• New Report on Russia’s Online Operations: Pseudo-Think Tanks, Personas

    The Kremlin used many different techniques in its effective campaigns of interference in the politics of Western democracies, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One such technique is “narrative laundering” – the technique of moving a certain narrative from its state-run origins to the wider media ecosystem through the use of aligned publications, “useful idiots,” and, perhaps, witting participants. “Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect,” a new report says.

  • Germany: Far-Right Lawmaker Punished over Anti-Semitism

    German lawmakers on Wednesday, in a move which is unprecedented in modern German history, removed a far-right politician from his position as the chairman of the powerful Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag. The move came after the politician, Stephan Brandner, has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments. All the parties in the Bundestag, except his own AfD party, voted to strip him of the committee’s chairmanship.

  • Firehosing: The Systemic Strategy that Anti-Vaxxers Are Using to Spread Misinformation

    “Firehosing” relies on pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible. Firehosing is effective because its goal isn’t to persuade. It’s to rob facts of their power. “The strategy is effective for those trying to hold on to political power, and it’s the same for those who gain power from engaging in science denial,” Lucky Tran writes.

  • How Fake News Spreads Like a Real Virus

    When it comes to real fake news, the kind of disinformation that Russia deployed during the 2016 elections, “going viral” isn’t just a metaphor. Using the tools for modelling the spread of infectious disease, cyber-risk researchers at Stanford Engineering are analyzing the spread of fake news much as if it were a strain of Ebola.

  • The Trolls Are Everywhere. Now What Are We Supposed to Do?

    Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. Andrew Marantz’s just published book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, offers a detailed and disturbing study of how the social media platforms, rolled out over the last decade by a group of nerdy but naïve Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been hijacked by “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists, and more, whose goal is to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways,” Marantz writes. Public discourse is being replaced by the dance of discord and enragement and noxiousness.

  • Online Disinformation and Political Discourse: Applying a Human Rights Framework

    The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) saw human rights as a fundamental safeguard for all individuals against the power of authority. Although some digital platforms now have an impact on more people’s lives than does any one state authority, the international community has been slow to measure and hold to account these platforms’ activities by reference to human rights law. Kate Jones writes that “Although international human rights law does not impose binding obligations on digital platforms, it offers a normative structure of appropriate standards by which digital platforms should be held to account. Because of the impact that social media can have, a failure to hold digital platforms to human rights standards is a failure to provide individuals with the safeguards against the power of authority that human rights law was created to provide.”

  • Are Facebook and Google State Actors?

    In 1924, concerned about monopolization in the radio industry, the secretary of commerce said something prescient: “It cannot be thought that any single person or group shall ever have the right to determine what communication may be made to the American people. … We cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in a position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcasted to the public.” Jed Rubenfeld writes that what Secretary Herbert Hoover warned against has now come to pass:

  • Social Media: Growing Conduit for Electoral Manipulation, Mass Surveillance

    Governments around the world are increasingly using social media to manipulate elections and monitor their citizens, tilting the technology toward digital authoritarianism. As a result of these trends, global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year, according to Freedom on the Net 2019, the latest edition of the annual country-by-country assessment of internet freedom, released today by Freedom House.

  • Russia Tests New Disinformation Tactics in Africa to Expand Influence

    Russia has been testing new disinformation tactics in an enormous Facebook campaign in parts of Africa, as part of an evolution of its manipulation techniques ahead of the 2020 American presidential election. Unlike past influence campaigns from Russia, the Africa campaign targeted several countries through Arabic-language posts. Russians also worked with locals in the African countries to set up Facebook accounts that were disguised as authentic to avoid detection. The effort was at times larger in volume than what the Russians deployed in the United States in 2016 to help Donald Trump win the presidential election. The campaign underlined how Russia is continuing to aggressively try different disinformation techniques, even as it has come under scrutiny for its online interference methods.

  • Germany Unveils New Plan to Fight Far-Right Extremism, Online Hate Speech

    Facing a growing far-right extremist violence, the German government today (Wednesday) unveiled a series of new measures giving intelligence and law enforcement services more power to combat the threat. Among the new measures: Tightening gun laws; more protection for political figures at all levels; a requirement for social media companies to report online criminal content; and reducing privacy protection for social media posters disseminating hate and incitement.

  • New UN Report on Online Hate Speech

    Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently gave a highly promoted speech about the importance of protecting freedom of expression online—which was immediately criticized as taking too binary a view of the issues and presenting a false choice between free expression and Chinese censorship. Evelyn Douek writes that by contrast, David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the freedom of opinion and expression, in a 9 October report, offered a very real reckoning with the trade-offs involved in protecting free speech while dealing with the real harm caused by some forms of expression, and is an attempt to find guiding, consistent standards. “There is still a lot of work to be done, not least by the companies themselves, to make this a reality,” Douek writes. “But this latest report will be a useful and influential guide in that process.”

  • Emerging Risk: Virtual Societal Warfare

    The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression which involves efforts to manipulate or disrupt the information foundations of the effective functioning of economic and social systems. Researchers are calling this growing threat “virtual societal warfare.”

  • Trolls Exploit Weaknesses of Social Media Platforms to Spread Online Hate, Report Finds

    Social media platform design enables online harassment, as trolls often carry out coordinated attacks on a target by leveraging key platform features, according to a new report. Such features include the ability to be anonymous online, to create multiple accounts by one person, the fact that there is no limit to the number of messages one user can send to another, and the use of personal networks as weaponized audiences.

  • How Fact-Checking Can Win the Fight Against Misinformation

    According to fact-checkers at the Washington Post, President Donald Trump has made more than 13,000 false or misleading claims since his inauguration. It is no wonder some people doubt that the fact-checking of politicians’ claims is an answer to the problems of this misinformation age. Peter Cunliffe-Jones , Laura Zommer, Noko Makgato, and Will Moy write that “As the leaders or founders of fact-checking organizations in Africa, Latin America, and Europe, we know that our work can play a powerful role in countering the effects of misinformation and restoring faith in reliable sources.” They add: “While we shouldn’t underestimate the scale of the threat posed by misinformation and declining trust, or the complexity of their causes, the problem is not nearly as intractable as some seem to believe. By addressing not only the symptoms of misinformation and mistrust, but also the systemic problems that underlie them, fact-checking organizations, media, government, and business can resist these worrisome trends.”

  • If Germany Can’t Stop the Rise of White Nationalism, How Can Canada?

    Between 2017 and 2018, anti-Semitic and xenophobic crimes both rose nearly 20 percent in Germany. In June, following the assassination by a neo-Nazi of Walter Lübcke, a conservative politician who supported Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, busted Nordkreuz, an extremist organization which compiled a kill list of 25,000 liberal politicians considered “pro-refugee” while also acquiring weapons, 200 body bags, and quicklime, which prevents the rotting that makes corpses smell. The BfV says that it is now tracking 24,100 known right-wing extremists in the country, of which 12,700 have been classified as violent. “That these developments are happening in Germany, a country known for an unflinching view of its own horrific past, might be considered surprising,” Sadiya Ansari writes. “And if Germany is struggling to contain this [extremists’] threat, what does that mean for countries that haven’t been as vigilant?”