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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
www.buzzfeednews.com
"Facebook quietly stopped recommending that people join online groups dealing with political or social issues", and will "assess when to lift them afterwards, but they are temporary." This part of the Facebook's AI plays a key role in pushing "people down a path of radicalization... groups reinforce like-minded views …
threadreaderapp.com
An interesting corrective: here's the Tech columnist for the New York Times, claiming Facebook is flooded with right-wing misinformation, not all labelled as such - and "it's not clear that labels are doing much". Most people - including, usually, me - will read that tweet, have their beliefs confirmed and move on. What's…
onezero.medium.com
Several of the president’s tweets overlaid with disclaimers ... invoking Twitter's Civic Integrity Policy, which prevents users from manipulating elections. Trump’s tweets also effectively throttled by preventing other users from amplifying them. Facebook’s measures were less accusatory, attaching an informational label.Neither stopped Trump …
www.wsj.com
Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established i…
www.nytimes.com
The platforms started doing what people concerned about disinformation have been asking for, and immediately came under fire from people concerned about censorship.When The New York Post published a story supposedly incriminating Hunter Biden "YouTube largely did nothing, Facebook deprioritized the Post story (slowing spread until 3rd party f…
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social media,
facebook,
politics,
factchecking,
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youtube,
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disinformation,
us2020,
domestic
medium.com
There are two possible reasons why we are not talking as much about foreign interference. Both could be true. Only one is good news.
Think
social media,
facebook,
journalism,
conspiracy,
polarization,
censorship,
disinformation,
newsletter,
qanon,
us2020,
domestic,
delegitimise
www.theverge.com
All forms of content related to QAnon are banned, excepting posts from individual profiles, "even if they contain no violent content" - a significant update of Facebook's anti-Q August sweep - effectively treating it as an “identified Militarized Social Movement... no different than an extremist militia group, but not quite on the l…
www.wired.com
Criticisms of social media platforms for allowing disinfo and hate speech to flourish are accurate, but sometimes also wishful thinking: "if only Mark Zuckerberg got his act together, American politics would get back to normal"A disinfo video gone viral may get half a million views - the first Trump-Biden "debate was probably seen b…
popular.info
The new label makes clear that Facebook understands Trump is posting misinformation about whether votes are counted. But it is not fulfilling its stated policy to remove the post.
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.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…
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.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…
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.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.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.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 …
www.buzzfeednews.com
for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…
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facebook,
ai,
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Relevant Overviews
- Communication Strategy
- Content Strategy
- Online Strategy
- Online Community Management
- Social Media Strategy
- Content Creation & Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Innovation Strategy
- Surveillance Capitalism, Social media and Polarisation (Overview)
- Disinformation in the US 2020 elections
- Communications Tactics
- Psychology
- Social Web
- Media
- Politics
- Communications Strategy
- Science&Technology