help
the lies avoid spam filters, validity checks, and human editors
and spread across social networks.
Unfortunately, there are many varieties of lies and what
Caroline Jack calls “problematic information.” And the me-
dia’s dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sen-
sationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait gives
the producers, distributors, and marketers of political lies the
ability to project misinformation and disinformation to a wide
audience. Misinformation is contested information that re-

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flects political disagreement and deviation from expert con-

sensus, scientific knowledge, or lived experience. Disinforma-
tion is purposefully crafted and strategically placed information
that deceives someone—tricks them—into believing a lie or
taking action that serves someone else’s political interests. Junk
news is political news and information that is sensational, ex-
tremist, conspiratorial, severely biased, or commentary masked
as news.
The messages, pictures, videos, and other content that lie
machines distribute isn’t simply false advertising. It can include
very personal messages from platform users who are being
paid by foreign governments to bait you to join an argument
or spread a rumor. It can include highly customized posts
about conspiracies. Paid advertising takes advantage of a plat-
form’s own means of generating a profit for itself, while direct
messaging involves users who work for a political agenda.
The key distinction between misinformation and false
advertising for commercial products is that the lies are in ser-
vice of some political ideology. And generating social media
content in the service of a party or an ideology increasingly
takes a formal work arrangement, with teams under contract,
storyboards and scripts, dedicated office space, and significant
financial commitments. Sometimes individuals buy ads on
their own or work as coordinated volunteers to drive a po-
litical figure off social media. But this work can also involve
formal employment with agencies that coordinate large, agile
teams that can be hired on short notice to support a political
communication campaign.
Many kinds of political actors put technology in the ser-
vice of power. In almost all countries, it is the far-right, ultra-
conservative groups and populist leaders that get caught using
such tools early and aggressively. Only on rare occasions have
we caught left-wing populists and middle-of-the-road politi-

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cians putting these tools and techniques to work for a political

agenda, and usually it’s only after someone else has used a lie
machine to attack them. Foreign governments meddle in the
domestic affairs of neighboring countries, usually to sow local
discord or target a politician whose ideas threaten the foreign
government. When political parties do it, it’s about projecting
their values by stoking fear, uncertainty, and misunderstanding.
Lie machines are made up of parts—people and the tech-
nologies for disseminating the falsehoods they come up with.
And when assembled properly, lie machines put information
technology into service for a political ideology by generating
computational propaganda. Deliberately using device networks,
social media algorithms, and personal data to shape how we
perceive the world is the work of regular advertisers but also of
propagandists. Producing, distributing, and marketing propa-
ganda is certainly an old craft, but these new, scaled-up mech-
anisms swiftly create and distribute content, with rapid testing
and refinement, customized for individual consumption by
that individual’s personal and behavioral data. This is not
the broadcast era’s propaganda of posters, government adver-
tising, and leaflets dropped from airplanes. The modern lie
machine is not a mass media instrument for broadcasting mis-
leading information. It is a new, complex system of people and
technologies with unique features.
The best lie machines involve components with three key
functions: production, distribution, and marketing. The better
these components work to promote a political lie, the greater
the chances are of successfully manipulating public opinion on
an issue. First, a well-running lie machine requires govern-
ment agencies, political leaders, candidates for election, or
political parties who produce misinformation in the service
of their political agenda or big ideological project. Second, a
lie machine needs a distribution system, which today takes the

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form of the platforms provided by social media firms. The dis-

tribution system of bots, fake accounts, and easily exploited
social media algorithms provides a technical infrastructure
for packaging the lie and delivering it to your inbox. The third
important component of a lie machine is the marketing work
and this usually involves consultants and commercial agencies
who polish and bundle the information into junk news stories.
They analyze both big-picture market trends and data about
you to get the marketing strategy right. Political consultants,
lobbyists, and advertisers make big money by refining such
marketing strategies. In sum, the key components are the peo-
ple who produce political lies, the social media firms that dis-
tribute the lies, and the consulting firms that market the lies
to you.
Simply defined, computational propaganda is the mis-
leading news and information that is created in the service of
political interests and algorithmically distributed across social
media networks. It can involve networks of highly automated
Twitter accounts or fake users on Facebook. Sometimes the
people running these campaigns simply pay for advertising
and exploit the services that social media companies offer to
all kinds of advertisers. Often the political campaigns or for-
eign governments that generate computational propaganda
take advantage of the design of platforms. So for dating apps
like Tinder, the automated accounts or fake users will flirt and
then talk politics. For YouTube, the goal is to repackage main-
stream content or create dedicated channels to keep users in a
narrow stream of content. Strategies for Reddit involve creat-
ing crazy new conspiracy theories and encouraging users to
transport those theories to other platforms. Doing so usually
means breaking terms of service agreements, violating com-
munity norms, and using platform affordances in a way the
engineers didn’t intend. Occasionally it means breaking elec-

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tion law, privacy regulations, or consumer protection rules.

But it happens anyway—sometimes because of inadequate en-
forcement of existing laws, regulations, and rules or inadequate
public policy oversight. At times the firms themselves don’t
consistently enforce their own terms of service, because doing
so would mean losing revenue or upsetting a group of users.

What Do Lie Machines Look Like?

Many people are questioning whether social media platforms
are threatening democracy. Concentrated in just a few hands,
these firms are aggregating large data sets about public and
private life—including data on demographics and public at-
titudes and opinions. Making all this intelligence available
for commercial use allows elite political actors to control the
most valuable resource possible in a democracy: our attention.
Information infrastructure is an invaluable asset to lobbyists
seeking to pass legislation, foreign governments interested
in controlling domestic conversations, and political campaign
managers working to win an election. While the internet has
certainly opened new avenues for civic participation in political
processes—inspiring hopes of a democratic reinvigoration—
the parallel rise of big data analytics, black-box algorithms,
and computational propaganda is raising significant concerns
for policymakers worldwide. In many countries around the
world, divisive social media campaigns have heightened ethnic
tensions, revived nationalistic movements, intensified political
conflict, and even resulted in political crises—while simulta-
neously weakening public trust in journalism, democratic in-
stitutions, and electoral outcomes.
The first troll armies appeared in Russia in 2007, during
Vladimir Putin’s second term as president. I traveled there that
summer to meet these early patriotic bloggers who went to

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 19

camps on the outskirts of Moscow to talk about the future of

their country—and learn to code. After multiple successful
campaigns of misinformation, the use of trolls spread as other
governments, political parties, and lobbyists saw Russia’s troll
armies in action. By 2016, some twenty-five countries were
spending upward of $2.5 billion a year on large cohorts of com-
mentators, reviewers, harassers, and advocates who manipu-
lated public life over social media. By 2020, more than seventy
countries had organized social media misinformation teams.
These days, troll armies take many different organiza-
tional shapes. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte
paid a small army of social media users not just to post upbeat
messages about his candidacy for president but to threaten
and harass his critics and opponents. In a country with one of
the highest rates of extrajudicial killing and journalist murder
rates in the world, a few threatening social media messages
can be enough to drive many reasonable people out of public
life. Given the great variety of lie machines in operation, what
is the best way to frame the problem, explain it, and work out
the best ways to break the lie machines down?

Lie Machines as Sociotechnical Systems

For many years, being a social scientist has meant purpose-
fully gathering large amounts of information about people,
their relationships, and their ideas. But the internet has also
affected how we do such research, because it has become
harder and harder to build meaningful explanations of social
phenomena without making room for the affordances of in-
formation infrastructure. We used to think that people were
the primary causes of social change. Many disciplines of so-
cial science inquiry investigate the role of media, technology,
and information infrastructure and treat these things as tools

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 20 Science and Technology of Lie Machines

for individuals, networks, and communities. But increasingly

we’ve had to admit that such a fundamental infrastructure as
the internet both enables and limits our activities. Causal fac-
tors are often conjoined, and sensible explanations of modern
politics need to give attention to the causal role of information
technology.
A sociotechnical system is made up of people and their
tools, and seeing both in interaction gives you a better analyt-
ical frame because you can observe how the material world
provides both capacities for and constraints upon human ac-
tion. We may all feel that we are agents, yet our ability to have
an impact on the social and material world around us is largely
determined by our access to information and our ability to
communicate. Having a good education, consuming high-
quality news, and using the latest information technology
allows us to have an impact. These may give some of us the
capacity to change the world, but for other people, not having
access becomes a constraint.
Understanding the momentous changes and big chal-
lenges in how we do politics must mean understanding both
people and technology. It is possible to be too technologically
determinist, however. Arguing that the internet alone is re-
sponsible for social decay gets us nowhere. But it is also possi-
ble to be technologically underdetermined: we must also admit
that the social media platforms we’ve built for ourselves have
affordances that help us behave badly, circulate misinforma-
tion, cause other people harm, and degrade public life.
However, trying to understand computational propa-
ganda only from a technical perspective—as hardware and
algorithms—plays into the hands of those who use the tech-
nology to undermine democracy and the firms that profit
when that happens. The very act of describing something as

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 21

purely technical or in very mechanistic terms may make it

seem unbiased, inevitable, or easily fixed by an engineer or a
change in settings. This is clearly a dangerous position to take,
and we must look to the emerging discipline of social data sci-
ence to help us understand the complex sociotechnical issues
at play and the influence of technology on politics. As part of
this process, social data science researchers must maintain a
critical stance toward the data they use and analyze to ensure
that they are critiquing as they go about describing, predicting,
or recommending changes in the way technology and politics
evolve. If academic research on computational propaganda does
not engage fully with the systems of power and knowledge that
produce it—the human actors and motivations behind it—
then the very possibility of improving the role of social media
platforms in public life evaporates. We can only hope to un-
derstand and respond appropriately to a problem like compu-
tational propaganda by undertaking computational research
alongside qualitative investigation. This lets us see and under-
stand the sociotechnical system.
Computational propaganda, then, is both a social and a
technical phenomenon. It is produced by an assembly of social
media platforms, people, algorithms, and big data tasked with
the manipulation of public opinion. Computational propa-
ganda is of course a recent form of the propaganda that has
existed in our political systems for millennia—communica-
tions that deliberately subvert symbols, appealing to our baser
emotions and prejudices and bypassing rational thought to
achieve the specific goals of its promoters—and is understood
as propaganda that is created or disseminated by computa-
tional means. Automation, scalability, and anonymity are hall-
marks of computational propaganda. The pernicious advan-
tage of computational propaganda is that it enables the rapid

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 22 Science and Technology of Lie Machines

distribution of large amounts of content, sometimes personal-

ized in order to fool users into thinking that messages origi-
nated in their extended network of family and friends. In this
way, computational propaganda typically requires bots that au-
tomate content delivery, fake social media accounts that need
little human curation, and junk news that is misinformation
about politics and public life.
Thus, the mechanism we need to understand—and
rebuild—is one that involves both people and technology. Peo-
ple generate political misinformation; social media platforms
such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter spread it around.
Politicians generate negative messages; Twitter distributes the
anger and outrage. Of course, journalists still generate high-
quality journalism, and politicians do have positive, construc-
tive ideas about public policy. But long-form, high-quality
journalism and interesting new ideas about public policy aren’t
disseminated as widely as extremist, conspiratorial, and sensa-
tional junk news. If we analyze the entire mechanism, with its
social and technical parts, can we redesign it to support dem-
ocratic norms?

Taking the Lie Machines Apart

Public life is being torn apart. Lie machines sow distrust and
infect political conversations with anger, moral outrage, and
invective in ways that forestall consensus building. It is not
simply that social media may have side effects, making us de-
pendent on our screens for news and information, or that our
mobile phones may be isolating us from our neighbors. Troll
armies, bot networks, and fake news operations are formal
structures of misinformation, purposefully built. But to un-
derstand how they work, we must go behind the scenes of
some of the most engrossing and appalling stories of modern

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 23

political intrigue and manipulation, explain the systems be-

hind them, look ahead to how advanced technologies will be
used, and give readers tools to break them down. And ulti-
mately, analyzing these components isn’t enough: we need to
know how to fix the problem. So this book concludes by pre-
senting ways that we can protect ourselves and help destroy
the complex lie machines now threatening our democracies.
Most of the investigative journalism around this topic
builds headlines around particular events involving trolls, bots,
or fake news. But these components work very well together.
Trolls launch negative campaigns, usually for radical move-
ments or as paid advertising. They amplify their voice through
automation and social media algorithms. Automated social
media accounts have more impact when they link to fake news.
Fake news has more sophistication and audience appeal when
artificial intelligence is used to manipulate big data about pub-
lic life. And very soon, the internet of things will generate the
biggest data of all. The internet of things is made up of net-
works of manufactured goods with embedded power supplies,
small sensors, and an address on the internet. Most of these
networked devices are everyday items that are sending and
receiving data about their conditions and our behavior. Such
devices generate massive amounts of data, and if we are not
careful, they could become part of truly enormous mecha-
nisms for social control.
To understand properly how lie machines operate, we
need lots of evidence. From interviews and fieldwork with
political organizations and consultants to big data analysis of
large amounts of content from Twitter and Facebook, we need
to be able to explain how and why these assemblages get built
if we are ever going to work out how to take them apart. So the
analytical effort ahead involves evidence from different coun-
tries around the world, expert interviews, and exclusive, rare

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 24 Science and Technology of Lie Machines

data sets sourced from the social media companies themselves.

I present original research on government agencies that are
spending public money or retasking military units to keep cer-
tain hashtags trending, rile up particular groups of people, or
defame rising political figures.
The recent slew of surprising political outcomes, strained
civic dialogues, and polarizing debates seem—at face value—
to be related to social media and the internet. In analyzing a
political problem, our first instinct is often to try and identify
the one person or factor to pin all the blame on. In the US
context, one explanation is that the Russians are responsible
for the current political climate because of their interference
with how voters deliberated in 2016, 2018, and 2020. A rival
theory assigns blame to white supremacists and the far right
for successfully using social media to radicalize mainstream
conservatives. But both explanations are incomplete because
they miss the full perspective of the global political economy
behind the lie machines that work on US voters.
How did we get here, and whom do we blame? Is Russia’s
Vladimir Putin behind it all? Is it our own fault for being ad-
dicted to Facebook and Twitter? Unfortunately, the answer is
complex, involving both people and technologies in a sensible
causal story about how big political lies get produced, distrib-
uted, and marketed to us.
The first components that we need to examine are the
politicians and governments that generate big lies. As a start-
ing point, we need to track the rise of organized teams of peo-
ple dedicated to social media manipulation—groups of people
often called trolls. The first troll armies, which appeared in Rus-
sia in 2007, are now organized by the Russian government’s
Internet Research Agency (IRA). I illustrate how they are used
to actively spin government operations and take a close look

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 25

at the playbook used by social media trolls during a week in

which Russia’s ruling elites were accused of assassinating a de-
mocracy advocate.
The second core component to examine is the distribution
method for political lies. We need to scrutinize the automation
and algorithms that disseminate misleading political informa- Reset to
tion. What are bots and who makes them? When do people lose a line
believe a bot, and what impact do bots have on public opinion?
I focus on the mechanics of automation on several platforms
and on how the mechanism of automating political communi-
cation has become more and more sophisticated over the years.
The final components of lie machines to understand are
the consultants, marketers, and advertisers who put political
lies into a distribution system—and profit by doing so. Many
outrageous political stories, rumors, and accusations spread
rapidly over social media, and there are businesses that profit
by marketing, amplifying, and advertising political lies. In
2016, bots were successful in spreading a crazy story, often
called #pizzagate, that supposedly linked Hillary Clinton with
a pedophilia ring based out of a pizza parlor in Washington,
DC. In 2020, it was automation on TikTok and Twitter that
tried to convince local activists and the world at large to dis-
miss Hong Kong’s democracy advocates as violent radicals.
Every country now has similar kinds of politically potent lies—
stories that remain believed long after they have been dis-
proven. Who takes a potent piece of misinformation that serves
the interests of political elites or some ideological agenda, does
the market analysis, and unleashes a marketing campaign over
social media? Who are the political operatives who buy and
sell our data, make or break politicians, and distribute political
lies over the internet?
After I’ve broken the machine down to these compo-

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 26 Science and Technology of Lie Machines

nents, the next task is to figure out how the parts fit together
and affect public life. Understanding the impact and influence
of a lie machine means tracing out the flow of information
from lie producers through social media distribution systems
and marketing plans by professional political consultants. We
could call it a case study, archival research, process tracing, or
a study of political economy, but it is simpler to say that we
need to follow the money.
Lastly, if we can break a lie machine into component parts
and then see how the lies and money flow, can we anticipate
how such mechanisms might evolve in the years ahead? More
importantly, can we catch and disassemble them permanently?
Unfortunately, bots are just early forms of automation
that have filled our inboxes and social media feeds with junk.
Political chatbots backed by sophisticated machine learning
tools are now in development, and these automated accounts
provide a much more humanlike, interactive experience. They
are not simply scripted bots that can talk about politics. Are
you sure we have evolved from primates? Does smoking cause
all cancers or just some, and might this connection vary by
gender and cigarette brand? There’s a chatbot that will make
you reconsider such things. Is climate change real? Should we
inoculate our kids?
Chatbots have become the hot tool for industry lobbyists
seeking to promote junk science. And the next step is to put
artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which simulate learning,
reasoning, and classification, behind these bots. Several mili-
taries are looking at ways of using the latest nascent AI person-
alities and machine learning algorithms for political engage-
ment. Some of the best stories are coming out of China, where
closed media platforms allow for large-scale experimentation
on public opinion. What can we say now about the political

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 Science and Technology of Lie Machines 27

biases in algorithms, and how will AI affect political participa-

tion in the democracies?
Most of us are used to experiencing the internet through
the browser on our smartphone or computer. But as our cars,
refrigerators, and thermostats are also increasingly connected
to the internet, how will the data from devices with chips and
sensors, wireless radios, and internet addresses be used? What
can we learn about political opinion by playing with such big
data? Moreover, how will others use this data to coerce us
and manage public life? The most basic AI systems are already
starting to use complex data to engage real people in political
conversations. I highlight some of the amazing ways that this
data is being used for meaningful political impact. When so-
phisticated AI gets to play with big sets of behavioral data from
the network devices around us, someone somewhere will at-
tempt to make political inferences from the analysis. Someone
will always try to build better lie machines that offer ever
more complete systems for understanding our behavior and
pushing political opinion. I accept cynicism about the current
impact of social media on democracy but not fatalism: civic
action and policy leadership may well prevent the worst inter-
net of things scenarios from becoming a reality.
There are multiple challenges before us if we want to live
in functional democracies: A politician who doesn’t like how
a question is phrased dismisses the questioner as “alt-right” or
“alt-left.” A political leader who doesn’t like how a news story
is framed labels it “fake news.” A political consultant who
doesn’t like the evidence comes up with “alternative facts.”
Growing numbers of citizens believe junk science about cli-
mate change and public health. Traditional pollsters can’t call
an election, and the surprising outcomes of elections seem to
have their roots in manipulative leaders in other countries.

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 28 Science and Technology of Lie Machines

By closely examining lie machines, we can understand

how to take them apart. I offer basic policy recommendations
on how we can protect political speech while demolishing the
mechanisms for producing, distributing, and marketing mis-
information. I provide civic defense tips that should help us
proactively protect ourselves in the years ahead. Yet the best
way to solve collective problems is with collective action, so I
also identify ways that our public agencies can protect us with
policies that make it tough for these big lie machines to oper-
ate in our democracies. It is possible to block the production,
dissemination, and marketing of big political lies, but we’ll have
to act together to do this effectively.

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