In an Oval Office meeting with President Trump, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan whipped out an iPad to play a propaganda video that depicted the leader of the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces as a terrorist. Erdoğan did this unabashedly in a meeting that included five Republican senators who have been the most vocal critics of Turkey’s invasion of Syria and attacks on Kurdish allies. Somehow, he thought he could lure them into changing their minds, but as the video ended, Senator Lindsey Graham reportedly asked: "Well, do you want me to go get the Kurds to make one about what you've done?"
We might be using more innocuous words for it these days, like fake news or disinformation, but attempts to manipulate our emotions, attitudes and beliefs are nothing new. We used to call it propaganda or just plain old lies. It would be jaw dropping that the president of Turkey would take a crude and clearly propagandistic video with him to the White House if it were not for the man currently occupying it.
Not only has Trump benefited from disinformation, he may even be sitting in the White House because of it. He encourages it as well as propagates it himself. During the 2016 election he went so far as to publicly ask Russia to dig up and release Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. His speeches and relentless Twitter feed is a river of half-truths and outright lies. The House of Representatives is currently running an impeachment investigation against him because, by many corroborated accounts, he held up military aid to an ally, Ukraine, in exchange for them launching an investigation into the son of a potential political rival for the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden. In other words, Trump has called on foreign countries to interfere in U.S. elections on his behalf. Yet he calls this investigation a ‘hoax’, a ‘witch hunt’ and of course, ‘fake news.’
This is what makes following the news feels like wading into quicksand these days: the utter shamelessness of the U.S. President when it comes to the truth extends to and blows apart much of the credibility of any information we consume. This is certainly true for Americans and arguably many people throughout the world. This also coincides with a media landscape that has gone through profound change over the past 20 years. The 1990’s were really the last gasp of traditional media-centered political campaigns in the U.S. The so-called ‘spin-doctors’ reigned and set up war rooms to fight electoral battles mostly that took place on cable television and radio. Their job was to put a positive ‘spin’ on stories about their own candidates and a negative one on the opposition. Since 2008, the old spin-doctors have given way to a more scientific generation of campaign consultants who use digital tools and big data to micro-target like-minded groups of voters.
While this new communications frontier has provided unprecedented opportunities for political campaigns, it has also lowered the barriers to participate in the conversation so that anyone to get into the game and create content that supports or attacks political parties, candidates, ideas and the like. Back during the reign of spin-doctors, only politicians, pundits, journalists and the very famous could speak their minds on TV, radio or on the newspaper pages. If you had a lot of money, you could purchase an ad in the New York Times—as Trump himself did back in 1987—to get your point across to millions of people. While this type of communication is still only accessible to those with piles of money, just about anyone can afford to buy targeted advertising on social media. Or, even better, they can create accounts run by trolls or echoed by entire farms of bots and peddle any lie they want without having to put a public face behind it.
Just in October, Facebook reported that it had taken down four state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, three of which originated in Iran and one in Russia and not only on Facebook but also on Instagram. They targeted people in North Africa, Latin America and the United States. While this issue mostly came to light during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, it’s important to recognize this as a transnational challenge to democracies throughout the world. These campaigns take advantage of the openness of democracies and especially the value of free speech to sow discord which fuels suspicion and doubt in democracy.
Like any good lie, these campaigns will often target real issues that are particularly divisive and attempt to make them even more so. Spain’s own dispute over Catalonia is a perfect example of an issue that is already extremely contentious, which is what has made it a perfect target for Russian disinformation campaigns that distributed photos of violence that purportedly took place in Catalonia but were later revealed to be from other protests.
Of the campaigns recently found by Facebook, one focused more on the 2020 U.S. election, with 50 Instagram accounts that could be traced back to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm known to be backed by the Kremlin. These campaigns targeted Democratic presidential frontrunners Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren and not always in a negative way. Again, it’s important to note that the point of these campaigns isn’t necessarily to promote one political view over another—they will work on both sides of any issue in order to stir up the online outrage machine in any way possible.
One example of the content taken down that was aimed at the 2020 election is a pretty innocent one that is simple supportive of Bernie Sanders. But more often, this content is aimed at wedge issues, such as ones that stir up racial angst, such as another post from an account called Confederate Virginia featuring a truck emblazoned with the Confederate flag—the flag of the South during the U.S. Civil War and a widely recognized symbol of racism. In fact, the social movement #blacklivesmatter is often a target for the extreme right and one that equally fires up the extreme left. This can be a winning strategy because it makes it appear that the social media, and therefore the world, is full of extremes. Racists and politically correct lefties all screaming at each other.
While Russia has been the most notable culprit, Iran is taking note and getting into the disinformation game as is China. However, disinformation doesn’t not only come from foreign sources, but in fact most of it comes from domestic ones.
And much of it comes in the form of video, much of it clearly fake and some that falls into the category of ‘deepfakes’which are more difficult to detect. TheGeekzTeam, a pro-Trump video creator made headlines and caused outrage when a violent video made by them was screened at an event for a pro-Trump called American Priority at the Trump National Doral in Miami. Staged in the “church of fake news” Trump shoots his political and media rivals. It goes on for nearly 4 horrifying minutes with the Lynyrd Skynyrd rock anthem Free Bird blaring while shots are fired. Trump encourages these videos and memes by sometimes retweeting them. This was the case with a video made to look like Trump had hit Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball. He also retweeted a fake video of Nancy Pelosi that was slowed down to make it look like she was slurring her speech.
What can and should be done? There has been increasing pressure on Facebook to make their own reforms. Warren upped this pressure by running her own fake advertising campaign on Facebook. It read: “Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election. You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking, ‘how could this possible be true?’ Well it’s not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.”
Biden has also escalated his attacks on Facebook over an advertisement from a political action committee (PAC) that accused Biden of a quid-pro-quo with Ukraine so that they would stop an investigation into his son. Sound familiar? While the ad in question isn’t from the Trump campaign, it echoes the same accusations that they have been making since the Ukraine issue came to the fore last summer.
Both Warren and Biden’s complaints target the Facebook policy that allows political leaders total free speech on Facebook whether it be in their posts on ads. Zuckerberg himself echoed Facebook’s commitment to unfettered free speech in a much criticized speech titled “Standing for Voice and Free Expression,” at Georgetown University. Zuckerberg extolled Facebook’s commitment to routing out foreign disinformation campaigns via a team of 35,000 former intelligence officials, digital forensics experts and investigative journalists. Also in the works are plans to pages and posts by state-sponsored media. Indeed, good steps, but he made is views clear: “People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world. It’s a fifth estate, alongside the other power structures in our society.” Whether the social media should be treated like a 5th estate, rather than regulated like the 4th estate (traditional media) has been is at the heart of this argument.
Rather than requiring disclaimers by political adverting, as traditional media does, Twitter has recently announced that it will ban all political advertising—both from political candidates and for issues—on its platform. While this may seem encouraging, it really doesn’t help all that much, first of all because what constitutes a political ad can be quite complicated. Also, because the disinformation problem on twitter, isn’t just from transparent political advertising but from bots and trolls. Also, and this is the issue for all social media, how algorithms work to serve up the most polarizing, clickbait content. In fact, while the likes of Twitter and Facebook constantly assert that they are not media organizations and therefore not responsible for the speech going on their platforms, the algorithms serve an editorial like function.
Some cues can be taken from how political advertising in traditional media has been regulated in the U.S. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) requires disclaimers on all political advertising on TV, radio and print. This is why you hear a candidate at the end of political ads saying “I’m so and so and I approve this ad” or the small print on newspaper advertisements. This provides the necessary transparency so that news consumers know who the message is coming from. This is why Twitter’s new ban on political advertising and Facebook’s unfetter free speech both ring hollow: at least for paid advertisements, they can require transparency, but they just choose not to.
U.S. cybercommand is the military agency tasked with fighting disinformation. It was able to block internet access to and therefore shut down the Russian Internet Research Agency on the 2018 midterm election day. While this is commendable, most voters have made their decisions well before election day, making the sum of all campaigns over the course of an election much more critical. Also, these campaigns are constantly updating their strategies. More recently, the agency organized a hacking contest to prepare for 2020. This first-time event included hundreds of U.S. military and National Guard hackers that will be the first responders in the event of an election day cyberattack.
Still, for many the solution is better education for consumers of social media. In these very pages I have offered a nine-point guide for identifying fake news. I also stress to my students that the most important skill they can gain at university is critical thinking. Unfortunately, too many people share before actually reading what they are sharing, especially when the content is funny and supports their own world view. Further, we seem to be quite ready to believe the absolute worst about other people online, especially those that we disagree with.
It’s a vicious cycle and the battle against it feels quite desperate and even futile as America heads towards the 2020 election centered around a president who revels in the chaos of this new media landscape.
This article was originally published in Spanish in esglobal on December 5, 2019.