Disinformation Experts Warn About US 'Playbook' Being Exploited Globally
DUBLIN–Discussions about disinformation often tip into a tech-bashing exercise(Opens in a new window), but a panel on that topic Thursday at the Dublin Tech Summit(Opens in a new window) aimed its ire elsewhere: boldface names in media and politics that traffic in and profit from it.
"We don't have any guard rails on social media that prevent people from impersonating other people or impersonating other groups, which is exactly how Russia meddled in the 2016 election,” Joan Donovan, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said during a panel on disinformation. “But in 2020, you have all of these mainstream actors doing all the same shenanigans, using their real names.”
Donavan left no doubt about the political leanings of these people spouting nonsense about election integrity: “main-stage Republican actors and fairly mainstream rightwing journalists."
Bad-faith political participants in other countries have taken note too, as Donovan’s fellow panelists commented earlier in the discussion.
“You can see how the United States playbook is currently being executed in Brazil,” said Áine Kerr, co-founder of the Dublin-based content-moderation-support firm Kinzen(Opens in a new window), citing president Jair Bolsonaro’s claims(Opens in a new window) of looming election fraud and appeals to the military.
The third panelist—Lyric Jain, CEO of UK-based disinformation-defense firm Logically(Opens in a new window)—pointed to his firm’s work combatting election-process disinformation in India’s Maharashtra state. "You'd be surprised about how common these instances were," he said. As in: 30,000 of them during that one campaign.
If bold-face names are going to lie and
Read more on pcmag.com
