The New Yorker September 14, 2020 pp26-31 |Annals of Politics|”Believe It Or Not” “How concerned should we be about online Russian manipulations?” By Joshua Yaffa
Graphic source news.mit.edu
Summary of Article
Yes Russian and other disinformation exists, especially on Social Media, but on its own, as posts, has little penetration and little real impact. In reality, it is the echoing, for sensation or political gain, of thinly-followed content by traditional media and government leaders that exponentially increases the impact. The goal of Russian’s and politicians wanting to leverage disinformation is really to have the anxious news-following public focusing on distraction and chaos rather than substantive issues. Previous era concerns centered on lack of access to information but today the concern is too much information, too much access and not enough knowledge of how to assess the truthfulness of content. Ultimately, with polarized politics and mistrust, disinformation is more appealing. Rather than increasing regulations or expecting Social Media to police posted content, durable solutions will likely involve an earnest effort to understand our differences and in educating the population, starting with our children, how to effectively determine whether bits of information are factual or not.
Quotes from the Article
“The challenge in making sense of disinformation…is disentangling intent from impact”
“A 2017 Yale study found that labelling Facebook content “disputed” increased the share of users who judged it to be false by less than four percent”
According to Nina Jankowicz, author of “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict”, “Unless we mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal issues, we will continue to be an easy target for any malign actor.”
Says Art Toler (Bellingcat-unit that tracks Russian intelligence operations), “The effect of one Trump press conference or tweet in shaping opinions, even behaviors can be monumental.” In response to Trump suggesting that “disinfectant could be injected into the body to treat COVID-19”, The North Texas poison-control hotlines received “nearly 50 calls about bleach ingestion in the first three weeks of August alone. The most a few thousand Russian-directed bot accounts might achieve is to get a Twitter hashtag trending for a few hours.”
“When it comes to COVID-19, the apparent result of the combined disinformation campaign of Trump and Fox News has been devastating. A working paper…that had analyzed anonymous location data from millions of cell phones showed “that residents of Zip Codes with higher Fox New viewership were less likely to follow stay-at-home orders.”
“The tradecraft of disinformation remains the same-forged documents, planted leaks, fake experts” but unlike the Cold War era what we have today is the rise of “cheap speech”. Tim Wu (Columbia University) notes “the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ speech is lost amid the information deluge.”
Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist author of “This Is Not Propaganda” 2019, comments “truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgia, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equated to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare…”
Looking for solutions. Jankowicz “commends the model of Finland, which has taught media literacy in public schools for decades…”. “By contrast, civics education…in America has dwindled.” With civic proficiency in high school at 23%, “If you don’t know how government actually works, you’re more likely to believe in conspiratorial versions of its doing.”