An excellent article by Mackenzie Weinger in which Jed Willard inexplicably says “64 F-35s is a lot of plane.”
https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/716696/finland-mulls-joining-nato-as-russia-attacks-ukraine/
(Alas there is a paywall, as the National Journal is primarily aimed at the U.S. Congress.)
“Sociability was a key word for Enlightenment thinkers. The pleasures of hearing unanticipated viewpoints and a variety of storytelling talents, music, theater, and interpretive conversations managed to weave and to sustain the political fabric of democracies. That social fabric has frayed over time, while investments in the humanities also erode. This is no coincidence. The weave and the practices of equitable interchange need mending today, as democracy shows signs of unraveling along anti-social barriers that sideline the arts and interpretation from public life, even though these activities ground democracy with stakes in civility.”
Read the entire piece here: https://harvardmagazine.com/2021/05/features-democracy-requests-company
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Today, nations that can’t effectively tell their own story risk having it told by another country, says Jed Willard, global engagement director at Harvard’s FDR Foundation, who has worked with European countries on strategies to counter disinformation.
He says politicians and the public in Australia should never engage in a debate with China about issues unrelated to Canberra’s relationship with Beijing.
“This may not be a battle of national narratives so much as a battle of framing [of issues],” he adds. “The first thing the government (and people) should do is take a step back and look at the big picture.”
Willard says the Chinese Communist Party has become “increasingly aggressive around the world” and willing to openly and forcefully “use a full spectrum of trade, investment, and public diplomacy tools to work toward long-term goals”.
In this setting, Zhao’s inflammatory tweet is not about Australia in Afghanistan, Willard says. “This is about Australian sovereignty and rules-based trade.
“Don’t engage in their frame. Send a clear message to the public at home and abroad that this is a real dispute about sovereignty, rule of law and trade, and anything else is simply a distraction.
“Australia must stick to [its] own frame and not play what-aboutism, even though the CCP is obviously sensitive about their own policies in Xinjiang.”
What-aboutism is the term for arguments in which criticism of one subject (for example, detention camps for Uighurs in Xinjiang) is countered with a “what about this?” question (in this case, allegations of Australian war crimes that are being fully investigated).
Read the full article here: https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/grey-area-china-s-trolling-drives-home-reality-of-social-media-war-20201203-p56kcx.html
“Given the hard lessons of the 2016 U.S. election, it’s safe to assume that bad actors, foreign and domestic alike, are already hard at work trying to take full advantage of the discord, said Jed Willard, a Harvard University expert on information warfare.
“But much of the work is being done for them — partisan battles over masks, economic lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, inflamed by joblessness and uncertainty, have ripped more holes in America’s social fabric than any disinformation peddlers could ever hope to do themselves.
“‘On masking, it is extremely silly, it’s extremely dangerous,’ Willard said of the culture clash that has divided Americans over wearing face coverings to protect against the spread of COVID-19.
“It’s also extremely outlandish and implausible — too much so, in fact, for foreign disinformation agents in Russia and China. They have focused more on convincing westerners the virus is a man-made bioweapon, a storyline that never took root despite its familiar, Hollywood-friendly frame.
“‘What happened in the United States is that our own domestic misinformation was so much more effective at exploiting the real divisions in our society, that the foreign actors just amplified it,’ Willard said.
“‘They didn’t bother pushing their master narratives, which is weird for them. They just went with what we were already doing to ourselves.'”
Read the full article here:
“‘The Kremlin is a chaos monster,’ Jed Willard, global engagement director of the FDR Foundation at Harvard, previously told VICE News. ‘Their frame is Americans can’t trust Americans.'”
Read the article here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyzkay/facebook-had-to-nuke-a-bunch-of-russian-bots-right-as-it-bragged-its-ready-for-2020
Not exactly “Hot Off the Wire” but a good reminder to follow the journalist Eliza Mackintosh and the great counter-disinformation work happening in Finland.
…
It may be difficult to export democracy, but it is easy to import experts, which is precisely what Finland did in 2016 to combat what it saw as a rise in disinformation emanating from accounts linked to its neighbor to the east.
“They knew that the Kremlin was messing with Finnish politics, but they didn’t have a context with which to interpret that. They were wondering if this meant they [Russia] would invade, was this war?” Jed Willard, director of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Center for Global Engagement at Harvard University, who was hired by Finland to train state officials to spot and then hit back at fake news, told CNN.
Russia maintains that it has not and does not interfere in the domestic politics of other countries.
Behind closed doors, Willard’s workshops largely focused on one thing: developing a strong national narrative, rather than trying to debunk false claims.
“The Finns have a very unique and special strength in that they know who they are. And who they are is directly rooted in human rights and the rule of law, in a lot of things that Russia, right now, is not,” Willard said. “There is a strong sense of what it means to be Finnish … that is a super power.”
Not all nations have the type of narrative to fall back on that Finland does….
Read the whole piece at https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/