Foreign Disinformation Research Articles

Disinformation and strategic frames: Introducing the concept of a strategic epistemology towards media

Efforts to raise awareness about foreign disinformation might accidentally increase distrust towards legitimate media. We argue that state discourse on disinformation is comparable to strategic framing in journalists’ coverage of political events, and that it might imbue audiences with cynicism. Furthermore, in contrast to an experimental paradigm that depicts disinformation audiences as passive, we suggest that news consumers actively appropriate and produce content themselves. Conceptualising media content as ‘strategic’ rather than sincere might influence audiences to share and produce media content strategically. This Machiavellian tendency leads to similar effects on bias as motivated reasoning. Most accounts of motivated reasoning assume that limits of psychological processing are the reasons for biased judgements of what is true and fake, however, we argue that biases can also be due to culturally acquired second-order beliefs about knowledge. To explain this, we build on ideas about ‘folk epistemology’ and propose the term ‘strategic epistemology towards media’. Resistance-building efforts against disinformation risk promoting such a strategic epistemology towards media and this can have harmful effects on democratic dialogue. To avoid this, educational interventions should be premised on social epistemology rather than experimental psychology.

Behind Every Good Lie Is a Grain of Truth

Abstract Drawing on the experiences of the 2020 Taiwanese and Moldovan presidential elections, this article develops a framework to better understand whether certain aspects of identity can predict a constituency’s demand for foreign disinformation during contentious election cycles. The model bridges key tenets of Monroe E. Price’s “market for loyalties” metaphor with geographic information system applications to identify areas where a constituency’s willingness to exchange loyalty for disinformation is expected to be salient within these postimperial polities. The article concludes by outlining the theoretical implications for focused policy interventions in Taiwan and Moldova.

Country branding in post-truth Era: A configural narrative

This study investigates the impact of online disinformation and hate speech on a country's image, considering its implications for the destination's image and tourism prospects. Utilizing the theoretical lens of soft power, the study performs a macro-level empirical analysis across 56 countries on the influence of a diverse array of online disinformation variants and hate speech on the nation's brand image. The results from the configurational analysis demonstrate the increasing dominance of state and partisan factions-led disinformation, which collectively impact the nation's image. The findings also shed light on the diminishing role of foreign disinformation, while the ancillary function of online hate emphasizes the significance of disinformation amplified hate speech, which has become increasingly commonplace in global political discourse, with such disinformation campaigns using hate speech as an amplification strategy. The study contributes to contemporary tourism research, which underscores the vitality of the country's image to tourism and offers recommendations to destination marketing organizations towards intensifying efforts to preserve the country's image.

FENOMENA DISINFORMSASI VAKSINASI COVID-19 PADA REMAJA DI KABUPATEN JOMBANG

This study looks at how disinformation regarding Covid-19 affects the process of making vaccination decisions for adolescents aged 12 to 17 years in Jombang Regency. The increase in the spread of disinformation related to Covid-19, which contains information that lacks credibility in the content of the information available, creates various negative perspectives from its readers towards the Covid-19 vaccination, which, as stated by WHO, has spread disinformation and caused confusion, suspicion, as well as negative sentiment towards the Covid-19 vaccination. In addition to vaccine skepticism and skepticism, public health has long been the target of foreign disinformation campaigns, including conspiracy theories, as part of the larger struggle for national security (Boghardt, 2009; Ellick & Westbrook, 2018). With the influence of rampant disinformation on various social media, the suspicion of vaccination is increasing, which gives a negative view. This study used a qualitative approach with a phenomenological study method. Data collection techniques were carried out by means of FGD (Forum Group Discussion) and interviews. The results of the study show that Covid-19 disinformation has a role in the decision-making process for youth vaccination aged 12-17 years in Jombang. However, with this, there are still other factors that influence the decision, namely related to the role of community leaders around. This study used a qualitative approach with a phenomenological study method. Data collection techniques were carried out by means of FGD (Forum Group Discussion) and interviews. The results of the study show that Covid-19 disinformation has a role in the decision-making process for youth vaccination aged 12-17 years in Jombang Regency. However, with this, there are still other factors that influence the decision, namely related to the role of community leaders around. This study used a qualitative approach with the phenomenological study method. Data collection techniques were carried out by means of FGD (Forum Group Discussion) and interviews. The results of the study show that Covid-19 disinformation has a role in the decision-making process for youth vaccination aged 12-17 years in Jombang Regency. However, with this, there are still other factors that influence the decision, namely related to the role of community leaders around.
 Keywords: Disinformation; Vaccination; Decisions

Powered by innovation, derailed by disinformation: A multi-country analysis of the influence of online political disinformation on nations' innovation performance

A nation's development is determined by its predisposition for innovation and commitment to fostering innovation ecosystems. However, the political structures and disinformation within them represent a significant threat to innovation endeavors. Despite disinformation's far-reaching repercussions, its role in stifling innovation remains largely unknown. Anchored on the need to shed light on its debilitating effects, the current study examines the influence of social media disinformation from the government, political parties, and foreign governments in derailing nations' innovation performance. Drawing upon complexity theory and configurational analysis, the results of a cross-country examination based on data from 2021 to 22 and encompassing 131 nations indicate that the spread of disinformation by governments and political parties poses an increasing threat to innovation performance, surpassing the influence exerted by foreign disinformation. The supplemental analysis reinforces this finding but emphasizes that the risk of foreign disinformation remains a persistent concern for innovation efforts in developed countries. The results have implications for the emergent body of technology research on the dark side of social media and the escalating crisis of false information over the past few years while also extending recent claims regarding the role of political systems in influencing the innovation ecosystem within countries.

Crowddoing and crowdfunding democracy: Innovative strategies for countering foreign disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe has become a ripe target for disinformation and malign narratives propagated by foreign actors. A deluge of propaganda deployed by hostile states is aimed at polarizing societies, undermining the decision-making capabilities of governments, and influencing public policy. Against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the stakes are enormous. Heeding research on debunking and pre-bunking strategies recognizing the limitations and potential of these approaches in inoculating populations against disinformation, this paper examines how several tactics deployed in the CEE region can both speak to and draw from this literature. While certain segments of CEE populations may be vulnerable to disinformation, the region also boasts civically engaged publics that want to take an active part in fostering societal resilience. The rise of digital elves (volunteer information warriors taking the fight to online trolls), the outsourcing of counter-disinformation activities to popular public institutions (like the police and military), and the use of crowdfunding to support news literacy education and independent media outlets present compelling alternative strategies towards responding to foreign influence. These activities show promise in overcoming obstacles faced by conventional approaches to disinformation and addressing CEE-specific issues related to media distrust and state capture of the media.

Disinformation as a Threat to Democratic States Such as Bulgaria

The article examines to what extent disinformation is a threat to a democratic state such as Bulgaria. The hypothesis is that democratic states possess enough resources to counter effectively foreign disinformation campaigns. Based on in-depth interviews with experts from the security and media fields, the research has rejected, to a large extent, this hypothesis about Bulgaria. It has found out that the country is quite vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and the article elaborates on the causes for this vulnerability and on possible countering measures.

Misinformed: Implications of Foreign Influence on the Information Environment that Launched Operation Iraqi Freedom

This article examines the means through which disinformation made its way into major media outlets and the U.S. intelligence community in the months preceding the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq. Most of the relevant literature tends to frame this period in terms of failure, directed at either intelligence producers or consumers. Instead, this study approaches the issue from a perspective of success—namely that of a foreign disinformation campaign—which may reveal instructive lessons overlooked in previous research. Despite its role in launching the Iraq War (2003–11), disinformation remained ill-defined and shallowly analyzed in the public sphere in the years between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As international tensions rise and the U.S. Joint force leans more heavily on open-source information in its operations, it is imperative that the American people, intelligence analysts, and policymakers understand how the environment has been exploited to build false consensus during periods of heightened political instability.

Disinformation ‘gatecrashes’ tourism: An empirical study

Disinformation poses a formidable threat to the tourism industry, but empirical studies remain limited. Recognizing this escalating crisis, this study undertakes a theoretically grounded cross-country investigation of political disinformation and its crippling consequences on the travel and tourism sector. While the pre-pandemic analysis from 2018 constituting 160 countries demonstrates the impact of foreign disinformation on the sector's performance, a supplemental analysis from 2021 comprising 117 countries highlights domestic disinformation emerging as a greater threat over disinformation from foreign operatives. Qualitative insights are presented for specific configurations. The study overcomes theoretical vagueness around disinformation as a phenomenon and provides a robust theoretical foundation anchored on agenda-building and soft power theories for the understanding of disinformation and its impact on tourism performance.

The need to up our game in countering disinformation

The U.S. government should establish a nongovernmental institute of expert spokespersons to counter foreign disinformation and propaganda more effectively. Such an institute would provide a media-friendly source of information and perspective from experts totally immersed in the relevant subject matters. They would debunk false charges, but also reframe the discussion to reveal disinformers’ records of lies as well as the quirks of human belief that make many people susceptible to false claims. Government can play an essential role in uncovering the secret machinations of hostile state actors, but typically chooses spokespersons who are managers rather than subject matter experts. Not only do they lack in-depth knowledge of often obscure subjects, but also lack the autonomy to freely discuss highly controversial subjects. Nongovernmental expert spokespersons would suffer neither deficiency.

Do I sound American?

Ongoing research into how states coordinate foreign disinformation campaign has raised concerns over social media’s influence on democracies. One example is the spread of Russian disinformation in the 2016 US presidential election. Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) Twitter accounts have been known to deliver messages with strategic attempts and political goals. We use publicly available IRA Twitter data created during and after the 2016 US election campaign (2016 and 2017) to examine the nature of strategic message features of foreign-sponsored online disinformation and their social media sharing. We use computational approaches to identify unique syntactic features of online disinformation tweets from IRA compared to American Twitter corpora, reflecting their functional and situational differences. More importantly, we examine what message features in IRA tweets across syntax, topic, and sentiment were associated with more sharing (retweets). Implications are discussed.

The Canadian government’s response to foreign disinformation: Rhetoric, stated policy intentions, and practices

In recent years, governments have considered how to respond to “disinformation.” However, there is little academic literature on Canada’s response in the area of security and foreign policy. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how and why Canadian government foreign and security actors have “securitized” foreign disinformation. It argues that, since 2014, they have increased awareness about disinformation and transformed it into a matter of “security” through rhetoric and discursive framing, as well as stated policy intentions and actions. This has occurred in response to perceived threats, but without coherent policy. The findings suggest that challenges are linked to persistent difficulties in defining and understanding disinformation. The result has been fragmented actions, some of which may legitimate actions that deviate from “normal political processes.” The implications are that definitional challenges need to be addressed, the role of security actors assessed, and a clearly articulated and holistic strategy drawn.

Foreign disinformation operation's affective engagement: Valence versus discrete emotions as drivers of tweet popularity

AbstractTwitter's 2018 release of its data corpus on Iran‐ and Russia‐backed accounts provided an opportunity to examine whether emotion‐laden tweets reached a wider audience than nonemotional tweets in the first large‐scale attempt to interfere in the US presidential election in 2016. We contrasted the dimensional and discrete theories of emotion by comparing tweets’ virality as a function of their valence or discrete emotional content. While both perspectives were supported by the popularity of positive and joyful tweets, the unpopularity of negative and fearful tweets uniquely supported the discrete view. The robustness of this theoretically insightful finding was checked by applying a set of keywords from the Department of Homeland Security to identify tweets that were both negative and fear‐evoking. Iranian and Russian disinformation operatives seemed unaware of negative and fearful tweets’ unpopularity and composed most posts with these sentiments. This study's findings explored the digital extensions of two emotion theories and balanced the prevailing media reporting on foreign disinformation operations’ sophistication.

The Sisson Documents and their ‘distinguished place’ in the history of disinformation

ABSTRACT Russian interference in American politics appears today in sophisticated forms thanks to technology, but disinformation is not a new phenomenon. The influence of foreign disinformation on domestic policy has antecedents in the First World War, when the American government distributed fabricated documents supplied by anti-Communist revolutionaries to make false claims about a German-Bolshevik conspiracy. The so-called Sisson Documents strengthened a narrative the Wilson administration created that the Bolsheviks were German stooges who, with German support and direction, took Russia out of the war and promoted unrest in the United States. The Wilson administration sold the German-Bolshevik conspiracy through a pro-war, patriotic American press, whose pages were laced with talk of pervasive German conspiracies.

Source alerts can reduce the harms of foreign disinformation

Social media companies have begun to use content-based alerts in their efforts to combat mis- and disinformation, including fact-check corrections and warnings of possible falsity, such as “This claim about election fraud is disputed.” Another harm reduction tool, source alerts, can be effective when a hidden foreign hand is known or suspected. This paper demonstrates that source alerts (e.g., “Determined by Twitter to be a Russian government account”) attached to pseudonymous posts can reduce the likelihood that users will believe and share political messages.

Relating foreign disinformation through social media, domestic online media fractionalization, government's control over cyberspace, and social media-induced offline violence: Insights from the agenda-building theoretical perspective

While disinformation through social media has emerged as a new form of information operations for countries to advance their strategic interests, there is a lack of studies examining its adverse impacts. By grounding the discussion on the agenda-building theory, we theorize the relationships among four key variables of interest, namely, (1) foreign disinformation through social media, (2) domestic online media fractionalization, (3) government's control over cyberspace, and (4) social media-induced offline violence in a country. A quantitative analysis based on publicly available archival data offers support for our research model. Specifically, our findings indicate that foreign disinformation through social media increases social media-induced offline violence in a country by increasing its domestic online media fractionalization. Further, our results highlight that the relationships among foreign disinformation through social media, social media-induced offline violence, and domestic online media fractionalization in a country are contingent on the government's role in controlling its cyberspace. Implications of our findings to research and practice are discussed.

State media warning labels can counteract the effects of foreign disinformation

Platforms are increasingly using transparency, whether it be in the form of political advertising disclosures or a record of page name changes, to combat disinformation campaigns. In the case of state-controlled media outlets on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter this has taken the form of labeling their connection to a state. We show that these labels have the ability to mitigate the effects of viewing election misinformation from the Russian media channel RT. However, this is only the case when the platform prominently places the label so as not to be missed by users.

Social media and vaccine hesitancy

BackgroundUnderstanding the threat posed by anti-vaccination efforts on social media is critically important with the forth coming need for world wide COVID-19 vaccination programs. We globally evaluate the effect of...

The easy weaponization of social media: why profit has trumped security for U.S. companies

American-based social media companies have become active players in digital war, both by accident of design and a subsequent failure to address the threat due to concerns over profits. Discussions about the negative role of social media in society generally address the myriad problems wrought by social media, including electoral manipulation, foreign disinformation, trolling, and deepfakes, as unfortunate side effects of a democratizing technology. This article argues that the design of social media fosters information warfare. With its current composition and lack of regulation, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are active agents of disinformation, their destructive force in society outweighing their contributions to democracy. While this is not by deliberate design, the twin forces of capitalism and a lack of regulation of the world’s largest social media platforms have led to a situation in which social media are a key component of information war around the globe. This means that scholarly discussions should shift away from questions of ethics or actions (or lack thereof) on the part of social media companies to a frank focus on the security risk posed to democracy by social media.

#Kremlin: Using Hashtags to Analyze Russian Disinformation Strategy and Dissemination on Twitter

Reports of Russian interference in U.S. elections have raised grave concerns about the spread of foreign disinformation on social media sites, but there is little detailed analysis that links traditional political communication theory to social media analytics. As a result, it is difficult for researchers and analysts to gauge the nature or level of the threat that is disseminated via social media. This paper leverages both social science and data science by using traditional content analysis and Twitter analytics to trace how key aspects of Russian strategic narratives were distributed via #skripal, #mh17, #Donetsk, and #russophobia in late 2018. This work will define how key Russian international communicative goals are expressed through strategic narratives, describe how to find hashtags that reflect those narratives, and analyze user activity around the hashtags. This tests both how Twitter amplifies specific information goals of the Russians as well as the relative success (or failure) of particular hashtags to spread those messages effectively. This research uses Mentionmapp, a system co-developed by one of the authors (Gray) that employs network analytics and machine intelligence to identify the behavior of Twitter users as well as generate profiles of users via posting history and connections. This study demonstrates how political communication theory can be used to frame the study of social media; how to relate knowledge of Russian strategic priorities to labels on social media such as Twitter hashtags; and to test this approach by examining a set of Russian propaganda narratives as they are represented by hashtags. Our research finds that some Twitter users are consistently active across multiple Kremlin-linked hashtags, suggesting that knowledge of these hashtags is an important way to identify Russian propaganda online influencers. More broadly, we suggest that Twitter dichotomies such as bot/human or troll/citizen should be used with caution and analysis should instead address the nuances in Twitter use that reflect varying levels of engagement or even awareness in spreading foreign disinformation online.