Digital Fog
The search for signal during modern war.
“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.” – Leo Tolstoy
At approximately 10:50 p.m. on August 12, 2015, a fire broke out at the Port of Tianjin in northern China. Firefighters battled to control the blaze, but a stupendous explosion occurred some 40 minutes later. The first detonation was followed half a minute later by one of the largest industrial blasts ever recorded, generating a massive fireball with an eerie similarity to a nuclear mushroom cloud. The official death toll from the incident stands at 173. If pressed, we would take the over.
The second explosion was recorded by the many witnesses who pulled out their cell phones after the first blast. The event was thoroughly captured from various angles. For understandable reasons, numerous videos went viral online, and anybody who studied them carefully will never forget certain specifics. Watched enough times, the exclamations, expressions of shock, and panic became fingerprints that validated the authenticity of videos connected to that fateful night more than a decade ago.
Familiarity with such fingerprints came in handy over the past two weeks as we navigated social media in search of news about the war with Iran. On dozens of occasions, we observed users posting videos from the Tianjin incident as evidence of massive explosions in either Tehran or Tel Aviv. Several prominent and well-meaning accounts amplified the footage, probably because it wasn’t discernibly generated using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It also almost certainly confirmed a preexisting bias about how these users hoped the war would go—an incredibly challenging impulse to beat back during times of major crisis.
One technique we have used to cut through disinformation and psych-ops is to navigate social media sites like Twitter/X using curated lists, segmented by political bent or point of view. To gain entry onto one of these lists, an account must regularly post interesting and relevant information, even if we wildly disagree with it. To remain on the list is simple: resist the temptation to create or propagate clearly fake information. What is the pro-renewables crowd telling itself today? The oil industry? The European elite? The Make America Great Again crew? As a tool of analysis, this approach is truly invaluable.
Another useful truth-finding method is inspecting how the same event is covered by various international outlets, especially useful during times when a single topic—like a terrorist attack or the snatching of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—is dominating the global news cycle. Historically, our approach has been limited to reading English-language versions of major media periodicals in foreign countries—especially adversarial ones. Doing so provides insights missed or purposely minimized in legacy Western media.
It became obvious early on that the war with Iran would perhaps be the single most important geopolitical event in decades, especially because of the inevitable impact on energy markets. We quickly decided to fuse our two fact-finding strategies—in other words, to get a complete picture by having the Twitter/X algorithm itself help us curate a list of pro-Iranian accounts in order to examine what the other side of the conflict was telling itself about the war.
Rather than simply adding a new list to our existing profiles, which have years of bias themselves that the algorithm has already mapped, we decided to run a more controlled experiment. A new tablet was purchased, fresh email and login credentials were established, and the Twitter/X app was downloaded. An hour was then spent training the program that our only interest is the pro-Iranian aspects of the conflict.
It didn’t take long to pick up on our cues.
What followed was an experience difficult to fully articulate. As the war ramped, two wholly different universes played out online as we watched, and the ability to refresh the “For you” tabs on both sides of the conflict yielded a knowledge advantage that significantly exceeded our expectations. We take pen to paper now to share the results with our subscribers.