foreignpolicy--2020-11-11--Taiwan Is Beating Political Disinformation. The West Can Too.

Taiwan Is Beating Political Disinformation .
The West Can Too .
If you read news stories or social media posts in Taiwan last December , you may have learned some startling “ facts.
” HIV has spread rapidly in Taiwan since the government legalized same-sex marriage , one story claimed .
President Tsai Ing-wen forged her doctoral degree , another rumor went .
Despite outrageous lies like these in the run-up to January ’ s presidential election , Tsai won in a landslide .
Fake news failed .
Hard as it may be to imagine against the backdrop of conspiracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dangers dominating Facebook and YouTube for months , Taiwan should give everyone hope that we can live in a normal news environment again .
The West ’ s response to disinformation so far has largely been reactive .
It could do far better by following the Taiwanese model and taking an active stance against it .
As a Washington Post headline reads , “ [ D ] isinformation is ascendant .
Taiwan shows how we can defeat it.
” Taiwan takes a whole-of-society approach to fighting disinformation .
Its civic technology community works @ @ @ @ @ @ @ island ’ s popular messaging service Line , to identify , debunk , and downrank viral conspiracy theories on social media platforms .
When someone comes across a news story that sounds fishy , they can send it to the popular chatbot Cofacts , where teams of volunteers then rapidly research the claim to determine its validity .
The independent Taiwan FactCheck Center maintains an online repository of disproven conspiracy theories .
Taiwan also shows that the best defense comes from a solid offense .
Rather than simply play whack-a-mole by disproving every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new conversations by organizing public debates about issues via the citizen-run vTaiwan platform .
Instead of promoting hysteria to sell more ads , vTaiwan ’ s algorithms highlight where there is consensus in a debate and minimize the voices at the most extreme ends .
Media literacy trucks go to rural areas to educate people how to spot fake news .
And with China keen to cause divides in Taiwan , local groups that knowingly receive foreign money to spread disinformation about elections can face fines , and their leaders can go to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of hiring technologists to drive government innovation , Tsai appointed a software engineer , Audrey Tang , to increase citizen engagement in government decision-making in 2016 .
While Tang has led initiatives to roll out new technologies that increase transparency and combat disinformation , she has also helped Taiwan distinguish itself by marrying those investments with community-level engagement efforts , such as enlisting thousands of pharmacists to help dispel rumors about COVID-19 .
Since the early 2000s , and especially since Russia ’ s invasion of Ukraine and its well-documented interference in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has become hyperaware of the dangers of disinformation .
Eighty-three percent of respondents in a 2018 Eurobarometer poll said they thought that fake news was a threat to democracy itself .
But unlike Taiwan , the West has mounted a response that does not call on whole-of-society efforts to fight back .
The European Union ’ s flagship program to fight disinformation , EUvsDisInfo , serves largely as a clearing house for journalists and others to fact-check dubious claims and conspiracy theories disseminated within EU member states .
The Global Engagement Center , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s final year in office , identifies sources of foreign disinformation in fragile democracies , shares that information with U.S. allies , and generates content to counter false claims .
Simply responding to disinformation is not enough .
Nor will profit-driven corporations like Facebook magically solve the disinformation problem—although they bear considerable responsibility for creating it in the first place .
Building resilient societies that can fight back against disinformation comes from the hard work of increasing the public ’ s media literacy and creating and sustaining relationships among people over time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ innovators like Taiwan should be an overarching priority for liberal democracies in the 2020s .
To get there , democracies need to work together .
Increased investments in foreign assistance programs and public diplomacy budgets to fight disinformation and to strengthen open societies to replicate Taiwan ’ s success should be made in a multilateral , coordinated way and in consultation with international and local civil society organizations .
This should not be a U.S.-led war against disinformation , or a French-led one , but one shared by all democracies that want to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should prioritize professional exchanges , funding for civic tech communities , and capacity-building within vital institutions , progress won ’ t come unless we put empathy before exceptionalism .
The United States has much to learn from other countries , and all liberal democracies should see global networks akin to the World Economic Forum ’ s Young Global Leaders program or to the U.S. State Department ’ s Young African Leaders Initiative as more than modern megaphones .
With some humility , we can source the best ideas , wherever they may come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media ; and connect human rights and democracy defenders from around the world .
Fighting disinformation is not just the responsibility of beleaguered reporters or frustrated public servants .
Educators , religious leaders , social justice activists , senior citizen advocacy groups , environmentalists , labor leaders , public health practitioners , and business leaders , among many others , all have a stake in the fight .
Reaching out to these constituencies , helping them to understand how disinformation affects their core interests , recruiting their leaders to speak out , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how we win .
Taiwan has not completely solved the disinformation challenge .
Conspiracy theories still take root , even today , and this contributes to an increasingly polarized electorate .
But the island is far ahead of most other liberal democracies in fighting the disinformation war , an achievement that is made even more remarkable by the fact that Taiwan is also the No .
1 target for foreign disinformation in the world .
To win this asymmetric war against democracy will require a new and offensive strategy , with robust resources @ @ @ @ @ @ @ focuses on building whole-of-society efforts in every liberal democracy under attack .
And we can begin by looking to Taiwan for answers .

If you read news stories or social media posts in Taiwan last December, you may have learned some startling “facts.” HIV has spread rapidly in Taiwan since the government legalized same-sex marriage, one story claimed. President Tsai Ing-wen forged her doctoral degree, another rumor went. Despite outrageous lies like these in the run-up to January’s presidential election, Tsai won in a landslide. Fake news failed.
If you read news stories or social media posts in Taiwan last December, you may have learned some startling “facts.” HIV has spread rapidly in Taiwan since the government legalized same-sex marriage, one story claimed. President Tsai Ing-wen forged her doctoral degree, another rumor went. Despite outrageous lies like these in the run-up to January’s presidential election, Tsai won in a landslide. Fake news failed.
Hard as it may be to imagine against the backdrop of conspiracy theories about child trafficking or supposed vaccination dangers dominating Facebook and YouTube for months, Taiwan should give everyone hope that we can live in a normal news environment again. The West’s response to disinformation so far has largely been reactive. It could do far better by following the Taiwanese model and taking an active stance against it. As a Washington Post headline reads, “[D]isinformation is ascendant. Taiwan shows how we can defeat it.”
Taiwan takes a whole-of-society approach to fighting disinformation. Its civic technology community works with social media companies, like the island’s popular messaging service Line, to identify, debunk, and downrank viral conspiracy theories on social media platforms. When someone comes across a news story that sounds fishy, they can send it to the popular chatbot Cofacts, where teams of volunteers then rapidly research the claim to determine its validity. The independent Taiwan FactCheck Center maintains an online repository of disproven conspiracy theories.
Taiwan also shows that the best defense comes from a solid offense. Rather than simply play whack-a-mole by disproving every new fake fact, the government creates new conversations by organizing public debates about issues via the citizen-run vTaiwan platform. Instead of promoting hysteria to sell more ads, vTaiwan’s algorithms highlight where there is consensus in a debate and minimize the voices at the most extreme ends. Media literacy trucks go to rural areas to educate people how to spot fake news. And with China keen to cause divides in Taiwan, local groups that knowingly receive foreign money to spread disinformation about elections can face fines, and their leaders can go to jail.
Building on a global trend of hiring technologists to drive government innovation, Tsai appointed a software engineer, Audrey Tang, to increase citizen engagement in government decision-making in 2016. While Tang has led initiatives to roll out new technologies that increase transparency and combat disinformation, she has also helped Taiwan distinguish itself by marrying those investments with community-level engagement efforts, such as enlisting thousands of pharmacists to help dispel rumors about COVID-19.
Since the early 2000s, and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its well-documented interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the West has become hyperaware of the dangers of disinformation. Eighty-three percent of respondents in a 2018 Eurobarometer poll said they thought that fake news was a threat to democracy itself.
But unlike Taiwan, the West has mounted a response that does not call on whole-of-society efforts to fight back. The European Union’s flagship program to fight disinformation, EUvsDisInfo, serves largely as a clearing house for journalists and others to fact-check dubious claims and conspiracy theories disseminated within EU member states. The Global Engagement Center, established during U.S. President Barack Obama’s final year in office, identifies sources of foreign disinformation in fragile democracies, shares that information with U.S. allies, and generates content to counter false claims.
Simply responding to disinformation is not enough. Nor will profit-driven corporations like Facebook magically solve the disinformation problem—although they bear considerable responsibility for creating it in the first place. Building resilient societies that can fight back against disinformation comes from the hard work of increasing the public’s media literacy and creating and sustaining relationships among people over time, not better algorithms alone. Learning from innovators like Taiwan should be an overarching priority for liberal democracies in the 2020s.
To get there, democracies need to work together. Increased investments in foreign assistance programs and public diplomacy budgets to fight disinformation and to strengthen open societies to replicate Taiwan’s success should be made in a multilateral, coordinated way and in consultation with international and local civil society organizations. This should not be a U.S.-led war against disinformation, or a French-led one, but one shared by all democracies that want to stay that way.
While Western democracies should prioritize professional exchanges, funding for civic tech communities, and capacity-building within vital institutions, progress won’t come unless we put empathy before exceptionalism. The United States has much to learn from other countries, and all liberal democracies should see global networks akin to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program or to the U.S. State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative as more than modern megaphones. With some humility, we can source the best ideas, wherever they may come from; support an empowered and independent media; and connect human rights and democracy defenders from around the world.
Fighting disinformation is not just the responsibility of beleaguered reporters or frustrated public servants. Educators, religious leaders, social justice activists, senior citizen advocacy groups, environmentalists, labor leaders, public health practitioners, and business leaders, among many others, all have a stake in the fight. Reaching out to these constituencies, helping them to understand how disinformation affects their core interests, recruiting their leaders to speak out, and incentivizing them all to work together is how we win.
Taiwan has not completely solved the disinformation challenge. Conspiracy theories still take root, even today, and this contributes to an increasingly polarized electorate. But the island is far ahead of most other liberal democracies in fighting the disinformation war, an achievement that is made even more remarkable by the fact that Taiwan is also the No. 1 target for foreign disinformation in the world.
To win this asymmetric war against democracy will require a new and offensive strategy, with robust resources and multilateral coordination to match, that focuses on building whole-of-society efforts in every liberal democracy under attack. And we can begin by looking to Taiwan for answers.


foreignpolicy--2020-11-11--Slovenia’s Prime Minister Is a Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and Twitter Addict Who Won’t Admit Trum

Slovenia’s Prime Minister Is a Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and Twitter Addict Who Won’t Admit Trump Lost

Slovenia ’ s Prime Minister Is a Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and Twitter Addict Who Won ’ t Admit Trump Lost Janez Jansa , the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia , used Twitter to declare Donald J. Trump the winner of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4 , saying , “ It ’ s pretty clear that American people have elected @ realDonaldTrump @ Mike_Pence for # 4moreyears.
” Alas , this turned out to be , as Jansa ’ s hero likes to say , fake news—although Jansa has doubled down on it since .
But the tweet was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Jansa has moved from left to far-right over the years .
He was once one of the founders of an independent Slovenia who had made his name in the 1980s as a journalist , writing for the left-leaning magazine Mladina .
In 1988 , he was arrested by the Yugoslavian authorities for publishing a stream of military leaks .
After popular protests for his release , he joined the political movement that won the first democratic elections in Slovenia in 1990 .
In 1993 he became the president of the right-wing Slovenian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he still holds the title to this day .
He is also a three-time prime minister—but after a vote of no confidence in 2013 , he was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges .
The sentence was confirmed by the Higher Court in Ljubljana in April 2014 , but subsequently unanimously overturned by the Constitutional Court of Slovenia a year later .
Jansa is a avid Twitter user , using social media to insult journalists , political opponents , the general public , and anybody who does not agree with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ profile is pretty usual for the prime minister .
In July , he retweeted a video from the QAnon series The Fall of Cabal , which details an ugly conspiracy theory , and invited people to join him on the Parler social network , where he follows far-right figures such as Paul Joseph Watson , Katie Hopkins , Jack Posobiec , and Alex Jones ’ conspiracy network Infowars .
He also likes to attack journalists and public figures , insulting them and spreading falsehoods about them .
According to the SparkToro Fake Followers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Twitter followers are fake , but his tweets are regularly picked up by mainstream media outlets in Slovenia , extending their reach .
“ Jansa has a two-prong approach to media relations , ” said Andraz Zorko , a public opinion expert , “ where he uses Twitter to form outrageous statements that agitate the general public and his opponents , and at the same time appears perfectly rational in traditional media outlets.
” In the summer of 2015 , Jansa and his colleagues from the SDS funded and launched a media outlet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ First in the service of truth , ” but the reality is anything but .
The party-linked propaganda outlet spews regular falsehoods on the refugee crisis , Muslims , and the LGBTQ community , spinning and twisting the truth in order to fit the right-wing party agenda .
Left-wing parties have labeled it a “ hate factory.
” “ Like Trump , Jansa ended up with nothing but yes men around himself , effectively starting to drink his own Kool-Aid , dispensed by the very media apparatus he created in order to disrupt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Aljaz Bitenc Pengov , a political analyst .
“ I am not surprised that the prime minister running a fake-news government would publicly endorse the fake-news electoral victory of incumbent Donald Trump , ” said Anuska Delic , editor in chief at Ostro , a center for investigative journalism in the Adriatic region .
“ In a year and a half since the launch of Ostro ’ s media fact-checking project , the media controlled by the SDS and majority-owned by members of the inner circle of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , disinformation , and misinformation in Slovenia.
” “ Our findings indicate a symbiotic relationship between the party , its policies and goals , and the content that is being churned out by this media , ” Delic explained .
“ At publication , the content is usually disseminated on social media by the party ’ s members ( many of them current public officials ) , its sympathizers , and possibly trolls to exert pressure on opponents and skew the public debate .
The same methods are also used on ‘ unruly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of these media which usually concern their professional or personal activities , or those of their family members .
That content is further used to smear , harass , and attack reporters online.
” In 2016 , Hungarian investors joined the Nova24TV media venture with an investment of 800,000 euros that turned out to be connected to the Orban regime .
They invested again in 2018 , bringing a total sum of Hungarian investments into the SDS-related propaganda outlets to more than 3.5 million euros .
Nova24TV ’ s other income is sourced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such as Telekom Slovenije , insurance company Triglav , the Petrol Group , and others which , when publicly called out , could not explain the market reasoning behind them .
Critics say they fund the channel to suck up to the party in power .
According to Primoz Cirman , editor of media outlet necenzurirano.si , “ The Orban-Jansa alliance formed after the so-called migrant crisis in 2015 .
Bothsaw the opportunity to establish themselves as defenders of Christian Europe .
Jansa ’ s motives were logical .
In 2014 , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was in jail .
As a result , the party needed a new platform , and Jansa found one in anti-globalism .
There was only one problem : SDS needed channels for spreading its new ideas , so it started to establish its own media outlets .
Since 2017 , a huge influx of Hungarian capital has come into media companies , established by prominent SDS members or the party itself.
” Nova24TV ’ s website and TV station of the same name are just the central parts of Jansa ’ s propaganda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also connected to more than 20 local online media outlets that are used to anneal the messages of party propaganda , which are further distributed by a network of Twitter and Facebook accounts .
“ By analyzing his Twitter behavior , we can note that the prime minister is spending more and more time on Twitter , ” said Maja Cimerman of Today Is a New Day , a Slovenian nongovernmental organization .
“ During the U.S. elections , we calculate he spent at least three full hours a day on Twitter , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the morning .
His behavior often indicates a form of escapism from the actual issues in the country , connected with the second pandemic wave where government policies are sorely lacking effectiveness , ” she adds .
Jansa owes more than just his media network to the neighboring Hungarian autocrat .
He won the general election in the summer of 2018 but was unable to form a coalition , since other major parties denounced his hard-right stance .
A New York Times article from June 2018 drew connections between Orban and Jansa , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s footsteps .
Orban praised Jansa on Nova24TV during the election campaign in 2018 , saying , “ Jansa is exactly the kind of leader Slovenia needs.
” From 2018 until the spring of 2020 , Jansa ’ s party was busy developing a relationship with Orban and other leaders of countries in the Visegrad Group .
The COVID-19 pandemic offered a new window of opportunity .
In March , the country ’ s center-left coalition fell apart , and Jansa was able to form a center-right coalition with him at the helm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second fiddle to his regime .
He immediately went to work , proposing legislation to gut the public media outlet RTV Slovenija , shift more public money into funding his propaganda outlets , and repress NGOs .
At the same time , Orban and Jansa started forging long-term strategic cooperation , including efforts to tie the two countries ’ power grids together and potentially build a new joint oil pipeline .
Also in the talks were military contracts between the two countries , since the Slovenian government recently approved a military investment budget @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the next six years .
“ The alliance grew stronger and expanded to North Macedonia , where the same Hungarian proxies bought several media outlets that support right-wing party VMRO-DPMNE , ” Cirman explained .
“ SDS and [ Orban ’ s party ] Fidesz are virtually synchronized in European Parliament voting .
Jansa was one of the few European leaders that opposed the rule of law as a condition for any EU member to be eligible for EU coronavirus funds .
The alliance presents a new challenge for Slovenia , as Hungary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political interests in our country , especially in the field of infrastructure , energy , and banking.
” Beyond Orban , Jansa favors the global “ alt-right.
” Jansa is no stranger to retweeting other outlets such as the Daily Caller , Project Veritas , Breitbart , PragerU , and other far-right Twitter accounts .
Media outlets connected with Jansa and the SDS feature interviews with controversial guests from the global alt-right universe such as Kevin MacDonald , Daniel Friberg , Martin Sellner , and Renaud Camus , all of whom Jansa regularly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the global neo-Nazi movement is simply an extension of his right-wing politics , ” explained Boris Vezjak , a philosopher and professor at the University of Maribor .
“ These [ shared ] feelings are then reflected in the connections of the SDS party with the Generation Identity movement or in supporting local neo-Nazi groups to break up anti-government protests , ” he added .
“ As with Slovenian paramilitary units , Serbia has also seen the formation of anti-migration self-organized groups , ” said Katja Lihtenvalner , a researcher at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ In Bosnia we followed the formation of … vigilantes and groups who were increasingly taking matters in their own hands , under the pretext of protecting the safety of others and public order .
Generally , the impression is that authorities themselves are not able or willing to prevent the formation of such groups , the most radical of which are in Slovenia , where self-appointed ultranationalist groups were patrolling the border with fake guns and military uniforms.
” Jansa has many political enemies , but his politics are a grim reminder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Slovenia .
Barbara Rajgelj , an assistant professor of law at the University of Ljubljana , explained : “ For the past 30 years , we were convinced Slovenian society was autocracy-resistant , but we are now seeing that isn ’ t true .
Part of this irresponsible public media tolerance was that Jansa was never confronted about his statements made on Twitter , even though his attacks towards the public media are well documented.
” The future , however , looks bright for Jansa right now .
With a parliamentary majority in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the shots , while weaker coalition partners tremble in silence , the pandemic allows him to repress anti-government protests , a general culture of fear which makes people afraid to speak out because of fear of retribution , Slovenians are walking down the path of failed states .
Despite Jansa ’ s having promoted far-right figures and built a propaganda network funded by a foreign regime , many Slovenians are still attracted to his maverick way of constructing his own reality , which is slowly sucking the air out of Slovenia—one tweet at @ @ @

They call him Marshal Tweeto.
Janez Jansa, the right-wing prime minister of Slovenia, used Twitter to declare Donald J. Trump the winner of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4, saying, “It’s pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears.”
Alas, this turned out to be, as Jansa’s hero likes to say, fake news—although Jansa has doubled down on it since. But the tweet was nothing new for the Slovenian prime minister. Jansa has moved from left to far-right over the years. He was once one of the founders of an independent Slovenia who had made his name in the 1980s as a journalist, writing for the left-leaning magazine Mladina. In 1988, he was arrested by the Yugoslavian authorities for publishing a stream of military leaks. After popular protests for his release, he joined the political movement that won the first democratic elections in Slovenia in 1990.
In 1993 he became the president of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), and he still holds the title to this day. He is also a three-time prime minister—but after a vote of no confidence in 2013, he was sentenced to two years in prison on corruption charges. The sentence was confirmed by the Higher Court in Ljubljana in April 2014, but subsequently unanimously overturned by the Constitutional Court of Slovenia a year later.
Jansa is a avid Twitter user, using social media to insult journalists, political opponents, the general public, and anybody who does not agree with him. Peddling misinformation on his Twitter profile is pretty usual for the prime minister. In July, he retweeted a video from the QAnon series The Fall of Cabal, which details an ugly conspiracy theory, and invited people to join him on the Parler social network, where he follows far-right figures such as Paul Joseph Watson, Katie Hopkins, Jack Posobiec, and Alex Jones’ conspiracy network Infowars.
He also likes to attack journalists and public figures, insulting them and spreading falsehoods about them. According to the SparkToro Fake Followers Audit, nearly 75 percent of his Twitter followers are fake, but his tweets are regularly picked up by mainstream media outlets in Slovenia, extending their reach.
“Jansa has a two-prong approach to media relations,” said Andraz Zorko, a public opinion expert, “where he uses Twitter to form outrageous statements that agitate the general public and his opponents, and at the same time appears perfectly rational in traditional media outlets.”
In the summer of 2015, Jansa and his colleagues from the SDS funded and launched a media outlet called Nova24TV. Its slogan is “First in the service of truth,” but the reality is anything but. The party-linked propaganda outlet spews regular falsehoods on the refugee crisis, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community, spinning and twisting the truth in order to fit the right-wing party agenda. Left-wing parties have labeled it a “hate factory.”
“Like Trump, Jansa ended up with nothing but yes men around himself, effectively starting to drink his own Kool-Aid, dispensed by the very media apparatus he created in order to disrupt the liberal democratic consensus,” explained Aljaz Bitenc Pengov, a political analyst.
“I am not surprised that the prime minister running a fake-news government would publicly endorse the fake-news electoral victory of incumbent Donald Trump,” said Anuska Delic, editor in chief at Ostro, a center for investigative journalism in the Adriatic region. “In a year and a half since the launch of Ostro’s media fact-checking project, the media controlled by the SDS and majority-owned by members of the inner circle of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have been the main sources of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation in Slovenia.”
“Our findings indicate a symbiotic relationship between the party, its policies and goals, and the content that is being churned out by this media,” Delic explained. “At publication, the content is usually disseminated on social media by the party’s members (many of them current public officials), its sympathizers, and possibly trolls to exert pressure on opponents and skew the public debate. The same methods are also used on ‘unruly’ journalists who receive questions from one of these media which usually concern their professional or personal activities, or those of their family members. That content is further used to smear, harass, and attack reporters online.”
In 2016, Hungarian investors joined the Nova24TV media venture with an investment of 800,000 euros that turned out to be connected to the Orban regime. They invested again in 2018, bringing a total sum of Hungarian investments into the SDS-related propaganda outlets to more than 3.5 million euros.
Nova24TV’s other income is sourced from advertising contracts with partially state-owned companies such as Telekom Slovenije, insurance company Triglav, the Petrol Group, and others which, when publicly called out, could not explain the market reasoning behind them. Critics say they fund the channel to suck up to the party in power.
According to Primoz Cirman, editor of media outlet necenzurirano.si, “The Orban-Jansa alliance formed after the so-called migrant crisis in 2015. Bothsaw the opportunity to establish themselves as defenders of Christian Europe. Jansa’s motives were logical. In 2014, the SDS lost a parliamentary election while he was in jail. As a result, the party needed a new platform, and Jansa found one in anti-globalism. There was only one problem: SDS needed channels for spreading its new ideas, so it started to establish its own media outlets. Since 2017, a huge influx of Hungarian capital has come into media companies, established by prominent SDS members or the party itself.”
Nova24TV’s website and TV station of the same name are just the central parts of Jansa’s propaganda empire in Slovenia. His party is also connected to more than 20 local online media outlets that are used to anneal the messages of party propaganda, which are further distributed by a network of Twitter and Facebook accounts.
“By analyzing his Twitter behavior, we can note that the prime minister is spending more and more time on Twitter,” said Maja Cimerman of Today Is a New Day, a Slovenian nongovernmental organization. “During the U.S. elections, we calculate he spent at least three full hours a day on Twitter, with tweets appearing even at 4:30 in the morning. His behavior often indicates a form of escapism from the actual issues in the country, connected with the second pandemic wave where government policies are sorely lacking effectiveness,” she adds.
Jansa owes more than just his media network to the neighboring Hungarian autocrat. He won the general election in the summer of 2018 but was unable to form a coalition, since other major parties denounced his hard-right stance. A New York Times article from June 2018 drew connections between Orban and Jansa, claiming that Jansa was following Orban’s footsteps. Orban praised Jansa on Nova24TV during the election campaign in 2018, saying, “Jansa is exactly the kind of leader Slovenia needs.”
From 2018 until the spring of 2020, Jansa’s party was busy developing a relationship with Orban and other leaders of countries in the Visegrad Group. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a new window of opportunity.
In March, the country’s center-left coalition fell apart, and Jansa was able to form a center-right coalition with him at the helm and other right-wing and centrist parties playing second fiddle to his regime. He immediately went to work, proposing legislation to gut the public media outlet RTV Slovenija, shift more public money into funding his propaganda outlets, and repress NGOs.
At the same time, Orban and Jansa started forging long-term strategic cooperation, including efforts to tie the two countries’ power grids together and potentially build a new joint oil pipeline. Also in the talks were military contracts between the two countries, since the Slovenian government recently approved a military investment budget of a staggering 780 million euros over the next six years.
“The alliance grew stronger and expanded to North Macedonia, where the same Hungarian proxies bought several media outlets that support right-wing party VMRO-DPMNE,” Cirman explained. “SDS and [Orban’s party] Fidesz are virtually synchronized in European Parliament voting. Jansa was one of the few European leaders that opposed the rule of law as a condition for any EU member to be eligible for EU coronavirus funds. The alliance presents a new challenge for Slovenia, as Hungary has strong economic, cultural, and political interests in our country, especially in the field of infrastructure, energy, and banking.”
Beyond Orban, Jansa favors the global “alt-right.” Jansa is no stranger to retweeting other outlets such as the Daily Caller, Project Veritas, Breitbart, PragerU, and other far-right Twitter accounts. Media outlets connected with Jansa and the SDS feature interviews with controversial guests from the global alt-right universe such as Kevin MacDonald, Daniel Friberg, Martin Sellner, and Renaud Camus, all of whom Jansa regularly retweets.
“Jansa’s affection for the global neo-Nazi movement is simply an extension of his right-wing politics,”explained Boris Vezjak, a philosopher and professor at the University of Maribor. “These [shared] feelings are then reflected in the connections of the SDS party with the Generation Identity movement or in supporting local neo-Nazi groups to break up anti-government protests,” he added.
“As with Slovenian paramilitary units, Serbia has also seen the formation of anti-migration self-organized groups,” said Katja Lihtenvalner, a researcher at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. “In Bosnia we followed the formation of … vigilantes and groups who were increasingly taking matters in their own hands, under the pretext of protecting the safety of others and public order. Generally, the impression is that authorities themselves are not able or willing to prevent the formation of such groups, the most radical of which are in Slovenia, where self-appointed ultranationalist groups were patrolling the border with fake guns and military uniforms.”
Jansa has many political enemies, but his politics are a grim reminder of the turn things have taken in Slovenia.
Barbara Rajgelj, an assistant professor of law at the University of Ljubljana, explained: “For the past 30 years, we were convinced Slovenian society was autocracy-resistant, but we are now seeing that isn’t true. Part of this irresponsible public media tolerance was that Jansa was never confronted about his statements made on Twitter, even though his attacks towards the public media are well documented.”
The future, however, looks bright for Jansa right now.
With a parliamentary majority in which Jansa’s party is calling the shots, while weaker coalition partners tremble in silence , the pandemic allows him to repress anti-government protests, a general culture of fear which makes people afraid to speak out because of fear of retribution, Slovenians are walking down the path of failed states. Despite Jansa’s having promoted far-right figures and built a propaganda network funded by a foreign regime, many Slovenians are still attracted to his maverick way of constructing his own reality, which is slowly sucking the air out of Slovenia—one tweet at a time.


foreignpolicy--2020-11-11--The United States Can’t Sleepwalk Into the Coming Military Revolutions

The United States Can ’ t Sleepwalk Into the Coming Military Revolutions Virginia Woolf famously observed that sometime in the first decade of the 20th century—she arbitrarily chose December 1910—human life was fundamentally transformed .
That date is near the culmination of what Barbara Tuchman called a “ century of the most accelerated rate of change in man ’ s record.
” Tuchman was describing the somatic effects of the Industrial Revolution , Woolf the psychological changes in society that those effects drove .
What Woolf sensed and Tuchman saw , however , was something the political leaders of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , foreign ministers , and chiefs of army staffs failed to appreciate the revolutionary technological advances of the late 19th century and the dramatic acceleration of life that followed .
The mismatch between their outdated mental models and the new reality led them to practically sleepwalk into the lethality of World War I , unheeding of the warnings of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars that preceded it .
Today , militaries around the world are experimenting with new technologies and debating which capabilities to invest in and which to divest of—just as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Now , as then , political leaders struggle to make sense of rapidly changing social , technological , and geopolitical milieus .
And just like their predecessors , our own leaders risk tragedy by underestimating—or worse , misunderstanding—the profound implications of all that change .
The years prior to the outbreak of World War I were flush with military innovation , just like today .
After suffering a complete and embarrassing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 , France ’ s leaders faced the particularly daunting challenge of reforming a military that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ready for 20th-century combat .
French military theorists acutely feared that the emerging tactics favoring cover and entrenchment would lead them backward to “ the passivity of which the French were allegedly guilty in 1870 , and destroy the moral willingness to advance and fight , ” the military historian Azar Gat writes .
France ’ s army thus fell victim to a dangerous pathology that made attack the highest virtue .
“ Only the strategic offensive … gives important and decisive results , ” French War Minister Jean Auguste Berthaut declared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all efforts to seize it.
” This doctrine was then known as the French School but is today more often derisively referred to as the “ cult of the offensive.
” An entire generation of French army officers was instilled with the idea that French élan—the flash of the bayonet and the weight of the cavalry charge—could win the day no matter the odds .
“ Returning unto its traditions , ” one wrote , the army “ no longer knows any law other than the offensive.
” But France ’ s leaders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faith in the cult of the offensive to them obviated the need for real military reform ; their renewed emphasis on enthusiasm took the place of real technological or organizational innovation .
They ignored the horrific revelations from Petersburg and Mukden , preferring instead the nostalgic reassurance of decidedly outdated Napoleonic concepts like strategic maneuver and the “ battle of annihilation.
” World War I was unprecedented in its scale and scope .
France ’ s almost religious faith in the cult of the offensive was largely responsible for the million-plus casualties it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Battle of the Frontiers in the war ’ s opening months in 1914 .
Never had new and newly combined technologies allowed armies to kill so many so swiftly in so many places at once .
What France ’ s military commanders and policymakers failed to comprehend was the changed character of 20th-century warfare , a failure that resulted in the greatest wholesale slaughter in human history , a conflict that went on to claim the lives of more than 40 million people .
A little over a century later , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another military-technical revolution—a period of sharp , discontinuous change in the conduct of war .
But where World War I was characterized by revolutionary hardware—wireless communications , railway networks , machine guns , and long-range artillery , for example—the most dramatic capabilities today are being wrought by the development of revolutionary software—of both the digital and human varieties .
This new era of digitized warfare compresses time and distance , blurring once separate warfighting domains and rendering national borders practically irrelevant .
An amorphous digital blanket has been stretched across the planet , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ individuals , political parties , and nation-states .
This connectivity opens nations to manipulation and attack by making their internal frictions painfully transparent and malleable to almost anyone , almost anywhere .
And while the battles that take place within this ethereal domain may be virtual , their consequences—from radicalization to the hijacking of infrastructure—can be very real .
U.S. policymakers have so far failed to appreciate the disruptive changes undermining the so-called “ American way of war , ” just like their World War I-era French predecessors failed to appreciate the carnage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They ’ ve ignored the lessons of the recent past and have instead doubled down on the force structures and weapons platforms of yesterday by giving the Defense Department billions of dollars to buy slightly better versions of things it already has .
The 2018 National Defense Strategy acknowledged this but stopped short of calling for the sort of wholesale reforms required .
It nonetheless marked a turning point , directing the Pentagon to essentially abandon its 20-year fixation with terrorism and to shift its focus to “ long-term strategic competition ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China and a recalcitrant Russia .
It ordered the department ’ s leaders to “ shed outdated management practices ” and “ adapt their organizational structures.
” But while changing engrained practices and adapting organizational structures are incredibly difficult , buying stuff is easy—indeed , it ’ s what the Pentagon does best .
That ’ s one reason , perhaps , why the National Defense Strategy ’ s urgent call for transformative change was instead quickly watered down and reduced to a meaningless buzzword—lethality .
Lethality was so loosely defined that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was quickly adopted by a chorus of departmental apparatchiks and defense industry executives to highlight their product or policy ’ s purported contribution to that end , since having been used to justify such things as the acquisition of new car doors for military working dogs and the authorization of command-approved naps for soldiers .
The problem with this renewed emphasis on lethality is that the United States already has an impressive panoply of coercive power , one capable of dishing out more lethality than any of several other nations on the planet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yet despite this lethal overmatch , it hasn ’ t been able to achieve U.S. policy preferences—the very purpose of war—for a generation or more .
That ’ s something that is unlikely to change no matter how much more lethal it becomes .
America ’ s adversaries , recognizing this , are moving beyond mere lethality .
They ’ re still building tanks , planes , and ships , of course—but they ’ re also working to seize first-mover advantages by recognizing the asymmetric potential of a globally integrated datasphere and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intelligence .
Russia ’ s “ new-generation war ” is characterized by an emphasis on information weapons , for instance .
Its goal is to achieve Russian political preferences by changing foreign citizens ’ moral values and undermining state authority—not through the application of lethal force .
But Russia has also invested billions of dollars in autonomous systems that it has extensively tested in Syria .
China ’ s “ Three Warfares ” doctrine synchronizes the employment of strategic psychological operations , the manipulation of global media narratives , and the weaponization of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and erode international norms—to which the People ’ s Liberation Army ’ s growing capacity to deliver lethal force is but an adjunct .
China ’ s concept of systems confrontation warfare “ is no longer centered on the annihilation of enemy forces on the battlefield ” but on the disruption or paralysis of an enemy ’ s “ operating system , ” a schema that can be equally applied to naval flotillas or national infrastructure .
These concepts , of course , aren ’ t entirely new .
Nor are they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of catastrophic doom on the United States that some commentors imagine .
What they are , however , are signs that the country ’ s principal adversaries have recognized the changing character of geopolitical competition in an environment that bears little resemblance to the one that spawned the mass industrial-style wars of the 20th century .
If the United States is to survive and thrive in the 21st century , its leaders must recognize that the currency of great-power competition under contemporary conditions isn ’ t measured in the numbers of ballistic missiles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by its administrative capacity , structural resilience , and global legitimacy .
The real competition between the United States and its allies on the one hand , and Russia and China on the other , is between competing systems of governance and ways of ordering society .
The United States needs a modern military that ’ s better suited to defend its governance systems against the threats its competitors pose .
It needs a military that ’ s both adaptive and resilient , one flexible enough to quickly concentrate resources when crises emerge—and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when those crises subside .
It needs a military capable of continuous operations in the increasingly crowded and contested global digital commons , one that ’ s able to effectively respond to the strategic and operational challenges of this century—not the last one .
Before the digital warfare revolution subsides , the old ways of warfighting will have been left behind .
If the United States continues to spend profligately on military platforms whose looming obsolescence is clear to anyone paying attention , it risks competing itself to death by preparing for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its adversaries win the societal-level conflict that ’ s already here .

Virginia Woolf famously observed that sometime in the first decade of the 20th century—she arbitrarily chose December 1910—human life was fundamentally transformed. That date is near the culmination of what Barbara Tuchman called a “century of the most accelerated rate of change in man’s record.” Tuchman was describing the somatic effects of the Industrial Revolution, Woolf the psychological changes in society that those effects drove.
Virginia Woolf famously observed that sometime in the first decade of the 20th century—she arbitrarily chose December 1910—human life was fundamentally transformed. That date is near the culmination of what Barbara Tuchman called a “century of the most accelerated rate of change in man’s record.” Tuchman was describing the somatic effects of the Industrial Revolution, Woolf the psychological changes in society that those effects drove.
What Woolf sensed and Tuchman saw, however, was something the political leaders of the time largely missed. Heads of state, foreign ministers, and chiefs of army staffs failed to appreciate the revolutionary technological advances of the late 19th century and the dramatic acceleration of life that followed. The mismatch between their outdated mental models and the new reality led them to practically sleepwalk into the lethality of World War I, unheeding of the warnings of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars that preceded it.
Today, militaries around the world are experimenting with new technologies and debating which capabilities to invest in and which to divest of—just as the European empires did a century ago. Now, as then, political leaders struggle to make sense of rapidly changing social, technological, and geopolitical milieus. And just like their predecessors, our own leaders risk tragedy by underestimating—or worse, misunderstanding—the profound implications of all that change.
The years prior to the outbreak of World War I were flush with military innovation, just like today. After suffering a complete and embarrassing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, France’s leaders faced the particularly daunting challenge of reforming a military that had been thoroughly humiliated and somehow making it ready for 20th-century combat. French military theorists acutely feared that the emerging tactics favoring cover and entrenchment would lead them backward to “the passivity of which the French were allegedly guilty in 1870, and destroy the moral willingness to advance and fight,” the military historian Azar Gat writes.
France’s army thus fell victim to a dangerous pathology that made attack the highest virtue. “Only the strategic offensive … gives important and decisive results,” French War Minister Jean Auguste Berthaut declared. “One therefore has to make all efforts to seize it.” This doctrine was then known as the French School but is today more often derisively referred to as the “cult of the offensive.” An entire generation of French army officers was instilled with the idea that French élan—the flash of the bayonet and the weight of the cavalry charge—could win the day no matter the odds. “Returning unto its traditions,” one wrote, the army “no longer knows any law other than the offensive.”
But France’s leaders had applied the wrong lessons. Their faith in the cult of the offensive to them obviated the need for real military reform; their renewed emphasis on enthusiasm took the place of real technological or organizational innovation. They ignored the horrific revelations from Petersburg and Mukden, preferring instead the nostalgic reassurance of decidedly outdated Napoleonic concepts like strategic maneuver and the “battle of annihilation.”
World War I was unprecedented in its scale and scope. France’s almost religious faith in the cult of the offensive was largely responsible for the million-plus casualties it suffered during the execution of Plan XVII and the Battle of the Frontiers in the war’s opening months in 1914. Never had new and newly combined technologies allowed armies to kill so many so swiftly in so many places at once. What France’s military commanders and policymakers failed to comprehend was the changed character of 20th-century warfare, a failure that resulted in the greatest wholesale slaughter in human history, a conflict that went on to claim the lives of more than 40 million people.
A little over a century later, we find ourselves at the outset of another military-technical revolution—a period of sharp, discontinuous change in the conduct of war. But where World War I was characterized by revolutionary hardware—wireless communications, railway networks, machine guns, and long-range artillery, for example—the most dramatic capabilities today are being wrought by the development of revolutionary software—of both the digital and human varieties.
This new era of digitized warfare compresses time and distance, blurring once separate warfighting domains and rendering national borders practically irrelevant. An amorphous digital blanket has been stretched across the planet, running over, under, and through individuals, political parties, and nation-states. This connectivity opens nations to manipulation and attack by making their internal frictions painfully transparent and malleable to almost anyone, almost anywhere. And while the battles that take place within this ethereal domain may be virtual, their consequences—from radicalization to the hijacking of infrastructure—can be very real.
U.S. policymakers have so far failed to appreciate the disruptive changes undermining the so-called “American way of war,” just like their World War I-era French predecessors failed to appreciate the carnage of the Maxim gun and high-explosive shell. They’ve ignored the lessons of the recent past and have instead doubled down on the force structures and weapons platforms of yesterday by giving the Defense Department billions of dollars to buy slightly better versions of things it already has.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy acknowledged this but stopped short of calling for the sort of wholesale reforms required. It nonetheless marked a turning point, directing the Pentagon to essentially abandon its 20-year fixation with terrorism and to shift its focus to “long-term strategic competition” with rival great powers—namely, a risen China and a recalcitrant Russia. It ordered the department’s leaders to “shed outdated management practices” and “adapt their organizational structures.”
But while changing engrained practices and adapting organizational structures are incredibly difficult, buying stuff is easy—indeed, it’s what the Pentagon does best. That’s one reason, perhaps, why the National Defense Strategy’s urgent call for transformative change was instead quickly watered down and reduced to a meaningless buzzword—lethality.
Lethality was so loosely defined that it could mean anything to anyone. It was quickly adopted by a chorus of departmental apparatchiks and defense industry executives to highlight their product or policy’s purported contribution to that end, since having been used to justify such things as the acquisition of new car doors for military working dogs and the authorization of command-approved naps for soldiers.
The problem with this renewed emphasis on lethality is that the United States already has an impressive panoply of coercive power, one capable of dishing out more lethality than any of several other nations on the planet combined, including Russia and China. Yet despite this lethal overmatch, it hasn’t been able to achieve U.S. policy preferences—the very purpose of war—for a generation or more. That’s something that is unlikely to change no matter how much more lethal it becomes.
America’s adversaries, recognizing this, are moving beyond mere lethality. They’re still building tanks, planes, and ships, of course—but they’re also working to seize first-mover advantages by recognizing the asymmetric potential of a globally integrated datasphere and the revolutionary applications of autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence.
Russia’s “new-generation war” is characterized by an emphasis on information weapons, for instance. Its goal is to achieve Russian political preferences by changing foreign citizens’ moral values and undermining state authority—not through the application of lethal force. But Russia has also invested billions of dollars in autonomous systems that it has extensively tested in Syria.
China’s “Three Warfares” doctrine synchronizes the employment of strategic psychological operations, the manipulation of global media narratives, and the weaponization of legalism to establish precedent, foster doubt, and erode international norms—to which the People’s Liberation Army’s growing capacity to deliver lethal force is but an adjunct. China’s concept of systems confrontation warfare “is no longer centered on the annihilation of enemy forces on the battlefield” but on the disruption or paralysis of an enemy’s “operating system,” a schema that can be equally applied to naval flotillas or national infrastructure.
These concepts, of course, aren’t entirely new. Nor are they magic bullets capable of inflicting the sort of catastrophic doom on the United States that some commentors imagine. What they are, however, are signs that the country’s principal adversaries have recognized the changing character of geopolitical competition in an environment that bears little resemblance to the one that spawned the mass industrial-style wars of the 20th century.
If the United States is to survive and thrive in the 21st century, its leaders must recognize that the currency of great-power competition under contemporary conditions isn’t measured in the numbers of ballistic missiles or aircraft carriers a state possesses but by its administrative capacity, structural resilience, and global legitimacy. The real competition between the United States and its allies on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other, is between competing systems of governance and ways of ordering society.
The United States needs a modern military that’s better suited to defend its governance systems against the threats its competitors pose. It needs a military that’s both adaptive and resilient, one flexible enough to quickly concentrate resources when crises emerge—and just as quickly able to reallocate them when those crises subside. It needs a military capable of continuous operations in the increasingly crowded and contested global digital commons, one that’s able to effectively respond to the strategic and operational challenges of this century—not the last one.
Before the digital warfare revolution subsides, the old ways of warfighting will have been left behind. If the United States continues to spend profligately on military platforms whose looming obsolescence is clear to anyone paying attention, it risks competing itself to death by preparing for a conventional war that never comes, while its adversaries win the societal-level conflict that’s already here.


foreignpolicy--2020-11-11--Here Are the Experts Leading Biden’s Transition at Federal Agencies

Here Are the Experts Leading Biden ’ s Transition at Federal Agencies On Tuesday , U.S. President-elect Joe Biden released the names of hundreds of experts and former officials who will lay the groundwork for the eventual transfer of power at various federal agencies despite President Donald Trump ’ s ongoing refusal to accept Biden ’ s election win .
The agency review teams consist of groups of experts assigned to different agencies—including the State and Defense departments , foreign aid agencies , and the intelligence community—to do the spadework for the transition .
The review teams offer an early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Biden administration ’ s foreign policy , though members of such teams are not necessarily guaranteed posts in the agencies they are assigned to review .
Most are serving in the roles on a volunteer basis and come from a variety of think tanks , consulting firms , universities , and private industry .
Biden vowed on Tuesday that his teams will get “ right to work , ” but compared with past incoming administrations , his teams face significant challenges in getting started—a delay that , as seen in the George @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impacts on national security readiness .
The Trump administration has not formally kicked off the transition process .
The General Services Administration , led by Emily Murphy , a Trump appointee , has so far refused to send a so-called letter of ascertainment certifying Biden ’ s win to begin the transition .
The letter is the key to unlocking government funds for the transition teams and to allowing his “ landing teams ” to get seated inside the federal government to get briefed on the latest intelligence and map out more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assistants all the way up to Senate-confirmed jobs .
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has said he doesn ’ t expect the standoff to end before Friday .
Despite Trump ’ s roadblocks , the Biden transition team appears to be moving forward with routine plans for a transition , downplaying frustrations with Trump ’ s refusal to accept the election results and not giving any indications that the delays have altered the transition plan .
The experts staffing the agency review teams also give early signs that the Biden campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diversify the administration ’ s national security team , both on racial and gender diversity .
For example , of the 23 members of the Pentagon agency review team , 15 are women .
And of the 30 members of the State Department ’ s agency review team , 18 are women .
The team that will oversee the State Department indicates , unsurprisingly , a sharp departure from Trump .
The State Department agency review team comprises some former senior diplomats who were forced out of their jobs under Trump or resigned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policies and who have since become outspoken in their criticisms of how the Trump administration has sidelined career diplomats and spurned traditional U.S. alliances and engagement with international institutions .
The team lead for the State Department is Linda Thomas-Greenfield , a former career diplomat who served in the State Department for decades and held senior posts including director-general of the foreign service and assistant secretary of state for African affairs .
At the time she stepped down from her job in 2017 under Rex Tillerson , Trump ’ s first secretary of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American woman in the State Department .
Current and former diplomats describe Thomas-Greenfield as a highly respected and balanced diplomat .
Since leaving the department , Thomas-Greenfield has been an outspoken advocate for reforming the State Department and helping to improve its record on diversity , another indication that such issues will be a priority under the Biden administration .
Another member of the State Department team , Roberta Jacobson , resigned from her post as U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 2018 .
Jacobson , who served in the State Department for over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ department ’ s top experts and most experienced hands on Latin America .
She later publicly condemned internal mismanagement at the State Department and Trump ’ s policies toward Mexico , saying the U.S.-Mexico relationship was being “ destroyed ” under Trump .
Biden ’ s transition team for the National Security Council includes former senior members of the Obama administration NSC who helped craft the Iran nuclear deal and have been outspoken critics of Trump ’ s handling of Iran policy since he abandoned the deal in 2018 .
This includes Jeff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to then-Vice President Biden and senior director for Iran , Iraq , and Syria at the NSC ; Colin Kahl , former national security advisor to Vice President Biden ; and Kelly Magsamen , another seasoned Middle East expert who held posts in the Pentagon and NSC during the Obama administration .
Magsamen is the vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress , an influential progressive think tank in Democratic foreign-policy circles .
With Michèle Flournoy widely expected to become the first woman to be defense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pentagon transition team is headlined by several high-profile female voices on national security—many focused on boosting the agency ’ s high-tech weapons to prepare for a possible conflict with China .
Spearheading the effort is Kath Hicks , who led the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review ( QDR ) at the Defense Department while she served in Flournoy ’ s powerful policy shop , which sought to prepare the United States for confronting irregular warfare used by terrorist groups .
She also led the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance , which pushed for the agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deal with Chinese weapons meant to deny U.S. access to the region as the agency bristled against budget caps imposed by Congress .
She ’ s joined by Christine Wormuth , who was confirmed as the Pentagon ’ s top policy official in 2014 and who led the follow-on 2014 QDR ; Susanna Blume , a former deputy chief of staff to Obama-era Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work ; and retired Adm. Michelle Howard , the first Black woman to attain the Navy ’ s top rank .
Former Biden Deputy National Security @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Comptroller Mike McCord are also on board .
The 17-agency U.S. intelligence community has long been a target of Trump ’ s ire as president , and Biden ’ s efforts to restore the relationship with the new administration will be led by Stephanie O ’ Sullivan , a former principal deputy director of national intelligence under Barack Obama , and Vince Stewart , a retired three-star Marine general who was the first Black man to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top deputy at U.S. Cyber Command .

On Tuesday, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden released the names of hundreds of experts and former officials who will lay the groundwork for the eventual transfer of power at various federal agencies despite President Donald Trump’s ongoing refusal to accept Biden’s election win.
On Tuesday, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden released the names of hundreds of experts and former officials who will lay the groundwork for the eventual transfer of power at various federal agencies despite President Donald Trump’s ongoing refusal to accept Biden’s election win.
The agency review teams consist of groups of experts assigned to different agencies—including the State and Defense departments, foreign aid agencies, and the intelligence community—to do the spadework for the transition.
The review teams offer an early window into the personnel and priorities for the Biden administration’s foreign policy, though members of such teams are not necessarily guaranteed posts in the agencies they are assigned to review. Most are serving in the roles on a volunteer basis and come from a variety of think tanks, consulting firms, universities, and private industry.
Biden vowed on Tuesday that his teams will get “right to work,” but compared with past incoming administrations, his teams face significant challenges in getting started—a delay that, as seen in the George W. Bush administration, can have lingering impacts on national security readiness.
The Trump administration has not formally kicked off the transition process. The General Services Administration, led by Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, has so far refused to send a so-called letter of ascertainment certifying Biden’s win to begin the transition. The letter is the key to unlocking government funds for the transition teams and to allowing his “landing teams” to get seated inside the federal government to get briefed on the latest intelligence and map out more than 4,000 political appointments, from low-level special assistants all the way up to Senate-confirmed jobs. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has said he doesn’t expect the standoff to end before Friday.
Despite Trump’s roadblocks, the Biden transition team appears to be moving forward with routine plans for a transition, downplaying frustrations with Trump’s refusal to accept the election results and not giving any indications that the delays have altered the transition plan.
The experts staffing the agency review teams also give early signs that the Biden campaign will make good on its promises to diversify the administration’s national security team, both on racial and gender diversity. For example, of the 23 members of the Pentagon agency review team, 15 are women. And of the 30 members of the State Department’s agency review team, 18 are women.
The team that will oversee the State Department indicates, unsurprisingly, a sharp departure from Trump. The State Department agency review team comprises some former senior diplomats who were forced out of their jobs under Trump or resigned in protest to some of his controversial policies and who have since become outspoken in their criticisms of how the Trump administration has sidelined career diplomats and spurned traditional U.S. alliances and engagement with international institutions.
The team lead for the State Department is Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former career diplomat who served in the State Department for decades and held senior posts including director-general of the foreign service and assistant secretary of state for African affairs. At the time she stepped down from her job in 2017 under Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, she was the highest-ranking African American woman in the State Department. Current and former diplomats describe Thomas-Greenfield as a highly respected and balanced diplomat. Since leaving the department, Thomas-Greenfield has been an outspoken advocate for reforming the State Department and helping to improve its record on diversity, another indication that such issues will be a priority under the Biden administration.
Another member of the State Department team, Roberta Jacobson, resigned from her post as U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 2018. Jacobson, who served in the State Department for over 30 years, was one of the department’s top experts and most experienced hands on Latin America. She later publicly condemned internal mismanagement at the State Department and Trump’s policies toward Mexico, saying the U.S.-Mexico relationship was being “destroyed” under Trump.
Biden’s transition team for the National Security Council includes former senior members of the Obama administration NSC who helped craft the Iran nuclear deal and have been outspoken critics of Trump’s handling of Iran policy since he abandoned the deal in 2018. This includes Jeff Prescott, former deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Biden and senior director for Iran, Iraq, and Syria at the NSC; Colin Kahl, former national security advisor to Vice President Biden; and Kelly Magsamen, another seasoned Middle East expert who held posts in the Pentagon and NSC during the Obama administration. Magsamen is the vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, an influential progressive think tank in Democratic foreign-policy circles.
With Michèle Flournoy widely expected to become the first woman to be defense secretary under the Biden administration, the Pentagon transition team is headlined by several high-profile female voices on national security—many focused on boosting the agency’s high-tech weapons to prepare for a possible conflict with China. Spearheading the effort is Kath Hicks, who led the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) at the Defense Department while she served in Flournoy’s powerful policy shop, which sought to prepare the United States for confronting irregular warfare used by terrorist groups. She also led the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, which pushed for the agency to focus on the Asia-Pacific and to deal with Chinese weapons meant to deny U.S. access to the region as the agency bristled against budget caps imposed by Congress. She’s joined by Christine Wormuth, who was confirmed as the Pentagon’s top policy official in 2014 and who led the follow-on 2014 QDR; Susanna Blume, a former deputy chief of staff to Obama-era Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work; and retired Adm. Michelle Howard, the first Black woman to attain the Navy’s top rank. Former Biden Deputy National Security Advisor Ely Ratner and former Defense Department Comptroller Mike McCord are also on board.
The 17-agency U.S. intelligence community has long been a target of Trump’s ire as president, and Biden’s efforts to restore the relationship with the new administration will be led by Stephanie O’Sullivan, a former principal deputy director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, and Vince Stewart, a retired three-star Marine general who was the first Black man to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top deputy at U.S. Cyber Command.


foreignpolicy--2020-11-11--Jihadist Networks Dig In on Social Media Across Central Asia

Jihadist Networks Dig In on Social Media Across Central Asia Central Asia was long a digital backwater .
Over the past decade , however , the region ’ s five republics—Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan , Turkmenistan , and Uzbekistan—underwent a rapid digital transformation .
High-speed fiber connections , mobile phones , and social media are widespread , while online services and tech hubs are proliferating .
Yet the internet , as always , is a double-edged sword : As more Central Asians get online , they are being exposed to sophisticated extremist content in their native languages—and facing serious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have established a foothold in the region .
Terrorist cells with links to Central Asia were purportedly behind attacks in New York and St. Petersburg in 2017 , Stockholm in 2018 , and Istanbul in 2019 .
Central Asian governments have struggled to contain organized terrorist activities , especially after several thousand battle-tested foreign fighters returned from campaigns in war-torn Afghanistan , Iraq , and Syria .
Part of the reason they are so hard to control is because many Central Asian extremists have migrated online .
Central Asia ’ s new generation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soil .
They can target huge youthful populations facing a dismal future with dim educational opportunities , limited job prospects , and little social mobility .
The region ’ s mean age is just 27 years compared with 38 in the United States and 44 in Western Europe .
Authoritarian police states leave few outlets for meaningful political expression .
To make their grievances heard , frustrated young men are turning to increasingly radical movements , which they can ever more easily find via social media or other online platforms .
Central Asia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are working on fertile soil .
While often home-grown , many of Central Asia ’ s violent extremists are connected to al-Qaeda , Islamic State , and Taliban networks .
Their alliances are often fluid and motives wide-ranging .
And they are not only trolling the internet for new recruits in Central Asian nations , but also casting out to a growing diaspora as unemployed young men seek their fortune elsewhere in the region , including neighboring Russia .
In Syria , for example , most Central Asian fighters operate under the umbrella @ @ @ @ @ @ @ militia fighting the Assad regime .
They include two essentially Uzbek groups , Tavhid va Jihod Katibasi and Katibat Imam al-Bukhari .
These Uzbek groups also operate in Afghanistan , where they collaborate with the Taliban .
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is also active in Russia ’ s northern Caucasus region and includes jihadist groups such as Imarat Kavkaz and Liwa al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar .
Their primary aim is to liberate Chechnya , Dagestan , and Ingushetia from Russian rule and they are busily recruiting from a large pool of Central Asian labor migrants in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of terrorist groups affiliated with the Islamic State that remain active in Central Asia itself , which typically use Uzbek , Tajik , and Russian .
For example , Islamic State Khorasan , a group which takes its name from the historical region encompassing modern-day Iran , Afghanistan , and Central Asia , says it represents the terrorist network in those countries .
According to SecDev Group ’ s online research , the organization claims it has operatives in Afghanistan , Pakistan , and Tajikistan .
What unites these and other ideologically disparate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media to reach out to followers and sympathizers .
SecDev has identified almost 500 separate channels used by Central Asian extremist organizations on Telegram , as well as Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , Youtube , and the popular Russian platforms VKontakte and Odnoklassniki—many using Russian , which is still the region ’ s lingua franca , but also Uzbek , Tajik , and Kyrgyz .
There are more than 174,000 subscriptions to these channels and the total audience is estimated to be in the millions .
Tensions between Russia and Turkey are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a call to arms in support of Muslim-majority Turkey .
Some extremist groups are more digitally active than others .
For example , Islamic State groups including Islamic State Khorasan have the largest social media footprint in the region , with over 174 channels and more than 66,000 subscriptions to their various platforms as of July 2020 .
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is not far behind , with 119 channels and almost 50,000 subscriptions .
Other groups registered between 1,000 and 16,000 subscriptions .
But it ’ s hard to know exactly how many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good chance they are being undercounted , since they increasingly use Telegram ’ s encrypted messaging platform to communicate .
Many posts from these disparate groups actively promote the use of violence to achieve political ends , including explicit threats and incitement to fight the “ infidels , ” wherever they might be .
Graphic depictions of violence from Syria , Iraq , Libya , and other conflict zones , while less common than in the past , are still circulating .
The channels also tend to link their own local causes to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh escalated this summer , for instance , SecDev detected increased chatter by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-affiliated groups in Syria that supported Azerbaijan and Turkey .
Tensions between Russia and Turkey are another prominent theme , often coupled with a call to arms in support of Muslim-majority Turkey .
Much of this content is squarely targeted at Central Asian users .
Governments , internet providers , and social media companies are struggling to contain this torrent of violent content .
The conundrum is familiar : As soon as a social media @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ones pop up again—ad infinitum .
And the more these efforts at content control are ramped up , the more violent extremist groups discover creative ways to bypass and circumvent them .
Years of playing cat-and-mouse with the foreign and domestic governments have turned Central Asia ’ s extremist groups into experienced and agile online operators .
Most extremist groups are careful to retain rigid anonymity across their networks .
They regularly use fake channels to throw off the scent of Russian and other intelligence services .
In order to avoid becoming targets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political content with more radical posts .
Indeed , violent extremist content is often embedded in inoffensive videos , audio , and text .
In short , it is often exceedingly hard to pin down .
By now , these groups also know to rapidly distribute back-up hyperlinks and third-party channels when their websites are removed .
Channel administrators often deploy bots and their own personal contacts to flood their subscriber accounts with hyperlinks before their channels are shut down .
Violent online extremists are also deftly removing content to keep the authorities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
For instance , SecDev detected a sharp drop in Telegram channels diffusing extremist content earlier this year .
In recent months , there has been a modest , but perceptible , decline in the number of extremist channels across most platforms , which has led to dramatic reductions in subscriptions overall .
This doesn ’ t necessarily mean the groups are shrinking—in fact , there are signs of groups resorting to back-up channels and encrypted communications to close the gap .
In order to avoid becoming targets , extremist channels mingle run-of-the-mill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ posts .
Given these challenges , tackling digital radicalization can not be achieved through online operations alone .
On-the-ground investments by governments and civil society groups are key .
One example of this is the comprehensive development strategy that the United States launched in 2019 to tackle the underlying risks of radicalization and extremism in the region .
The strategy aims to stimulate economic growth through job creation , expand school opportunities for young people , strengthen the government ’ s ability to deliver basic services , improve the rule of law and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assistance to neighboring countries such as Afghanistan that are magnets for foreign fighters .
But the truth is that it ’ s just a drop in the bucket given the sheer scale of the challenges on the ground .
What ’ s more , even the more successful programs are under threat of being derailed by Moscow , Beijing , Tehran , or Ankara .
Central Asia is at the center of a new kind of hybrid conflict in which the physical and digital worlds are blurred .
In this kind of conflict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ content is just as important as counterterrorism , law enforcement , and development measures targeted at extremists and the societal conditions that lead to radicalization .
Indeed , the process of radicalization intentionally combines virtual and physical interactions , using new tools to identify , groom , train , and deploy recruits .
In this , governments , social media companies , and civil societies are facing a terrible challenge .
Working together to fight the problem will be tricky , but the alternative is worse .

Kumar Bekbolotov, Robert Muggah and Rafal Rohozinski

Central Asia was long a digital backwater. Over the past decade, however, the region’s five republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—underwent a rapid digital transformation . High-speed fiber connections, mobile phones, and social media are widespread, while online services and tech hubs are proliferating. Yet the internet, as always, is a double-edged sword: As more Central Asians get online, they are being exposed to sophisticated extremist content in their native languages—and facing serious risks of radicalization.
Central Asia was long a digital backwater. Over the past decade, however, the region’s five republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—underwent a rapid digital transformation. High-speed fiber connections, mobile phones, and social media are widespread, while online services and tech hubs are proliferating. Yet the internet, as always, is a double-edged sword: As more Central Asians get online, they are being exposed to sophisticated extremist content in their native languages—and facing serious risks of radicalization.
Global jihadist movements have established a foothold in the region. Terrorist cells with links to Central Asia were purportedly behind attacks in New York and St. Petersburg in 2017, Stockholm in 2018, and Istanbul in 2019. Central Asian governments have struggled to contain organized terrorist activities, especially after several thousand battle-tested foreign fighters returned from campaigns in war-torn Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Part of the reason they are so hard to control is because many Central Asian extremists have migrated online.
Central Asia’s new generation of digital extremists are working on fertile soil. They can target huge youthful populations facing a dismal future with dim educational opportunities, limited job prospects, and little social mobility. The region’s mean age is just 27 years compared with 38 in the United States and 44 in Western Europe. Authoritarian police states leave few outlets for meaningful political expression. To make their grievances heard, frustrated young men are turning to increasingly radical movements, which they can ever more easily find via social media or other online platforms.
Central Asia’s new generation of digital extremists are working on fertile soil.
While often home-grown, many of Central Asia’s violent extremists are connected to al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and Taliban networks. Their alliances are often fluid and motives wide-ranging. And they are not only trolling the internet for new recruits in Central Asian nations, but also casting out to a growing diaspora as unemployed young men seek their fortune elsewhere in the region, including neighboring Russia.
In Syria, for example, most Central Asian fighters operate under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Salafist militia fighting the Assad regime. They include two essentially Uzbek groups, Tavhid va Jihod Katibasi and Katibat Imam al-Bukhari. These Uzbek groups also operate in Afghanistan, where they collaborate with the Taliban. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is also active in Russia’s northern Caucasus region and includes jihadist groups such as Imarat Kavkaz and Liwa al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar. Their primary aim is to liberate Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia from Russian rule and they are busily recruiting from a large pool of Central Asian labor migrants in Russia.
There are also a handful of terrorist groups affiliated with the Islamic State that remain active in Central Asia itself, which typically use Uzbek, Tajik, and Russian. For example, Islamic State Khorasan, a group which takes its name from the historical region encompassing modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, says it represents the terrorist network in those countries. According to SecDev Group’s online research, the organization claims it has operatives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan.
What unites these and other ideologically disparate extremist factions is their reliance on social media to reach out to followers and sympathizers. SecDev has identified almost 500 separate channels used by Central Asian extremist organizations on Telegram, as well as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and the popular Russian platforms VKontakte and Odnoklassniki—many using Russian, which is still the region’s lingua franca, but also Uzbek, Tajik, and Kyrgyz. There are more than 174,000 subscriptions to these channels and the total audience is estimated to be in the millions.
Tensions between Russia and Turkey are another prominent theme, often coupled with a call to arms in support of Muslim-majority Turkey.
Some extremist groups are more digitally active than others. For example, Islamic State groups including Islamic State Khorasan have the largest social media footprint in the region, with over 174 channels and more than 66,000 subscriptions to their various platforms as of July 2020. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is not far behind, with 119 channels and almost 50,000 subscriptions. Other groups registered between 1,000 and 16,000 subscriptions. But it’s hard to know exactly how many extremists are active—and there’s a good chance they are being undercounted, since they increasingly use Telegram’s encrypted messaging platform to communicate.
Many posts from these disparate groups actively promote the use of violence to achieve political ends, including explicit threats and incitement to fight the “infidels,” wherever they might be. Graphic depictions of violence from Syria, Iraq, Libya, and other conflict zones, while less common than in the past, are still circulating. The channels also tend to link their own local causes to conflicts elsewhere in the world. As the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh escalated this summer, for instance, SecDev detected increased chatter by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-affiliated groups in Syria that supported Azerbaijan and Turkey. Tensions between Russia and Turkey are another prominent theme, often coupled with a call to arms in support of Muslim-majority Turkey. Much of this content is squarely targeted at Central Asian users.
Governments, internet providers, and social media companies are struggling to contain this torrent of violent content. The conundrum is familiar: As soon as a social media channel or account is blocked, new ones pop up again—ad infinitum. And the more these efforts at content control are ramped up, the more violent extremist groups discover creative ways to bypass and circumvent them. Years of playing cat-and-mouse with the foreign and domestic governments have turned Central Asia’s extremist groups into experienced and agile online operators.
Most extremist groups are careful to retain rigid anonymity across their networks. They regularly use fake channels to throw off the scent of Russian and other intelligence services. In order to avoid becoming targets, extremist channels mingle run-of-the-mill religious and political content with more radical posts. Indeed, violent extremist content is often embedded in inoffensive videos, audio, and text. In short, it is often exceedingly hard to pin down. By now, these groups also know to rapidly distribute back-up hyperlinks and third-party channels when their websites are removed. Channel administrators often deploy bots and their own personal contacts to flood their subscriber accounts with hyperlinks before their channels are shut down.
Violent online extremists are also deftly removing content to keep the authorities from tracing it back to the source. For instance, SecDev detected a sharp drop in Telegram channels diffusing extremist content earlier this year. In recent months, there has been a modest, but perceptible, decline in the number of extremist channels across most platforms, which has led to dramatic reductions in subscriptions overall. This doesn’t necessarily mean the groups are shrinking—in fact, there are signs of groups resorting to back-up channels and encrypted communications to close the gap.
In order to avoid becoming targets, extremist channels mingle run-of-the-mill religious and political content with more radical posts.
Given these challenges, tackling digital radicalization cannot be achieved through online operations alone. On-the-ground investments by governments and civil society groups are key. One example of this is the comprehensive development strategy that the United States launched in 2019 to tackle the underlying risks of radicalization and extremism in the region. The strategy aims to stimulate economic growth through job creation, expand school opportunities for young people, strengthen the government’s ability to deliver basic services, improve the rule of law and respect for human rights, and provide assistance to neighboring countries such as Afghanistan that are magnets for foreign fighters. But the truth is that it’s just a drop in the bucket given the sheer scale of the challenges on the ground. What’s more, even the more successful programs are under threat of being derailed by Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, or Ankara.
Central Asia is at the center of a new kind of hybrid conflict in which the physical and digital worlds are blurred. In this kind of conflict, the disruption of violent extremist online content is just as important as counterterrorism, law enforcement, and development measures targeted at extremists and the societal conditions that lead to radicalization. Indeed, the process of radicalization intentionally combines virtual and physical interactions, using new tools to identify, groom, train, and deploy recruits. In this, governments, social media companies, and civil societies are facing a terrible challenge. Working together to fight the problem will be tricky, but the alternative is worse.