A Tale of Two Experiments in Social Engineering
“We’re agreed, right? Team Anton takes the old country and Team Boris the new one. Whomever causes the most carnage in the next four months wins.”. Boris looked a bit smug as he proclaimed the rules.
Anton glanced at his team and then nodded. Both teams bowed to the avid crowds above then went into their control centers. This was going to be their most ambitious match yet.
Social media accounts were gathered, bots generated, carefully planted news stories sent out. Boris’ team took an early lead, capitalizing on a tragic event and massaging long hidden fractures, splitting the country’s inhabitants into red and blue components. They inflamed protestors with media views of police brutalities and heated up the others with images of rioting and destruction. The calmer talking heads in the middle were gagged.
Anton’s team borrowed from the same playbook but the old country inhabitants didn’t fire up as easily so precious resources had to be expended with deploying paid rioters. When police and their animals were targeted and harmed, people revolted and backed the thin blue line.
Boris’ team was facing a similar problem, rioters were called into order by protestors and community police spoke up. The arena crowd was getting anxious as it looked like this season was going to wash out. Both teams called for a pause and conference with their senior social engineering mentors.
As the action commenced a synopsis of each team’s new strategy appeared on the board:
Team Boris was staging new players in a contested zone replacing disciplined troops with a wild, disorganized private militia tasked to take names and break faces. They planned to repeat the scheme elsewhere after they subdued the spirit of the land and thus maintain their chosen titular leader. The news media was being misdirected with carefully seeded news nuggets and mistrust of investigative reporting fostered and burnished by bots
Team Anton’s bots used riot footage from the new country to scare inhabitants of the old. Behind the scenes they took control of a few carefully chosen politicians and whispered of police misdeeds to them. Media was fed snippets that bolstered the new line about how police were so out of control they were the new danger. The politicians amplified it and the crowds cried for blue blood.
The moderators looked on and smiled, each toasting their chosen team with vodka. The stages were now set heading into the finals and the unwitting participants moving towards destruction never felt the tug of the puppet masters.
Tsuchur 