The 2022 federal election has brought us some frankly random strategies, including a meme war, one very shouty leader’s debate, the classic Clive Palmer jump scare ads… and disinformation floating around the Internet. As the election was expected to be a target for these coordinated, deliberately confusing campaigns, the Judith Nelson Institute brought together local and international experts to run a tech-lead disinformation detection and debunking project, the Mosaic Project, including Jiore Craig. Craig is the Head of Digital Integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and worked on a similar project during the 2020 US Presidential campaign. We spoke to her about how disinformation targeting Australia is unique, what the goal is, and the million dollar question – how can we stop it?
Zee Feed: Is there a difference between disinformation and just general election spin?
Jiore Craig: When we’re talking about disinformation in today’s environment, what we’re actually talking about is the phenomenon of social media and all that it offers to pursue disinformation strategies, propaganda strategies. Political spin and people using speech to tell a story has been going on for years, but social media evolved so fast, unlike other changes to our information environment which have stayed the same for decades. We really are always finding new activities and new tactics on the look out for.
So, who’s doing this? And what’s the end goal of bad actors spreading disinformation – why would they even bother?
It’s part of long term strategic goals to sow distrust, or erode trust in a specific messenger over time. A lot of these campaigns are not just about trying to tell you something that’s not true – it’s trying to get you to not believe anything coming out of the mouth of certain messengers, no matter what they say in advance. This longer term strategy is not just run during an election cycle, and is something that traditional ‘fact checking’ doesn’t get at.
#ICYMI: The AEC has asked Facebook to remove a number of posts raising baseless claims about election fraud. So, how can you tell if something is misinformation? 🗳 #TheDrum pic.twitter.com/PShhCIAw5w
— ABC The Drum (@ABCthedrum) April 19, 2022
It’s not really about taking down one party or another, is it? It’s about getting us to distrust the entire system of media and political institutions.
I like to use the image that they are trying to dislodge you from a current belief. So it’s not trying to replace your existing belief with a new idea, but just trying to get you to be less sure of what’s coming out of anyone’s mouth or from any type of system. That’s dangerous. One thing we worry about is it wears people down over time until they get to the point where they’re so unsure about what’s going on. They don’t really know who to trust or who to believe, so they just become passive and disengage.
One good feature of the Australian election system is the compulsory voting component, which is helpful because you won’t get huge swathes of the electorate just completely disengaging with the process. It’s an example of how putting some structures in place can combat the longer term aims of effective disinformation campaigns.”
Are there features of Australia’s political landscape that are weak spots?
I’ve seen a few examples of your ballots and some of them are rather complicated. Anything that’s not as straightforward makes it easier to make claims about online, which makes it harder to get the clear answer out there. Also Australia has many diaspora communities that are an important part of the voting population, which creates challenges for because it requires other languages. Because the country is dominantly English-speaking, it’s much more likely that those communities will have the information moving within them that’s left unchecked. The only way to know is to have some connectivity into the communities, to increase the chances that you’ll hear something.
You also have a gap in your political advertising rules, where as I understand it people can say whatever they want? That is a feature we also struggle with in my country [the U.S.] – fact checking or rules around political advertising campaigns. And that does make it easier for the social media companies to not have to have strict policies themselves, because the country’s laws set the tone for the platforms.
What are social media platforms doing to help address election disinformation? Is it enough?
I’m hesitant to give them much credit at all, because they really have such disproportionate resources to tackle some of these challenges. Most of their policies for protecting users from disinformation don’t get to the systems that are behind problematic content, and which feeds into the obvious business model designed to keep people on the platform for longer. If you think about what will keep people on platforms for longer, it’s not going to be boring content with contextualized information – it’s more sensational content that evokes an emotional reaction. That’s problematic because the tech platforms don’t tell us, “We’re going to change our recommendation system so it doesn’t direct people toward conspiratorial or false claims.”
Similarly we know they have ways that they can rank trusted, high quality news sources in a news feed. They can sort of ‘dial up’ how much trusted news they’re gonna show. But they choose not to do that, even though trials show it works.
It more than likely has to do with their bottom line. Elections will come and go, each of them will have different players, but what’s consistent in all of these election environments is the presence of the tech companies. They are the people have the biggest opportunity to trial things and have them be effective. It’s disappointing that they don’t take the learnings and roll them out.
As you noted, the AEC does not have the power to regulate misinformation, unless it relates to the act of casting a vote. We take misleading electoral information seriously and encourage you to report any content to us that you believe may be electoral misinformation.
— AEC ✏️ (@AusElectoralCom) May 10, 2022
So the million dollar question is what actually does stop disinformation campaigns and how do we roll that out?
I’m just gonna answer it right now, and then someone will pay me a million dollars and we can all go home! There are two prongs I believe in. The first is platform accountability. Obviously there’s regulation, but we can’t count on governments to necessarily get that right soon – although there are hopeful signs in Europe, the UK and Australia even, where governments have made headway. But really it’s about us directly appealing to the platforms to try to make the changes they can really do overnight with or without regulation. It’s about people understanding that disinformation is really about the business model. It’s a distraction to make this conversation about free speech or censorship because we’re all on the side of free speech… that’s a distraction from looking at what’s actually making the platform’s money.
The second prong is investing in the things that connect the us together as communities. It falls in two buckets – we should invest in things that serve citizens, like quality information and local journalism. But then we also have to invest in the distribution channels and the messengers and the communities that are receiving that in order for it to be effective.
Alongside what we’re seeing with social media and online harms, we’re also seeing a rise in many democracies of loneliness, depression and a breakdown in the social fabric of communities. People are less likely to talk to people who don’t think like them, or maybe just talk to people less in general. If we work to reconnect to each other as a community and build trust, we will also mitigate a lot of the effects of these influence campaigns that are targeting people to have an emotional reaction.
What can our audience of digitally savvy young people do to help stop the spread of disinformation? Especially within their own families and communities?
Digital natives have the benefit of being natural born creators and really strong messengers. It’s worth having a think about who in their life they’re trying to reach, because they will be the most compelling messengers for those people. We’ve seen a lot of research that shows intergenerational messaging can be a really effective form of communication in an election. But it takes an extra step of thinking, “Ok, I’m used to just talking to my audience in one place. Are there other places where I can share this? Can I share it in an email chain with my grandparents?”
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