A Short-Lived Crown
How to outlast psychological warfare
Kings rise, they die, and usually not many people cry.
If I had to guess, the first thing you thought about when you woke up this morning didn’t have to do with what was for breakfast at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
Perhaps you thought about what you were going to feed your children for breakfast.
Or how you were going to grab breakfast on your way to a work meeting.
Maybe you thought about your complicated relationship with your New Years breakfast plan now that you’re heading into March.
Most of you, if I again had to guess, then picked up your phone and started to scroll…some with trepidation over what you would find in your algorithm and others feeling jubilant that your guy at that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue house is doing exactly what you *hired him to do.*
I had planned to write on ICE raids in rural communities today, but the most pressing issue on my mind is internet literacy because it has to do with the most effective political strategy that exists in modern America: psychological warfare.
Intro to Forced Scamming
Before I dive too deeply into the politics of online traps and bot accounts, I want to zoom out to the larger criminal industry involving forced scamming farms.
You may have already interacted with the most rapidly growing criminal industry in the world, where individuals are sitting behind screens being coerced to send messages like this to cell phones all over the world.
This is a screenshot I took from my phone just this morning:
Behind this message, there may be an educated man or woman from the Philippines, Malaysia, or Indonesia who was recruited by a text much like this.
While I was speaking at the Freedom Business Alliance Global Forum last summer, a veteran nonprofit director from Bangkok told me a very specific story about an MBA graduate who thought he was traveling to Thailand for professional work with a good salary, only to find himself trapped in a scanning farm using his English acumen to mine for data day in and day out.
Unfortunately, this story is one of thousands being uncovered by journalists and researchers like my brilliant friend Mina Chiang, who was interviewed for the following article by the New York Times.
Every day, people all over the world are falling prey to the hope of a better income, willing to travel for international work in order to send remittances to their families back home.
In Nepal alone, over 25% of the country’s GDP comes from money sent from individuals working abroad. As I flew out of Kathmandu last May, I witnessed hundreds of parents hugging their children and wrapping them in flags, sending them off to a hopeful job prospect in another country.
Click Fraud
In his 2020 run for president, entrepreneur Andrew Yang made it a part of his stump speech to claim that “data is the oil of the 21st century."
Whether policies have caught up to the speed of technology or not, the wealth that is driven from taps on our screens and clicks on our keyboards cannot be denied. We are feeding trillions of data points to tech companies for free each day, with our engagement online not only informing algorithm formulas, but also advertising payouts.
These payouts are connected to forced scamming, as well.
According to a Cloudfare article:
“Click fraud is when a person or a bot pretends to be a legitimate visitor on a webpage and clicks on an ad, a button, or some other type of hyperlink. The goal of click fraud is to trick a platform or service into thinking real users are interacting with a webpage, ad, or app.”
The article continues:
“A click bot is a bot that is programmed to carry out click fraud. The simplest click bots will just access a webpage and click the desired link. Well-designed click bots will also be programmed to take actions that a real user would also take – mouse movements, random pauses before taking an action, mixing up the timing between each click, and so on. In this way, the scammer who wrote the bot hopes to disguise the bot clicks as being from legitimate users.”
It then describes how click farms are managed, adding:
“While bots are commonly used to carry out click fraud, it can also be carried out by low-paid human workers. A group of such workers is called a ‘click farm,’ and click farms are often run out of areas where wages are relatively cheap, such as in developing countries.Click farm workers will be assigned to go to certain webpages and click on designated links to artificially inflate click through rates or traffic totals for those pages. They can also be active on social media networks and ‘like’ certain posts or pages to boost their visibility.”
Why is this important to you, as a media consumer?
Search engines prioritize the articles and links they place at the top of a search result, sometimes through ads that are labeled as such, but other times through algorithms that suggest links based off of engagement in order to feed a link more likely to satisfy the user.
From a business model, this makes sense. Happy customer, increased profits.
But where there is a business model, there is also an opportunity for exploiting that model. And in the data world, both the forced laborer AND the consumer are impacted in negative ways.
AI Building
Plenty of evidence proves that “digital sweatshops” are powering much of the artificial intelligence interfaces we use each day.
In order to sell high-powered AI platforms, monstrous computers must be fed infinite amounts of data points, effectively building a massive library of online information that can be pulled and synthesized immediately in easy-to-digest information.
This article isn’t meant to dive into the ethics of AI, the challenges it poses to traditional classrooms, or the environmental concerns over the amount of water that is used to run simple ChatGPT prompts. (But by all means, keep your own deep dive going here.)
The reason for sharing the information is to help you better understand HOW we receive information today. The unfortunate reality is that information systems are not only built on the back of cheap and forced labor, but they are also designed to melt our ability to think critically.
The National Security Issue
Regardless of how you feel about the current administration, now acting Secretary of State Marco Rubio is known to have a solid reputation amongst lawmakers in D.C. He is the ONLY nominee for Trump’s cabinet who received zero dissenting votes to his confirmation, compared to the others listed here on the Senate’s website.
Secretary Rubio is a well-known figure in Republican politics, and holds a vetted resume with 14 years of experience serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I’m pulling this video from 2019, where then Senator Rubio spoke on a number of issues facing the global economy. Skip to 22:57-23:50 for the clip pertinent to this discussion.
In a strongly bipartisan speech, this respected legislator, with access to sensitive national security data, stresses the particular threat of psychological warfare impacting our nation’s ability to progress.
We stand in a time of American history where the greatest threat to our livelihood may not be incurable disease, military attack, or economic crisis, but rather the pervasive influence of intellectual control.
I cannot stress this enough.
I cannot speak too strongly of the way online comments, often from fake accounts, are manipulating the flow of information that becomes widely accepted and deeply believed by everyday citizens.
We are in war over the minds of voters, while foreign governments and private interest groups are well equipped to continue feeding the conflict.
In turn, those running for office are forced to speak the language of their constituents, and that language has been built in online spaces where information is rampant but not always factual.
And while we may not believe that politicians who play into these false narratives and disinformation campaigns are directly impacting our lives, we remain to feel it around our dinner tables.
We sense it from our familial discord, we carry it in our content consumption, and we experience it in the harassment directed toward us both online and in person.
The best way to fight our enemies is to understand their tactics.
In the case of psychological warfare, we may not even have a face or a name for our enemy. There is a long list of people who benefit from influencing the way you think: tech companies selling your data, traffickers using that data to feed you more of it, politicians using cheep talking points to garner votes, businesses marketing to entrenched political spheres, and lobbyists using online engagement to make their cases to elected officials, just to name a few.
Who wins in this scenario? Not you, and not competitive ideas.
The best thing you can do for your country today is this:
Slow down your media consumption.
Focus on the issues you care about most.
Become a learner of those issues in REAL life, not only online.
Call your lawmakers regularly with your pointed list of concerns.
Block any social media accounts that appears to be stirring up social discord on your feed.
Practice the mindfulness tactics that feel most accessible to you.
The king and his crown that was posted from the White House social account this week? That was done by a real person, posting a real image.
But his reign will be short-lived while your intelligence is needed for the next election.
Keep strong, both in your heart and in your mind.
Lauren Pinkston is a researcher with Freedom Business Alliance. She has a PhD from Clemson University and her research pairs human trafficking crises with sustainable business models. She is a specialized consultant for social enterprises, nonprofits, and anti-trafficking initiatives focusing on creative solutions to global and domestic social justice issues. She hosts the "Upwardly Dependent" podcast and writes at her on newsletter, The Mindful Middle. Find out more on her website and follow her on Instagram at @laurenmpinkston.
thank you for informing me of a topic i no knowledge of (and my husband has a masters degree in data science!). i knew about bots, and deep fake videos, etc., but was not aware of click farms and that people are essentially forced into fake click and scam work.
our oldest son participated in a team policy debate back in 2022 regarding whether the US should ban tiktok. at that time, his research provided evidence to compare the chinese version of tiktok to the american version, saying that the chinese version was like nutritious spinach while the US version was like crack cocaine. his argument at that time was: what happens to a nation whose people have been mind-numbed and attention span-dwindled? they surely are not able to withstand psychological warfare! also, less able to think critically about the potentially fake/manipulated content they are being fed.
thanks for shedding light on this topic, for sharing your research, and for listing actionable steps i can take.