Council Post: 2020 Elections: Be Wary Of These Five Disinformation Tactics

It’s election season in the U.S., and another potential crisis appears to be looming amid the pandemic. As if the “infodemic” surrounding Covid-19 wasn’t bad enough, the November 2020 election already promises to be the next big hacking and disinformation target. Twitter’s recent security woes provide a grave reminder of the types of threats U.S. elections are facing. Social media is actively being abused by political and nation-state adversaries to spread disinformation and mislead voters, and this is happening at an unprecedented scale.

What’s worse, if the electorate loses trust in the voting process, democracy as we know it may never fully recover.

Disinformation is deeply rooted in war and politics.

It’s no secret that Russian spy agencies weaponized disinformation and played an active role in the 2016 U.S. elections. But long before social media, trolls, bots and phishing, the Soviet Union was notoriously famous for using false propaganda; it wrote the playbook on it. The KGB called it “active measures,” a strategy to create false narratives or spread misinformation to gain military or political advantage. In the west, it came to be known as “disinformation,” a word that was derived from the Russian word “dezinformatsiya.”

The scale of disinformation campaigns in the pre-internet era was somewhat limited because most of the content was tied to clear authorship. Effective propaganda was only possible if there were active allies operating on the ground — Soviet agents themselves or authors and publishers who were sympathetic to Soviets.

In our internet age, all information becomes suspect when you consider how alleged social media “news” can be decoupled from the need to provide evidence backed by legitimate sources and authority and authenticity. Who has written it, and why are questions rarely asked about trolls, viral videos, memes and Twitter posts? The good news is that a few social media players are taking actions to delete conspiracy-peddling accounts.

What are the modern methods of internet manipulation?

No wonder online trolls spend most of their time on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Research suggests that our attention spans are decreasing as we try to cope with the deluge of information presented to us each day. The urge for newness is making us shift to newer topics faster. This situation creates fertile ground for spreading misinformation and manipulating campaigns. Unfortunately, the side effect primes us for disinformation, with recent research showing that 55% of U.S. adults get their news from social media. The Brexit referendum proves how successful these manipulators have become.

Here are five of the top lesser-known manipulation techniques:

• Astroturfing: The term originates from a brand of artificial grass made to look real. An example of astroturfing could be a series of comments made on social media, blogs or websites that appear to be uncoordinated or perceived as deriving from a random “grassroots” campaign of well-meaning private citizens. Astroturfing implies that these promotions are, in fact, orchestrated by a public relations or marketing agency (think Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency) funded by a nation-state adversary.

• Gaslighting: This alludes to the phrase “adding fuel to the fire” and involves a kind of psychological manipulation on a targeted individual or group to distort their sense of reality. Victims are usually not aware of the facts or are fed a false narrative, which makes them lose their grip on reality or deny it. Victims include climate change and Holocaust deniers, or those who believe Covid-19 is a “hoax.”

• Sock Puppet: This technique involves masquerading as someone by creating aliases or false personas or even fake LinkedIn profiles. The fake nature of their identities allows them to make controversial and offensive comments taking sides on deeply partisan or divisive issues while seeming to be a real person with no hidden agenda. They may even go to the extent of posting comments created under the pretext of another false identity.

• Clickbait: This tactic involves creating a misleading or inaccurate post using a provocative headline or image that lures the victim to click and read the content. The content often turns out to be unrelated or less sensational than the headline itself, or the clicker winds up downloading malicious malware. Clickbait titles can also be designed to polarize people by focusing on hot-button issues. This tactic can allow a disinformation engineer to pull emotional levers while also getting the click; they are then able to achieve additional goals from simple pay-per-click monetization to downloading malware.

• Microtargeting: This is the most recent and possibly the most controversial tactic in recent times. Microtargeting is the process of slicing up voters into small groups based on demographics, interests, biases or affiliations, and serving up tailored messages that appeal to the individual.

Limiting the spread of disinformation is a collective responsibility.

Big tech firms have already committed resources to fight the infodemic surrounding Covid-19 and are also gearing up for the disinformation war in the upcoming elections. Experts are already warning of disinformation chaos starting on election day and leading up to inauguration day on account of the already-controversial mail-in ballots.

With the proliferation of technology in our daily lives, waters are probably only going to get even murkier. Today it’s the pandemic, tomorrow, the elections, and the day after, something else. Nations, governments and institutions must raise awareness on disinformation and encourage people to continue developing cybersecurity skills that help them identify and sort out fact from fiction to check sources, backgrounds and motives. Individuals also carry a responsibility to ensure they stop disinformation in its tracks. As the United Nations chimes, “Pause. Take care before you share.”

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