NewsWire: 1/20/21
- According to a new report, 81 countries used social media to wage organized misinformation campaigns about politics in 2020. This is up from 28 countries three years ago, and the campaigns themselves have become more professionalized and harder to detect. (The Economist)
- NH: Not long ago, only a handful of countries used “troll farms” and other tools to manipulate opinion on social media for political ends. Think of the Russian government interfering in the 2016 election. Now Russia is just one of many. Expensive propaganda campaigns of outright deception are becoming an essential tool for a growing number of governments and political parties around the world--backed by multimillion-dollar contracts and paid employees. The report highlighted here, summarizing work by a team of Oxford University researchers, estimates that the number of countries that use private firms to manage propaganda campaigns jumped from just 9 in 2017 to 48 in 2020.
- In all, the report found evidence of 81 countries engaging in organized misinformation campaigns in 2020. That’s up from 28 countries three years ago. What's more, it's no longer just the most brutal autocrats who are practicing campaigns of deception at scale. The countries with the most extensive disinformation operations are the United States, Australia, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
- How do the researchers distinguish between "misinformation" and, say, the routine PR spin practiced by all organizations? For some types of misinformation involving explicit deception, the designation is categorical. This includes the use of bots or fake accounts, for instance, to spread propaganda or smear a critic. It also includes “doxing” political dissenters or coordinating efforts to mass-report their content in order to get social media companies to automatically demote it or take it down. For other types of misinformation such as "fake" or "misleading" news, where truth or falsehood may be more of a judgment call, the researchers employ an elaborate methodology: They conduct a content analysis of news stories by leading media outlets in each country in which they find keywords related to misinformation (e.g. “troll,” “sock puppet,” “fake news”).
- Of course, some may argue that in labeling misinformation many media outlets are as biased as many governments or political parties. But even if there is some bias, the trend over time is clear: These sorts of sophisticated misinformation campaigns are becoming ever more prevalent. In 2018, for instance, the number of countries using automated fake accounts was 38. In 2020, it was 57.
- The spread of misinformation in the U.S. has driven some states to pass their own laws requiring political advertising to be truthful in state-based races. But at the federal level, there has been very little action. The fact-checking norms that regulate traditional media simply do not exist on social media--and the result is a deeply polarized country whose separate allegiances increasingly come with their own set of facts.
