 Well, hello, everyone and everyone out in zoom land. I'm Scott Smith. I've got the pleasure of welcoming Casey Schmidt to talk about how to how to wield influence in the information environment. Casey is he's worked in a variety of intelligence and diplomatic assignments for the government, including Cape Town, South South Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Langley. He's a 2020 distinguished graduate of the war college and he also completed the ethics and emerging technology, military technology certificate program. Following graduation, he became the CEO of Voxcraft analytics firm specializing in automated media and public sentiment analysis. To entities, including the State Department, USA ID and various intelligence agencies. I should also note that Casey just presented to our three star course last week and was very widely received and popular we see so welcome again Casey and thanks for doing this. Great. Thank you very much, everyone. It's absolute pleasure to be here. It's actually remarking the last time I was here I was in SNP seminar, digging in the closet vets, and it was March of 2020. And we ended the seminar saying, Oh, we actually may need to go virtual. And that was the last time I set foot at the naval war college. But, you know, truly honored to be here. My time at the naval war college was one of the best years of my career. And certainly prepared me in this next venture of being a CEO of an open source intelligence company, trying to tackle some, some pretty tough issues. Now, today I'm going to talk about strategic communications in the context of great power competition. I'm going to argue that the United States does not do strategic strategic communications very well. It does not communicate with foreign audiences very well. And that comes at the expense of our influence in the information environment, and are influencing contested environments writ large. I'm also going to argue that to somewhat turn the tide. What is needed is a shift in thinking of how we do strategic communications into highly tailored hyper local strategic communications that reach audiences again at these hyper local levels. And the way people consume information, the way people receive information, and the way people communicate is changing very rapidly. And I'm going to walk through a number of strategic principles and concepts to help us think of how we better reach target audiences and places that matter. So now everything that I'm speaking of today is going to be through the lens and the experience from from Voxcroft from this private company and the work that we are doing in this space. My hope is that this complements a lot of the academic research that is done here and of course the very practical experience that information operators have have in the field. But as a company, we have developed what we call population centric intelligence, this new intelligence trade craft to get at these questions of public sentiment media sentiment, how people feel and why people feel the way they do environments that that matter. Next slide. Well, good. Again just real quickly so we're work. We're a company that's a little different than a lot of open source intelligence companies out there that are purely technology based. We're a hybrid solution, so to speak, where. Yes, we build AI solutions to do disinformation detection sentiment analytics. However, we tether these technologies to a global network of experts and linguists that are physically in these contested information environments. That enables us to imbue into our algorithms and our machines that kind of highly contextual contextual nuances in these information environments that are just super important to getting highly accurate information. All right, just real quick on the roadmap so going to basically five stages to this. First and foremost, we're just going to provide a little context of people matter. The information environment increasingly matters. So we're going to talk about soft power cognitive influence and strategic competition. We're going to break into connecting with foreign audiences is just really difficult. That's really difficult, especially from the context of. US official communications and how you reach foreign audiences. We're going to talk about this idea of United States hyper local hubris. There's a three level game of how you communicate with foreign audiences and how we reach the masses is just becoming exceedingly difficult will dig into that. We'll briefly talk about how adversaries are essentially filling this void at hyper local levels. A lot of this information that you receive on on on this point won't necessarily be new but I think it will be interesting in the context of looking at US strategic communications weaknesses. Lastly, we'll dig into some solutions, some communication principles and technologies that kind of boost our media profile and resonance in particular environments. Next slide. All right, so people matter. People especially matter in highly contested environments, whether it's South Africa, Central African Republic, the Philippines, Vanuatu. The battle for public influence and cognitive influence increasingly matters to the United States and clearly a number of our adversaries are investing heavily to try to gain superiority and influencing public opinion and applying those psychological pressure campaigns to ultimately impact decision making and power structures at hyper local levels. Next slide please. Now so for everyone who's in an SDM right now or TSTM, the whole concept of soft power. The United States has long enjoyed soft power advantages around the world. And we're going to get into kind of why that's degrading grading a little bit but I think the key point here is that there are a number of new protagonists that see soft power as important to their, their strategic competition and in certain environments. Clearly China is investing a lot more in trying to boost its cultural influence, soft power influence in a number of areas. And even when you look outside kind of the main protagonist. So Bollywood in India, nollywood in Nigeria. As these emerging centers of gravity of cultural and media influence are gaining more promise. So to our their influence with with global audiences and it's essentially competing with the United States, and it's all norms. It's media sports entertainment influence that his long kind of carried us democratic principles and influence for quite some time, and it's changing. Next slide. All right. Let's shift to looking at why is it so hard to communicate with with foreign audiences. So, I believe this is actually your quote, Scott said, hey, we can deliver missiles through windows with minimal collateral damage, but we struggle. We really struggle to deliver resounding strategic communications to the right foreign audiences at the right time. Next slide. So, when we think about strategic communications and how it is normally done or how it has been done for many years from the US government perspective. I like to think, think about it as a three level game. So, essentially, there's three buckets of audiences. And our messages go out and we're trying to target number one, an international audience. So elites around the world diplomats around the world. We have some desired strategic effects in terms of our influence with with these, these players that that we seek to gain from from those messages. And most of our messages that we put out are targeted at this level. Those diplomats, those elites, and it matters. Right. Of course, it matters if you're going to do a fauna, what elites in other countries, other political leaders think about that fauna. But there's also two other layers of communications that increasingly matter. So, the next layer is this national level, and I call this kind of the host government officials, the elites in a particular society. Our communications, especially when it comes from, let's say, our US embassies around the world do a fairly good job at targeting those audiences and delivering messages that are that are influential. However, where we really struggle is this communicating to the masses. And those local audiences, those target audiences that in many places contribute to networks that influence the power structures, the economic, the political and the security power structures in a given country. And this is where US communications fall short. Why. All right. So there is, of course, the message and the messenger will get into in a moment, but what is happening in the information environment at these hyper local levels. So on this screen, these are essentially communication platforms, ways for people to share information, communicate highly disaggregated, highly diffuse. Each one of those, those platforms is a communication ecosystem in and of itself, different ideological bets, different interest. And this is what information environments are starting to look like. And so reaching broad swaths of the public. And this is happening when target audiences are increasingly dispersed on all these different different mediums. Again, it's just naturally very difficult to decide and select which ones do we need to be targeting to reach a specific audience. Next slide. Great. Before I get into this one, you know, just talking about the last slide, I was actually listening to it was a lecture on international marketing. And because of that landscape, there's this whole concept that mass marketing is dead. It is impossible to have a one size fits all message that is going to reach large swaths of the public and resonates and create economic value. The main is to be said about us official communications. Right. In one size fits all communications approach, where we're delivering one message that is been dispersed to just a number of different social media platforms is no longer sufficient in terms of the main arts and lines. All right. So, I want to get, let's get a little practical and look at a couple case studies or or vignettes. So, as a company, what we wanted to do is take a look at certain policy initiatives or events and see to what extent are they resonating and, and particularly important environments. And we took a look at the Filipino information environment back in November and December and post one of the big freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, a fun up, right. Huge political decision to do a fun up in the South China Sea at that, at that time, it is a big US strategic decision. But we wanted to do okay. To what extent was that fun up having any type of strategic effect or resonance on on the public in the Filipino information environment. What we found, and I know it's really tough to read on these graphs. But essentially, the fun up and US security system writ large was only involved in about 2.5% of all security related discourse on this social media platform at that time 2.5%. And by security related discourse I mean, essentially all Twitter X users talking about foreign policy issues in the Philippines for two months. To what extent is the United States involved in that conversation, partly at all. Alright, why. Next slide please. Alright, I went through this exercise with with the three stars last week and we actually took a poll, which is hard to do within this virtual environment but I asked them how many of you have heard of PEPFAR. There was about 30 people in the audience and two people raise their hands. I said okay, PEPFAR US President's emergency plan for AIDS relief. It is 95% of us foreign assistance that goes to South Africa, South Africa, anchor state in Southern Africa, hugely influential information environment, a place where strategically, not doing so well. 95% of US assistance. We did the same exercise this time we took 10 years of HIV AIDS related discourse in the whole South African information environment. And we wanted to find out. Okay what fraction of that discourse. Are they talking about PEPFAR. Now mind you, PEPFAR is probably one of the biggest public health success stories. The amount of lives that was saved, you know 20 million lives saved since the mid the mid 2000s. What it is done to bolster health infrastructure across Southern Africa. The tangible benefits to people are incredible. I mean talk about a soft power advantage of actually delivering results that matter to people. Incredible. However, when you look at how the information environment there and how people actually feel about PEPFAR. 10 years of HIV AIDS related discourse, huge impact, but yet only 3% of HIV related discourse contained any mention of the United States for PEPFAR. Next slide, and it gets even worse. So even even with just 3% we took a look okay. So what is general South African media public sentiment toward PEPFAR. It's been neutral and pretty darn negative. One third of those mentions have negative negative public attitudes or negative media attitudes toward the benefit of PEPFAR at only 15%. So when you break that down 95% of bilateral assistance, billions of dollars provided to South Africa. All those tangible benefits to people on the ground, yet what public goodwill, what influence are we getting with this public with this program. Very, very little slide please. Alright, kind of the last case study on the on the US side, Ethiopia. Similar to the PEPFAR case study, you know, Ethiopia, anchor state East Africa, long a US counterterrorism partner in the region. And I don't have the exact figures on this but generally a billion dollars of humanitarian development assistance that has gone to Ethiopia every year. How do Ethiopians feel about that. Same deal took large swaths of media data and very, very negative and You can read just kind of this this quote or this little snippet there, but you can see the narratives that are in kind of general discourse about USAID and US foreign assistance, this whole notion of colonizer. And this whole notion that you're just using humanitarian humanitarian aid as a front for to compete against China or just dissuade us from from working with with China. And that they're just in general isn't a public understanding of what the actual intent of humanitarian aid policy is in Ethiopia that's pretty, pretty remarkable. Then I found this quote over the weekend and in foreign affairs article back in August of 2022. And meanwhile in Ethiopia, there's, you know, massive, you know, Chinese finance construction everywhere. There's a huge effort on Ethiopia being a critical Belt and Road Initiative country for China, and there's lots of advertising. But how the Ethiopians talk about it with these very tangible benefits that the Chinese are providing. I don't have the exact figures on it but general Ethiopian sentiment toward China is very high. What was remarkable to me in this is what's highlighted in orange. And where are their Americans. Right so I served in Ethiopia. I mean the Americans are everywhere. And US assistance is everywhere with very tangible benefits to the public all across the country. Yet, again, just not resonating there's not that connection between what you the intent of US policy and building that goodwill on the ground. Next slide. Alright, so shifting to, you know, looking at adversaries and their strategic communications. And just kind of highlighting some of the, the things that it does well to increase its profile and resonate in particular information environments. So I think first and foremost, what China does pretty well from our perspective is it has very strong practical narratives about the benefits of Chinese cooperation. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Ethiopia, Vanuatu, Bolivia. It's the same narratives everywhere about it being an economic powerhouse and an economic alternative to to the United States and Western Western economy. My favorite one here this peaceful alternative to to the West. It is pretty remarkable how whatever is happening in the world. China will comment comment on it and link it to kind of US being the United States being this this war monger, while China is the peaceful protector of global global order. And this other narrative of being very poor and development focused. When you look at a lot of their communications, it is very populous centric, it is very again protector of the poor, and you just see these tight narratives everywhere. And again I put pragmatic and quotes because when you look at kind of official Chinese communications they want to be this very pragmatic. They want to have this pragmatic messaging style or these pragmatic narratives that counterbalance us narratives which tend to be very ideological. Next slide please. And so, offensively, what we also see, again I talked about this war monger narrative. China also does a good job of taking issues and framing them in a way that essentially make the United States look bad in particular information environments. So, again, you could just look at hashtag war monger on on on Twitter X, you'll see it pretty much every single Belt and Road information environment and their conversations. This is especially true in Africa, the whole colonialist narrative and protectors being very anti colonialist. You just, you see these narratives everywhere. Next slide. All right. And what we also see China doing pretty well is it's soft power promotion. You can use very localized media vectors. And here is the front page of a very prominent South African newspaper, Cape Town front page. And again, it's, it's print media in South Africa is actually very widely read in particular. And it seems that this particular vector was chosen very deliberately to target a very specific audience at a very specific time with different political events happening. And again, it was just it was a really strong vector for getting a very certain message out and they do this quite well. And just wanted to just kind of comparing apples to apples. We just did a big US Chinese trade and investment project in in Kenya and looking at media resonance there and the sheer profile. Even though, again, in Kenya, the United States has a big bilateral push to increase US trade investment in Kenya, lots of humanitarian assistance Kenya has long been a strong partner for the United States. And Kenya is also a key BRI pillar for for the PRC. But when you look at the information environment, who has a bigger profile and who is resonating more strongly. Clearly China 18% of trade and investment discourse compared to us five 5% speaks for itself. Alright, and now getting into all backup and say, everything that I've talked about before, at least from our perspective we don't put that in like the malign influence category. This is just straight public diplomacy strategic communications. And how are they trying to wheel influence with certain populations and contested environments. And again, I don't think we need to deliver this too much there is a malign influence element to what adversaries do in particular particular environments. This one. We looked at the Philippines. And we looked at public sentiment toward the big initiative there, US military trying to open up new military bases and strengthen bilateral military cooperation with Filipinos. So, we looked at the information viral and we noticed like, huh, on one particular. This, this was Twitter X, one particular platform. Very, very negative toward toward the United States, we're able to geotag where a lot of these weeks forthcoming from we found a lot of that negativity is pulling around exactly with target audiences and the towns and villages near those proposed sites. We also have algorithms that do disinformation and authentic account detection and found, okay. Large, large number of those accounts were in fact inauthentic and it was very clear that there was an artificial campaign targeting those specific audiences with anti US anti US military anti American content. Again to try to influence that public perception and the power structures in those hyper hyper local areas. It's a pretty, pretty strong case study. So, right. So, let's shift to some solutions. Certainly not an admiring the problem. Exercise. So, definitely don't want everyone to kind of read this. This fancy graphic up here, we can go to go to the next slide, but I did want to leave it on there so if you're going to take these slides afterwards you can have that that graphic graphic to look through. So I want to talk about some strategic communication principles and also some technology concepts that can kind of help the United States think, at least certainly on the strategic level of how, how to reach target audiences in a more meaningful way. So, first principle, the right medium for the right audience. Right. We go back to that last slide. China was very, very deliberate in choosing Twitter X in the Philippines, because it knew. Okay, there's wide number of US military. Personnel that are on Twitter on Twitter in in the Philippines. There was a very specific reason for targeting using that platform and putting it that certain, certain message out at the right time. Now, we, we talked about how information environments are with the explosion of data and the explosion of platforms. It's, it's very difficult to choose. But certainly public affairs officers me so teams around around the world, it needs to become an eight and all operations that understanding the various mediums, the vectors, who's on them what their ideological events are. And where they most use in kind of geographic profile, psychographic profile demographic profile, understanding those dynamics of certain platforms is going to help give you some good clues of when a certain you want to put a certain message out where is the right target audience. So I'll give you a concrete example. Again, this from from the Philippines. Again, looking at media and public sentiment toward US military cooperation with with the Filipinos. We actually found, and this, this makes sense for a lot of folks that have done a lot of work in in kind of in developing countries that broadcast is often the primary information vector for large swaths of the public. And we found that broadcast had this and more, I would say a normal favorable coverage of, of such, such cooperation, and it goes back years. I can't tell you why or how how this happened, but it is a sure fact that if the United States generally wants positive coverage of its cooperation to reach mostly rural audiences. And it goes on like you're, we want those messages going out through these particular broadcast vectors that are highlighted there. But other social media platforms, very different type of content, very different type of messages that that needed that need to be promoted here. Facebook, which is the most widely used social media platform in the Philippines. I don't talk about military issues at all on that platform. I would say this is just like this is the soft power vector. They talk about music, they talk about entertainment. Again, those kind of trying to build understanding of cultural values and music entertainment. That is where you're kind of promoting that American pop culture, so to speak. And which of course is very influential over time. But Facebook it is that is your medium for general soft power and public diplomacy. Tick tock. I know there might be a number of questions on well can't use tick tock, but nonetheless, tick tock we found lots of users on there. It's very rationalistic toward the Philippines and pretty anti China and very positive on again having strong relationships with with the United States. Again, so if you're looking for a vector to put out messages and reach target audiences talking about the importance of US Filipino military partnership, tick tock is a phenomenal event vector to do that. Facebook. Next slide. All right. Next principle contextualize the message of seizing upon popular narratives. So if I go back to the Navy phonops and looking to why didn't the phone up in the South China Sea in November, resonate. Just a short proximity you think, but what was happening in the world in November, right the explosion of Gaza. And, and the start of the war. And when you looked at all that media discourse about international affairs and foreign policy and military issues. It's just Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. And then others. There's no linkage between what the United States officially put out about the fawn up and stuff happening in the Middle East. So if you can contextualize the message, if there was one mention of how freedom of navigation in the South China Sea relates to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, or the Western Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, or anything related to the Gaza crisis. The profile of that font now reaches millions of people instead of a few thousands on Twitter. So that seizing upon what are contemporary narratives, what are people talking about today, and linking that foreign policy action to what is happening today goes a long way of infiltrating much wider networks of public discourse and media coverage. Next slide. Let's contextualize the message, connect policy to local interest. Right. This one is clearly intuitive. However, it's, it's hard to do, but where all politics is local. Just quickly talk about a study that we did. We had a task to look at, okay, to what extent is African media talking about climate change or climate policy. All mentions of climate change and climate policy in Africa. And just those terms. We deliver bad news and basically said, you know what, nobody's talking about climate change. In terms of the way that Western jargon and Western elites frame climate change and how they talk about climate climate change is all up here. In the first study, we said, well, what if we start talking about crop degradation, locust, flooding, drought disease, all the effects of climate change. All of a sudden, everyone's talking about climate change. And it was such a, such an eye opening case study of like, you talk about climate change by not talking about climate change. You know, talking about climate change to this gentleman and his crops in, in Southern Mali, like just there's no, there's no connective tissue between that message and what matters to this person. But if you're starting to talk about US initiatives to deal with land degradation in Southern Mali, and here's our policies that are doing X, Y, and Z, all of a sudden it matters and it matters with a lot of people. Slide. Right. Reframing unsavory narratives. China does this pretty well. So, this is a, this is a Kenya example. That's humanitarian assistance. If you take a look at the one on the right with the red 20% negative. Again, it's for white American officials standing in front of food aid bags, and that just immediately incited kind of these anti-colonial social media networks to just jump on that and just talk about, here come the colonizers, here come the white saviors. And then of course there's major amplification done by adversaries with bot networks and just these narratives like that narrative is just flooding through the discourse and reaching audiences that we want to have a positive effect on of delivering humanitarian assistance. However, we saw messages basically on like the same day talking about US development assistance picture was different, the way that it was that it was framed up being very empowering to local communities. No US officials involved had a massive, massive difference in terms of how people talked about it how they felt about it, and the extent that it started to circulate through the wider information environment. Alright, communication piece. So this one's very near and dear to my heart because we're building language technologies for low resource environments around the world, and very intuitive. So many US messages go out in English without nuance and localisms that people in other information environments can understand. With hyper local communications rule of thumb, it's got to be in those hyper local languages. If it's in Filipino Savoyno versus Tagalog, you put out a message in Tagalog and Savoyla. It's, it's that simple. And when that happens, the resonance in the profile of those messages and again you're starting to reach millions of people, not just on this. Alright, engaging key influencers. So, I was actually looking at a Boston subway, the team, the team app. Yesterday, my, you know, this is actually just like a social network map. When you think of when you think of a subway map, there's certain stations where lots of lines come in and lots of lines go out. And of course, those stations are the ones that generated the most economic value. Social network analysis is saying that the folks where that the bubbles are are the biggest have the most amount of users and the most lines coming into it and going out of it. Are the ones that are the most influential in terms of shaping narratives on a particular topic. Now it's kind of hard to see here, especially for you are in the audience, but on the right side, there is a smaller red, red cluster of users. That's for an official US embassy account and it's very disconnected from essentially everything else. And this is the one in blue. It is connected to everything. And so it's essentially three users that are driving the narratives and driving discourse on particular topics. Public affairs officers, me so teams when you're thinking about who to engage you run through these exercises to identify okay, these three users, I have to be engaged, have to be following you. And if they do, again, all of a sudden, you're immediately amplifying your messaging your narrative into places that previously weren't there. So I'm. All right. On the defense side, so refute damaging narratives in real time. All right. So with the amount of misinformation and disinformation that is out there it's impossible to respond to every single piece of disinformation. There are times where disinformation is truly damaging to us narrative to us to us brand and to us objective in a particular country. And in that case, like, there just needs to be an immediate response from whomever is in charge on a certain platform. So I put this example up from on China side, I mean immediate response to a particular narrative that they felt that was on savory. I would certainly never recommend on the US side using China's language but the whole point was, it immediately responded and immediately tried to reshape the narrative, and it's just it's involved right. Like, dialectic it is discourse. It's not static, where it's just going to put out one message, and we're going to see what happens and see its response like it is just it is in it. It is active discourse with the public, and just shows like having that active discourse that that is the posture that you need to be able to defend against these these counter narratives to us interest slide. Alright, indirect messaging. So, if I go back to the last slide I said I wouldn't recommend such strong language is China and that's not because I'm a China apologist or anything. It's just the data suggests, it doesn't work. So when the United States goes on the offensive and deliberately tries to point out all the bad things that China is doing. It doesn't resonate too well, and insights pretty significant backlash in certain places. What does work, however, is when you look at what drives negative sentiment toward toward China. It gives you clues of the types of narratives that you can be driving over time, and that become very influential in the minds of the public. So, here in Fiji, you know we see, okay, media freedom corruption and military security and ocean. It's just generally highly negative public reaction to China's role in those things. And those are clues right. In fact, we're working with several US embassies right now, thinking about okay how do we build a communications campaign around corruption in Africa. This is just constantly an issue that people. So, and it's not a campaign to say oh China you're so corrupt. It's a campaign to say, okay, look at how the United States does business. They just launched this trade and investment deal look how business was done with transparency, openness, you know, essentially no corruption here and so you're offsetting, you're basically building on that negative sentiment by showing that you are this, you know this counternails this counterbalance to the solution to corruption concerns in those societies. All right, probably my favorite, and you know certainly a good message for everyone here at the war college. When you're thinking about strategic communications public messaging, especially at the campaign level, something you're going to do over time doesn't always need to be the United States. I think that partners in different information environments have have advantages that that we don't. This particular instance. Some security issue in the South China Sea, and I believe it came from Solomon Islands. The general public sentiment which were what the Australians were doing and what the Japanese were doing had a much higher profile and resonating very strongly and again we're the same values, same military objectives, same form policy objectives, as those partners. So in many cases it's coordinating with these of trying to put official communications out through them versus doing it doing it by yourself. All right, so yeah, you have kind of three key takeaways in the United States struggles at reaching those hyper local audiences. Strategic communications are the connective tissue between policy action and generating and building public goodwill on the ground and information environments that that matter. And it is just that those hyper local communications that hyper local engagement that is really going to help be become that that that connective tissue. We talked, we definitely dug into kind of those modern communications communication concepts that can help help us better compete in these places. Get more, a higher profile, more resonance and ultimately increase our competitiveness in the information environment. We're approaching the end of our time so I think. Yeah, excellent. Thank you.