Relevant Overviews
- Communication Strategy
- Content Strategy
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- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
- Communications Tactics
- Psychology
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
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Overview: Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
This Overview supported my newsletter (Sept 2020-present), during its focus on Disinformation in the US2020 elections, as part of my explorations into zettelkasten (see Don’t just Build a Second Brain: share (part of) it).
Last Update: 25 October 2020. Curated Resources covered: 41
Key MyHub.ai tags: #US2020 and #Disinformation (Latest 9 Best, below)
Key Roam tags: #us2020 and #PermNote (private)
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Hindsight: Predictions from 2016
Where new technology enables, new forms of disinformation follow, so predicting social media tech trends should help prepare for future forms of disinformation. Clearly noone's having much success:
- 2016 predictions:
- the timing wrong on some of the tech - not ready by 2020
- overestimated some tech
- missed other tech
- "Technology-push" extrapolation didn't work.
- Tech Giants Prepared for 2016-Style Meddling. But the Threat Has Changed.
- What lessons haven’t we learned since 2016?: practically all of them - journalism only now beginning to grapple with a rage-engage challenge led by a senior politician, let alone a President
- From Obama to Trump = a story of incremental improvement vs. innovation: H. Clinton incrementally improved on Obama's 2012 campaign, while Trump took latest off the shelf.
Questions
How better to predict (political) application of emerging (social media) tech? Ask:
- Cui bono: who and how can make money/power out of it?
- where? Not just usual suspects (St Petersburg): think Philippines, Macedonia. Where next?
- who will mainstream it from there? think #BlackPR firms, #domestic adoption (next)
Domestic Disinformation
IRA's 2016 tactics now mainstreamed by domestic groups, notably GOP =censorship through noise on an epic scale, practised by a sitting President on a domestic population. IRA probably nowhere near as dangerous as Trump & Fox News himself - Russians can get a hashtag trending and may convince a few people, but Trump can get people to poison themselves with bleach with a single press conference.
See: #domestic and #disinformation.
Social v. mainstream media
Attacks on independent journalists integral part of the domestic disinfo package:
- reflects greater fear of them than of social media platforms?
- echoes political pressure on newspapers in the past:
- what's the difference?
- what's the same?
- Platforms fearing regulation - existential attack on business model.
- Mainstream media, on the other hand, inherited 20th century culture more resistant to political pressure - far from perfect, but idea there in theory. But now:
- undermined economically by the platforms who lack this culture entirely and bend more easily to political force?
- competing with AI-driven #pink slime
Delegitimisation
Undermining legitimacy of election before it takes place has been a major Trump #disinfo effort, spanning social media to postal fraud, starting months before election:
- Covid19-driven means mail-in voting will be larger than average, but Trump's base is likely to vote in person;
- in-person votes will be counted first, so early results will be pro-Trump, with mailed votes slowly turning the tide towards Biden.
- Claiming victory and seeing it overturned by mailed votes - which Trump has repeatedly claimed are open to fraud - is a perfect Trump narrative for delegitimising the vote if he loses.
- probably why he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Bigger picture: the idea that postal voting is flawed is pure disinformation, but has a long history as part of GOP's voter suppression campaigns - Time.
See: delegitimise.
Foreign actors: waiting in the wings?
From ed. 4: (mid-October): There are two possible reasons why we are not talking as much about foreign interference. Both could be true. Only one is good news... anyone trying to mess with America probably realises they can’t get Trump re-elected, and so are better off focusing on the post-election period, which offers a “better chance to push more Americans to extremes than ever before”. - Six Disinformation Threats in the Post-Election Period.
They've certainly learnt to be bette at their job. From Russians Again Targeting Americans With Disinformation, Facebook and Twitter Say:
- New tactic by IRS: "information laundering": creating the Peace Data website, featuring personas with computer-generated images to create what looked like a legitimate news organization, mixing pop culture, politics and leftwing activism to appeal to a young audience
- More sophisticated, but the activities on Twitter and Facebook to promote the site "almost overt, designed to be detected". So are they trying to disinform some people, or convince everyone that noone can trust any information? - see Psychological Toll
Psychological toll
Paraphrasing JFK: the only thing we should fear about disinformation is the fear of disinformation.
Immune system over-response:
- media response to Russian disinfo magnifies it
- the general sense of danger is more the goal than disinforming/misleading individuals: "if the goal is disruption and confusion", being thought to have an effect is as good as actually having an effect - inability to trust anything, to even believe the truth can be known, paranoia & fear (private)
A domestic disinformation war also takes terrible toll on individuals:
- hateful content
- being hounded out of the public sphere
- fearing to speak openly and lose your social group
Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think? | The New Yorker
Social media platforms
Not ready:
- Dealt with under 5% posts flagged for misinformation
- Facebook employees increasingly outraged, leaking information
- Fearing regulation - existential attack on business model - Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment & relaxed misinformation rules for conservative pages - Facebook account managers for important pages interfering with processing of #factcheck results. More from Yahoo!
- contradictory rules: sometimes Facebook will remove disinformation about voting; other times it will apply a warning label. How the company will make that choice is unknown - probably even to them.
- flip-flopped: set new rules, then changed them, particularly re: delegitimisation, triggering the #Censorship narrative, below
- election-related disinformation policies unclear, particularly concerning content to #delegitimise election
- doesn't factcheck political ads or politicians posts, so any post-election censorship against #delegitimise will look hypocritical.
- banned political ads before election, actually rewarding those with major Facebook followings like Trump, who don't need ads and then get to say that he's being "silenced".
Twitter did ban political ads. Small beer compared to a President with 80m followers, no respect for the truth, a nation-wide infrastructure (GOP) and huge sums of money.
The #Censorship narrative triggered
Sudden flipflops in October inevitably sparked concerns about #censorship, as if this was an entirely new narrative, including a major attack re censorship on Twitter from Trump (on Twitter!).
See: #censorship and #disinformation (starting 2016).
Not helping
- lack of cooperation by platforms -> harder to detect disinfo campaigns -> harder to fight -
- if platforms are making money off disinformation, they seem morally obliged to cooperate, but with whom?
Solutions
Study it
Frameworks for understanding disinfo collected here.
Look in the mirror
Is Russian Meddling as Dangerous as We Think? | The New Yorker
What does it mean when a society can be so easily manipulated and turned against itself? Blaming Russians diverts responsibility: Trump and Fox News do more damage to US society and truth in general than any Russian, but are they not themselves symptoms as well as a perpetuating cause of a greater underlying problem?
Russian and others exploit flashpoints in American society, and election year 2020 has been rich: #BLM, Covid19 and Trump himself. If American society was more just, stable and fair, those flashpoints would not be there.
Tactics
A ‘war room’ that arms Black and Latino voters against disinformation:
- Black/Latino activists targeting disinfo campaigns designed to exploit #BLM anger, alienate & suppress Black voters
- Counter speech which does not mention - and thus amplify - the disinformation itself:
- creating recipes to nullify and educate
- hindered by lack of cooperation from platforms
#Factchecking is not enough: needs to make way for reality-testing and gaslighting-fighting
Reframe as a health issue
cf Clay Johnson's Information Diet, "if there was food that was poisoning us we wouldn’t care how hard the companies were trying" - Twitter bots are impersonating Black Americans to sow disinformation
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Automated links to relevant public Curated Resources follow:
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Relevant resources
medium.com
How a decades-long election delegitimisation campaign, amplified by social media disinformation, intersects with the death of a Chief Justice in a GoT-worthy season finale of “US democracy: Endgame”.
Think
facebook,
metrics,
vote,
disinformation,
newsletter,
us2020,
delegitimise,
flicc,
ginsburg,
suppress
www.politico.com
A tour of the year from Zuckerberg's original position - that private companies should not be censoring politicians or the news in a democracy - to the most recent U-turn, after a year of exploring options: from continuing to do nothing through to Twitter's position - banning all political ads."field testing revealed that none of th…
www.theguardian.com
It's 2020 in the US: "a pandemic, economic collapse and a society-wide reckoning over racism [and] an election in which voter suppression, foreign interference, online disinformation and a bitterly contested supreme court vacancy ... an incumbent president who has spent months spreading disinformation and discrediting what he calls “the …
www.nbcnews.com
a group to analyze and critique Facebook's content moderation decisions, policies and other platform issues in the run-up to the presidential election... Facebook's own won't be ready for the election...The name - "Real Facebook Oversight Board" - is misleading: it won't hear users' claims or appeals; more of an …
www.fastcompany.com
Facebook reacted quickly, but it was reaction, not proaction, and therein lies the problem.When I saw and Queued this article, they'd confirmed to FastCompany that "political campaigns would be able to place new ads on Facebook starting November 4" which meant Trump could advertise an election victory before it was confirmed. By the…
news.yahoo.com
More insights into the way Facebook removed 'strikes' from its internal system against conservative pages labelled as propagating disinformation. "Facebook employees in the misinformation escalations team... deleted strikes ... issued to some conservative partners for posting misinformation ... discussions ... showed [they] were wo…
www.technologyreview.com
Tours election technology from 2008 to 2018 "and beyond".2008: Obama integrated e-mail, cell phones and websites to both convey the candidate’s message and enable his supporters to connect and self-organize - supporting grassroots community. MyBarackObama allowed users to form groups, raise money, organise events, get info on local vote…
www.nytimes.com
A case study of top down domestic disinformation: "Questions about the legitimacy of Justice Ginsburg’s “dying wish” were not circulating online [until] his Fox News appearance, [then] social media has filled with false claims echoing it... and taking it even further
time.com
"the greatest threat to a credible vote is homegrown... Trump has falsely claimed that mail-in ballots “lead to massive corruption and fraud,” that foreign powers will “forge ballots” and that the “only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” ...Bullshit, of course: he said this in 2016, but now with the weight of…
medium.com
This edition’s 9 articles span the real meaning of “foreign meddling” and domestic flashpoints, social media platform preparations for Election Night and beyond, and how media has to go beyond factchecking as it tackles “pink slime” (yes, it’s a thing).
Think
social media,
media,
facebook,
factchecking,
local,
disinformation,
newsletter,
us2020,
blm,
delegitimise,
pink slime
www.cjr.org
pink slime: shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data... a network of 450 intricately linked sites ID's in Dec 2019 is now 1200 ...largest 2 networks: 90+% are algorithmically generated stories from publicly available data sets or by repurposing legitimate sources - the…
www.nytimes.com
The world’s biggest social network is working out what steps to take should President Trump use its platform to dispute the vote.
www.buzzfeednews.com
"the platform promoted violent conspiracy theories and gave safe harbor to militia groups" like the “Kenosha Guard”, which issued a “call to arms” on Facebook which, despite two people reporting it, remained online. It was only removed by the group themselves after 2 people were killed by a 17 yr old.The level of employee pushback at Fac…
presswatchers.org
Donald Trump literally laughs factchecking off - it's good to have, but insufficient. To establish non-partisan status, factcheckers need to be equally tough on all sides, but all sides don't lie the same. They use euphemisms for 'lie', and check narrow, easy-to-debunk statements while ignoring the larger pattern of "the a…
www.cjr.org
Facebook's steps to verify election-related content and prevent disinformation or attempts at meddling have largely underwhelmed. Political ads may be banned for the week before the election, but not those created beforehand. In any case, that's after months of damage. And it doesn't stop people posting disinformation which are not …
www.msnbc.com
fake Twitter accounts removed: impersonated black men who left the Dems because of BLM to support Trump ... some had tweets with over 10,000 RTs...bots risk drowning out an authentic black political dialogue... shutting them down risks collateral damage (ie shutting down actual people, not fake accounts)...Great metaphor: "we would have a lot…
www.theatlantic.com
if his supporters truly come to believe that the game is rigged, that persuasion is impossible, then his argument acquires a dark and inevitable logic. When politics ceases to function, when the rules governing its practice have been dismissed as a hoax, all that remains is the barrel of the gun.
www.nytimes.com
The Russian group that interfered in the 2016 presidential election is at it again...
www.newyorker.com
Unless Biden stumbles, he'll win, but the amazing thing is that ~40% of Americans will support Trump no matter what. Trump is talking and acting crazy while over 1000 Americans die of covid19 on many days - compared to around half that in the worst week of the Vietnam war. Yet there seems to be no electoral consequence: the Trump-Biden gap ha…
www.niemanlab.org
Less than 5% of the 912 posts flagged for misinformation were dealt with by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Many concerned covid19 and over 10% mentioned Gates.Their election-related disinformation policies are unclear, particularly concerning content to de-legitimise the election, "which is likely to make enforcement difficult and…
www.newyorker.com
Literature note: “How to Lose the Information War,” ... on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy...Mueller report: I.R.A.-created groups and accounts reached tens of millions... the troll factory found “authentic, local voices,” to foment large-scale distrust in government and democracy... and managed to get into the heads of powerful politici…
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
I'm (re)launching my newsletter to focus on disinformation during the 2020 US election. It's also part of a wider experiment in integrating Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management into my personal content strategy, hosted on MyHub.ai.
www.politico.com
Social media companies are struggling with an onslaught of deceptive and divisive messaging from political parties, foreign governments and hate groups... echo the Russian ... efforts ... U.S. 2016 presidential election... far more insidious and sophisticated ... And ... amplified by mainstream news outlets and major U.S. political figures ...Nat…
www.latimes.com
As the internet lit up ... Accounts identified as belonging to Latino social media users voiced outrage about politically correct “mob” bullying ... activists immediately grew suspicious... thousands of posts were coming from ... bots... activists cooked up a counteroffensive... exposed “recipes” for disinformation and distorting facts... educatio…
www.nytimes.com
time to rethink “election night.”... Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump tweets false allegations about fraud ... already ... called mail-in voting into question with false claims about fraud ...[in the US] the media actually assembles the results from 50 states... declares a victor... establishes the narr…
www.buzzfeednews.com
Facebook employees collected evidence company giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation... worried how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year... Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections... senior engineer collected internal evidenc…
www.theatlantic.com
The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…
Like
social media,
media,
democracy,
cambridge analytica,
trump,
polarization,
us,
disinformation,
us2020,
domestic
www.nytimes.com
Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…
standuprepublic.com
The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media... into traditional media... disinformation content is designed to be polarizing... exploits the business models of social media... pointing out that something is false and dangerous ... giving more oxygen to the fire... [Trump] tests and revises purposefull…
www.nytimes.com
big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …
Relevant Overviews
- Communication Strategy
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
- Communications Tactics
- Psychology
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology
- Business