NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 15
History of Misinformation
“[c]oordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with
the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g.,
by discouraging specific parties from participating
in discussion, or amplifying sensationalistic voices
over others).”
In May 2018, nearly a year after Facebook posted
those words, the U.S. House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence released 3,500 Russialinked ads that had been published on Facebook and
Instagram accounts before and after the 2016 U.S.
presidential election. As special counsel Robert S.
Mueller III wrote in his February 2018 indictment of
13 Russian individuals and three companies, those
accounts were able to “reach significant numbers
of Americans for purposes of interfering with the
U.S. political system, including the presidential
election of 2016” — a conclusion that had also been
reached a year earlier by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence in a report stating that, based
on information obtained by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the
National Security Agency, Russian President Vladimir
Putin had ordered the pre-election activity with the
goal of disrupting the U.S. political system and
electing Donald Trump as president.
At least 700 Facebook pages and accounts (and
likely many more) were linked to the Internet
Research Agency (IRA), a Russian propaganda
organization, feeding lies to very specific target
audiences based on interests people had shown in
their online activities. Of these and other efforts,
wrote Mueller, the IRA “had a strategic goal to sow
discord in the U.S. political system.”
Accusations of Russian interference continued in
advance of the U.S. Senate and House elections
in November 2018. On Oct. 19, just weeks before
Election Day, the U.S. Department of Justice
charged a Russian national with conspiracy to
defraud the United States by allegedly managing
a project with a budget of $35 million — paid for
by a close ally of Putin — that created thousands
of email and social media accounts to conduct
“information warfare against the United States.”
That same day, Twitter released more than 10 million
15
tweets — 9 million from the IRA alone, the rest largely
linked to accounts in Iran — that had been sent in an
effort to influence and disrupt political debate, both
in the U.S. and globally.
Indeed, according to a number of researchers trying
to fight disinformation, “[n]ation-states and politicallymotivated organizations have long been the initial
brokers of misinformation.”
Two University of Oxford researchers who focused
narrowly on just that aspect of disinformation found
evidence in 48 countries — up from 28 in 2017 — of
at least one political party or government agency
attempting to manipulate public opinion. In their
2018 study Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global
Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,
Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard call
these parties or agencies “cyber troops.” Since
2010, political parties and governments have spent
more than half a billion dollars on the research
and implementation of psychological operations
over social media. In most cases, this has involved
spreading misinformation during elections, military
crises and humanitarian disasters.
“The manipulation of public opinion over social
media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to
public life,” Bradshaw and Howard wrote, calling the
phenomenon “computational propaganda” — which
they define as “the use of automation, algorithms and
big-data analytics to manipulate public life.”
Figure 1: Global Cyber Troop Capacity: 2018
Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Note: This table reports on cyber troop size, resources, team permanency, coordination, and capacity. See Table 4 for
data on global cyber troop capacity. For capacity: = minimal capacity, = low capacity, = medium capacity, = high capacity
Map of global cyber-troop capacity from Challenging Truth and Trust, with
20
darker countries illustrating a greater capacity (size, resources, funds,
coordination). Click on the image for a PDF download of the report.