11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

economictimes.indiatimes.com

Weapons of mass disinformation:

politics, polls, and social media’s
uphill battle against fake news
By — Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Send to Kindle

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to

exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth ― Garry Kasparov, chess
grandmaster

Though “disinformation” entered the lexicon only towards the end of the Cold
War era, it had long been used as a covert tactic since the time of the centuries-
old Roman-Persian conflict. Derived from dezinformatsiya, a term said to be
coined by Joseph Stalin during the World War II, disinformation has morphed
into a monster that is capable of anything from sparking communal tension to
swinging elections in the age of digital warfare.

From nation states to political parties, today’s global geopolitical arena is riddled
with disinformation. Political camps are increasingly becoming similar to
medieval-era secret societies, but the only difference is that they are spreading
disinformation instead of revolutionary ideas. Further, political parties seem to
have no qualms about relying on such tactics every time elections approach. For
instance, sample the following developments: ●Russia and China have used the
pandemic to boost disinformation campaigns designed to interfere with foreign
elections. ●Russian-influence operations targeting the US and the European
Union are becoming increasingly undetectable. ●Certain governments in Africa
took to social media to spread disinformation and influence electoral campaigns.
●Myanmar witnessed a surge in hate speech and disinformation ahead of its
general elections on November 8. ●The Jair Bolsonaro government in Brazil is
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 1/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

seeking help from advertising agencies to run disinformation campaigns to

bolster support for the current president and target the opposition. But what
makes disinformation an undesirable yet seemingly ineradicable strategy in so-
called “democratic” political dialogue?

Fake news, one tweet at a time

The year 2019 marked what was termed by sections of the media as the “first
WhatsApp election in India”, witnessing a sharp and targeted digital electoral
campaign. The Facebook-owned messaging app has got a more powerful
companion now which offers an even wider reach for the political narrative. Of
late, Twitter has seen intense activity as a platform for heated political debates,
allegations, and false claims, especially during the election season.

"When popular political figures share misinformation, it is more likely that their
most loyal supporters will believe the information."

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Though the political storm in the US has somewhat settled with the conclusion
of the hotly contested presidential elections, other nation states continue to broil
in the face of disinformation campaigns. What makes the situation even worse is
the fact that several popular public figures have jumped on the digital-
propaganda bandwagon. While negative campaigning is nothing new in many
democratic nations, it has taken a more extreme form in recent years as we’ve
seen with candidates tagging their opponents with extreme labels, making
unfounded allegations about their opponents or voting procedures (such as
fraud) or even calling for the Opposition to be locked up,” says Dustin Carnahan,
assistant professor, Department of Communication, Michigan State University.
Any piece of information or misinformation, when shared by a popular political
figure, increases the likelihood of exposure due to their large following on social-
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 2/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

media platforms. Exposure alone, when repeated, can raise the likelihood of
audiences believing false or misleading claims. Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen,
director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, agrees that
misinformation coming from the top is one of the most serious problems today.
“When popular political figures share misinformation, it is more likely that their
most loyal supporters will believe the information,” he says. It gives licence to
others who spread misinformation and increases the risk that attempts to limit
misinformation will be seen as politically motivated, he adds. “Disinformation is
intentionally false information, which definitely gains legitimacy when it is
shared by people in leadership positions,” reiterates Marietje Schaake,
international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and
international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial
Intelligence.

Now let’s take a look at the fake-news rank score of various leaders as projected
on the FakeRank tool developed by Adverif.ai, an ad-verification platform actively
involved in identifying disinformation using artificial intelligence.

Or Levi, founder of AdVerif.ai, explains that the FakeRank algorithm measures

the volume of questionable content, including offensive language, hate speech
and various kinds of misinformation such as conspiracy theories and false
science and health-related claims. The lower the score the better. “In the tool, we
showcase examples of questionable content from both sides of the political
spectrum. The scores vary based on the person, for example, @realdonaldtrump
is around 50%-60% and @JoeBiden is around 20%-30%,” he says. Often, the
success of political leaders in spreading misinformation encourages many others
to follow their footsteps.

Stephanie Sugars, a reporter at the US Press Freedom Tracker, has maintained a

database of Donald Trump’s usage of the phrase “fake news”. He has used it

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 3/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

nearly 900 times in his tweets. Her research highlights that he redoubled his
efforts to bash the Fourth Estate ahead of the election results.

According to Carnahan of Michigan State University, “To the extent that

spreading disinformation is successful in advancing misleading narratives or
deflecting negative attention from themselves, I certainly think it would be
possible for other world leaders to be encouraged to implement similar tactics in
their own campaigns.” Like Trump, many other world leaders and governments
have invoked the term “fake news” to discredit supposed leaks, allege falsehoods,
and denigrate the media. Commenting on how several national leaders tend to
engage in spreading fake news, Nielsen says, “We may have used to hold political
leaders to higher standards of discourse than individual members of the public.
Online, it seems political leaders are sometimes held to lower standards than the
rest of us”.

Indian elections and misinformation

Fake news in the Indian landscape is a more deep-rooted problem. It gets an even
stronger footing when fuelled and funded by parties and politicians.

The use of WhatsApp to circulate messages centred around electoral campaigns

has long been debated due to the nature of the end-to-end encryption feature,
which leaves not just the fact-checkers but even the hosting platform struggling
to figure out what actually takes place within chat groups.

Ahead of the Bihar elections, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) 9,500-strong IT cell
heads had formed around 72,000 WhatsApp groups for each booth to keep the
voters informed about the party’s initiatives and messages. The Indian National
Congress, on the other hand, in alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal, created
around 3,800 WhatsApp groups.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 4/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

BJP’s digital dominance, coupled with it being the single-biggest spender on

advertising on Facebook and Google, during the general elections 2019, reflects
the enormous influence it could potentially have on public discourse. ET Prime
had reported on political spending on fake news during the 2019 general
elections, which amounted to USD140 million.

According to a 2018 study by BBC titled “Duty, Identity, Credibility: ‘Fake News’
and the ordinary citizen in India”, 56.2% of the accounts followed by the Indian
prime minister’s personal handle are unverified. Furthermore, 61% of these
accounts sit in the cluster of pro-BJP amplifiers and have an average following of
25,370 and have an average of 48,388 tweets in their lifetime. Twitter handles of
other national leaders such as Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, too, follow
unverified accounts but the proportion stands at 11% and 37.7%, lower than that
of Narendra Modi.

US elections 2020: a quick fact-check

Election season is a busy time for the team of 45 people at the UK-based startup
that fights fake news, Logically. “Unfortunately, that is when we see the
mis/disinformation explode,” says its founder Lyric Jain. In the months prior to
the US elections, Logically deployed its industry-leading threat-detection
platform in the US to identify false information, coordinated inauthentic
behaviour, foreign interference, voter-suppression efforts, and activities
undermining electoral confidence. However, this election season has surpassed
the expectations of fake-news watchkeepers and fact-checkers. “In the US this
year, unfortunately we are seeing a significant amount of misinformation and
disinformation, more so even than in 2016,” Jain says. “But it’s not just volume
that’s cause for concern, it’s how it’s being generated and who’s behind it.”

While foreign interference is still an issue, the content that is being generated
and coordinated by domestic actors has seen by far a greater increase in the US in
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 5/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

2020. Part of the upsurge is due to the events this year such as Covid-19, civil
unrest, and the rise of QAnon, which contributed to an incredibly febrile
atmosphere that has been driven largely by domestic forces and then amplified
by foreign actors.

Covid-19 has certainly been a catalyst for malicious activity designed to

undermine the electoral process, says Jain. “We’re seeing signs of voter
suppression related to Covid-19, for example reporting fake outbreaks or giving
false locations for ballot drop-offs.” AdVerif.ai’s Levi affirms that. “In this period
around the US elections, we are seeing a substantial increase in the spread of
offensive and questionable content amid the divided social and political
backdrop,” he says.

Tech platforms in a tough spot

“I think it’s fair to say that the [social media] platforms have had a mixed record
over the last few years,” says Jain of Logically. However, he adds that these
platforms were late in recognising the seriousness of the problem, and then spent
too much time on internal debates rather than taking action. But in recent
months, he believes, they have taken some positive steps and now seem to have
accepted the significance of the problem. But that may not be enough. The
challenge of misinformation and disinformation is huge, and their perpetrators
are both well organised and financially incentivised. Meanwhile, posts by popular
handles or profiles carrying fake claims or hate speech often go unchecked on
social-media platforms. By the time the respective content-moderation teams
take note of it, such posts would have gone viral. Carnahan explains that if a
politician posts fake news and it stays on the platform, he or she has
accomplished the goal of advancing a narrative that serves their electoral
purposes. On the other hand, if the social-media platform swings into action
quickly and removes the post, it is often blamed as being corrupt or pushing an
agenda against the said politician’s party.This blame game puts social media-

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 6/7
11/16/2020 Mercury Reader

platforms in a difficult spot. Though many are aware of the problem, they have
not been able to implement a solution due to behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by
politicians. Furthermore, platforms that take a stronger stand against fake news
run the risk of being subjected to accusations of political bias and investigations.

The bottom line

To subdue the impact of fake news during elections, Facebook last month
announced a moratorium on political ads in the period after the election day in
the US. But this was in contradiction with what the company’s CEO Mark
Zuckerberg had pledged initially — to not introduce any further election-related
policy changes.Twitter rolled out a feature encouraging users to add their own
comments when sharing a tweet by prompting "Quote Tweets" in place of
"Retweets". It also added additional warnings and restrictions on tweets with
misleading content around the US elections. The microblogging platform labelled
nearly 300,000 tweets with disputed and potentially misleading content during
the US electoral period from October 27 till November 11. Google, too, said that
it would impose a temporary post-election ban on political ads after the election
day to circumvent false claims about the electoral results. Despite these efforts,
the battle against fake news is only half won. The reason: Politicians always know
how to sidestep regulations when it comes to furthering their agenda. What are
the government and the authorities doing about it? Well, next to nothing.

(Graphics by Sadhana Saxena)

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphi
ll-battle-against-fake-news/primearticleshow/79224129.cms

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/prime/technology-and-startups/weapons-of-mass-disinformation-politics-polls-and-social-medias-uphill-battle-ag… 7/7