Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Psywar and Misinformation: 1965 Indonesia, 2016-? United States

    I recently had the privilege to review Geoffrey Robinson‘s The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966. It’s scheduled to be published promptly in March 2019 because academic publishing (although you might click here to see what happens). Anyone who happens to be reading this blog post is probably someone who would enjoy reading Robinson’s book.

    In a chapter entitled “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” Robinson describes how British and American authorities participated in a “sophisticated international propaganda and psywar operation” to blame the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the alleged coup against Sukarno. In the days following the murder of the six Army generals, there were plenty of skeptical voices—domestically and internationally—who doubted the claims of the PKI’s culpability or responsibility. But, writes Robinson,

    One reason the critics and skeptics were not easily heard was that information about the alleged coup and violence was deliberately skewed by a sophisticated international propaganda and psywar operation organized by British and US government agencies and their Indonesian Army friends.

    The American campaign involved

    clear direction to US agencies to stress the PKI’s alleged role in the alleged coup and emphasize its brutality, while at the same time playing down any sins of splits within the military. Following army cues, they also suggested stirring up memories of the 1948 Madiun uprising…. supplemented with reporting and commentary on the alleged (but never proven) role of China in the supposed coup and its connection with the PKI.

    On the British side, a memo from the Foreign Office

    fully endorsed the proposal for “unattributable propaganda or psy-war activities which would contribute to weakening the PKI permanently”… in which “British participation or cooperation should be carefully concealed” and the “overt…British attitude should be one of strict non-interference.”

    This was almost completely disingenuous on both the American and British parts, given the depth and extent of Western skepticism of both PKI and Chinese involvement—but it served a clear political purpose. Reading on,

    Western diplomats understood well that in the days following the purported coup, print and broadcast media had become crucial fields of political struggle…. A further element of the international psywar campaign was the cultivation of “friendly” foreign correspondents and journalists by various Western governments.

    It is not hard to see here the parallels between Western efforts to shape Indonesian politics through misinformation and media manipulation and the Russian campaign to disrupt US politics. The details have changed, of course, but the idea remains the same: stress one interpretation of politics over others, collaborate with (and support) trustworthy and likeminded media partisans, link current events to sensitive and inflammatory historical moments, and so forth.

    The big difference is the media environment, with the Indonesian Army having shut down all opposition media by October 2, 1965. Compare this to the United States, where the media is free and competitive, and where social media means that the way that most Americans consume political media is entirely different. But that just changes the tactics (Twitter bots, fake Facebook news), not the logic of psywar (distract, deflect, confuse).

  • Bias, Learning, and Observational Research

    I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the first time I saw Gerber, Green, and Kaplan‘s “The Illusion of Learning from Observational Research” (PDF): eating some peanut butter cookies in the back of a seminar room filled with august political scientists discussing methodology and the study of politics. I remember the reaction being pretty stark: “OK, here it is, the argument that we should all do experiments.” Like many pieces of this sort, I suspect that the Gerber et al. piece has been cited more than it has been read. Also like many pieces of this sort, the title does not help. The essay considers the problem of learning when confronted with an experimental result and an observational result subject to bias, and also asks how one would optimally allocate finite resources between research of these two types. The paper was subsequently published as part of the volume Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics.

    I recently finished an essay with Andrew Little that argues that learning from biased research designs is not an illusion. We argue instead that we can reformulate this challenge as a Bayesian learning problem, analogous to many formal theories of learning in the social sciences. The key to our argument is insisting that researchers do have (informative and often non-neutral) prior beliefs about both causal effects and the bias in observational research designs. One provocative implication of our argument is to suppose otherwise, that you are unwilling to specify prior beliefs about causal effects or bias. If that’s the case, as we note, then it follows that

    no result – hugely positive, hugely negative, or zero – would be more or less surprising to you.

    We clearly don’t live in a world where researchers have no prior beliefs. Our paper shows us how to think through the problem of learning from observational research when we recognize that we do have those beliefs.