[Civsoc-mw] disinfo campaigns widespread..... NYTimes.

[cammack at mweb.co.za]

At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds

The New York Times

 

By Davey Alba and Adam Satariano

 

    Sept. 26, 2019, 12:01 a.m. ET

 

In Vietnam, citizens were enlisted to post pro-government messages on their
personal Facebook pages. The Guatemalan government used hacked and stolen
social media accounts to silence dissenting opinions. Ethiopia's ruling
party hired people to influence social media conversations in its favor.

 

Despite increased efforts by internet platforms like Facebook to combat
internet disinformation, the use of the techniques by governments around the
world is growing, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at
Oxford University. Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit
political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs.

 

The researchers compiled information from news organizations, civil society
groups and governments to create one of the most comprehensive inventories
of disinformation practices by governments around the world. They found that
the number of countries with political disinformation campaigns more than
doubled to 70 in the last two years, with evidence of at least one political
party or government entity in each of those countries engaging in social
media manipulation.

 

In addition, Facebook remains the No. 1 social network for disinformation,
the report said. Organized propaganda campaigns were found on the platform
in 56 countries.

 

"Social media technology tends to empower propaganda and disinformation in
really new ways," said Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at the Oxford
Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, and co-author of the
study. The institute previously worked with the Senate Intelligence
Committee to investigate Russian interference around the 2016 campaign.

 

The report highlights the continuing challenge for Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube as they try to combat disinformation, particularly when the
perpetrators are governments. The companies have announced internal changes
to reduce social media manipulation and foreign interference.

 

But the research shows that use of the tactics, which include bots, fake
social media accounts and hired "trolls," is growing. In the past two
months, the platforms have suspended accounts linked to governments in China
and Saudi Arabia.

 

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a company that
specializes in analyzing social media, said the growing use of internet
disinformation is concerning for the 2020 United States election. A mix of
domestic and foreign groups, operating autonomously or with loose ties to a
government, are building from the methods used by Russia in the last
presidential election, making it difficult for the platforms to police, he
said.

 

"The danger is the proliferation" of the techniques, he said. "Anybody who
wants to influence the 2020 election may be tempted to copy what the Russian
operation did in 2016."

 

China's emergence as a powerful force in global disinformation is one of the
most significant developments of the past year, researchers said. The
country has long used propaganda domestically, but the protests this year in
Hong Kong brought evidence that it was expanding its efforts. In August,
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube suspended accounts linked to Beijing that were
spreading disinformation about the protests.

 

Philip N. Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the
authors of the report, said that such online disinformation campaigns can no
longer be understood to be the work of "lone hackers, or individual
activists, or teenagers in the basement doing things for clickbait."

 

There is a new professionalism to the activity, with formal organizations
that use hiring plans, performance bonuses and receptionists, he said.

 

In recent years, governments have used "cyber troops" to shape public
opinion, including networks of bots to amplify a message, groups of "trolls"
to harass political dissidents or journalists, and scores of fake social
media accounts to misrepresent how many people engaged with an issue.

 

The tactics are no longer limited to large countries. Smaller states can now
easily set up internet influence operations as well. The Oxford researchers
said social media was increasingly being co-opted by governments to suppress
human rights, discredit political opponents and stifle dissent, including in
countries like Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe and Bahrain. In Tajikistan, university
students were recruited to set up fake accounts and share pro-government
views. During investigations into disinformation campaigns in Myanmar,
evidence emerged that military officials were trained by Russian operatives
on how to use social media.

 

 

Most government-linked disinformation efforts were focused domestically,
researchers concluded. But at least seven countries had tried to influence
views outside their borders: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi
Arabia and Venezuela.

 

Ms. Bradshaw said that in the case studies the Oxford team identified,
advertising was not central to the spread of disinformation. Instead, she
said, the campaigns sought to create memes, videos or other pieces of
content designed to take advantage of social networks' algorithms and their
amplifying effects - exploiting the potential for virality on the platforms
for free.

 

Ms. Bradshaw said both government regulation and the steps taken by Facebook
to combat this kind of disinformation didn't go far enough. A lot of the
regulation "tends to focus on the content" or "problems at the edges of
disinformation problems," she said, pointing to efforts like Facebook's
transparency in its ads archive.

 

"But from our research, we know that this problem of microtargeting ads is
actually only a very small part of the problems," Ms. Bradshaw said.
Facebook has not addressed deeper structural problems that make it easy to
spread false and misleading information, she said.

 

"To address that you need to look at the algorithm and the underlying
business model," Ms. Bradshaw said.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 26, 2019, Section B,
Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning to 'Cyber Troops'
To Skew Global Reality. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | 


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