Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.

On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.

Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums. 

Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies. 

That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.

Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly. 

Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.

The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.

Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.

Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.

Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s  and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.

Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets. 

When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.

If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.

Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways. 

After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.

The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins. 

The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.

Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?

The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”

Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports. 

OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues  as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.

Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.

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The post Memeification and digital slop: AI and the fog of war appeared first on Coda Story.

These currents connect the crises happening in different parts of the world into a global web of intricately connected problems. It may not be obvious, but Silicon Valley is right at the very heart of this web. Home to some of the richest and most powerful men on earth, Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the technology that has given us so much convenience and also taken so much away from us. 

The world may be on fire, but things are going well for Silicon Valley’s most powerful men. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is now officially worth $157 billion and Mark Zuckerberg, whose $72 billion dollar wealth surge this year could now make him the richest person on earth. 

Both are in a position to address some of the world’s greatest problems, yet both choose to avoid any responsibility, and instead choose to obscure and deflect. 

Take AI-powered disinformation in this election for example. It’s rampant, scary and consequential for American democracy. Sam Altman’s response? He wants us to be patient. In his recent letter worthy of a techno-optimism medal Altman argues that it would be a “mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems”.  

Zuckerberg says he wants Meta to be remembered for “building big,” not safe. Meta no longer even engages in a whack-a-mole game of fact checking and content moderation. Along with Google, Amazon and X, Meta has essentially dismantled its Trust and Safety team that at least tried to mitigate the real life damage caused by the algorithmic promotion of hateful content. Mark Zuckerberg, who wore an “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil.” “Either Zuck or Nothing” shirt as he presented his latest meta verse at the company’s annual developer conference. As for life in this world, he is apparently done with politics. 

It takes a very special kind of privilege to ask for patience in the face of a major, life threatening, world changing crises. The attitude is familiar to anyone who has seen authoritarianism up close: the goal of an authoritarian is to secure a monopoly on money and power. Maintaining a monopoly of the narrative is the way of achieving that. Human suffering may not be the objective, but if that’s what it takes to achieve the desired outcome, then it’s just collateral damage. 

I spent a lot of my week speaking to people who could be considered “collateral damage”: people in Beirut, where unprecedented escalation of violence between Israel and Iran is wreaking havoc on millions of lives. Friends in Ukraine, where Russia is making territorial gains while continuing to bomb, kill and maim civilians.  

As well as my own family in Georgia, where the Kremlin is making political gains: the Russian state propaganda machine is now openly backing an autocratic, populist government that is about to use a democratic tool–elections–to pull the country deeper into its autocratic orbit. The government’s campaign strategy resembles blackmail. “If you don’t vote for us, Russia will do to you what it did to Ukraine,” is literally the message of the election billboards the Georgian government put up this week.  

The roots of each of these crises are buried deep in the history of individual places, but so much of the journalism we do at Coda brings us back to Silicon Valley. 

The valley is the modern day equivalent of the heart of the Roman empire; a place of extreme abundance, fantastic innovation and terrifying detachment from the rest of the world.  
For this reason, it has never been more important to connect the dots between the patterns that weave into the web of our modern life.

The post Global crises, local consequences: how Silicon Valley shapes our world appeared first on Coda Story.

In the U.S., one special breed of telehealth companies tends to focus on “wellness” issues common among people in their 20s and 30s: Companies like Cerebral, Hims & Hers, Keeps and Mindbloom offer a quick path to prescription medications for anxiety, depression, sexual health and skin-related issues. They also tend to feature a sleek, Instagram-friendly aesthetic.

Hims, launched in 2017, uses the tagline: “Telehealth for a healthy, handsome you.” For years, I’d noticed ads for Hers, its sister brand, dotting my social media feeds and featuring on the walls of subway cars. I finally visited the Hers website and found a banner stretched across the homepage: “Anxiety treatment, no insurance required. START YOUR FREE ASSESSMENT,” it read. Curious to learn more, I clicked on the link.

After a short intake assessment, the platform told me to wait for a provider evaluation that would also take place entirely online. If prescribed, the medication would be delivered to my door, as soon as possible. In the meantime, I could browse the site to see what kinds of drugs they prescribe. Brand names like Lexapro, Wellbutrin and Zoloft float across the sections for medication featuring the website’s calming, sage-green color palette. The site also sells health and sex-adjacent products like melatonin gummies (to help you “get the sleep of your dreams”) and USB-rechargeable vibrators (because “life’s too short for boring sex”). The familiar shopping cart icon in the upper right corner of the site reinforced the idea that I was here to buy something, not to seek a professional medical consultation.

It felt almost too easy. I didn’t see it through — I see a regular doctor at a regular brick-and-mortar clinic. But it left me wondering how other people might understand — or misunderstand — what the service really offers. Hims & Hers and companies like it often adopt the language of telehealth that we see coming from established healthcare providers, a practice that might give consumers the impression that the company has their best interests at heart. But these companies aren’t regulated in the same way that traditional healthcare providers are. And they are out to make money. In the first half of 2021 alone, venture capitalists invested nearly $15 billion into digital health companies.

In the eyes of Dr. Adrianne Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology researcher at Georgetown University, “there's real telehealth and there's fake telehealth.” Real telehealth, she explained, was an asset during the worst periods of the pandemic. And for years, it has helped people with limited mobility, or those who live in far-flung places, get access to specialist clinicians who tend to work in big city hospitals.

But then there are fake telehealth outfits, which Fugh-Berman described as “companies who are really just bypassing clinicians to provide drugs to patients.” 

“There's a prescriber involved,” she said, and that clinician does provide some level of safety. But she cautioned that they ultimately answer to the telehealth company, not to a traditional medical institution. “Their job is to prescribe you drugs,” said Fugh-Berman. If they deny a lot of people drugs, “they are not going to keep that job.” 

In traditional healthcare, patients typically see a primary care provider who can recommend treatment, medication or otherwise, with their full health status and history in mind. Although traditional healthcare institutions have been caught bending to the interests of big pharma — a major factor in the U.S. opioid crisis — there are regulatory measures in place to prevent this. New-fangled telehealth companies do not have the same guardrails.

Fugh-Berman runs Georgetown's PharmedOut program, a project to help educate healthcare professionals on pharmaceutical marketing practices. According to PharmedOut's resources, companies that use direct-to-consumer advertising are not subject to FDA regulations if they provide “disease awareness,” even though these sorts of campaigns can “lead to the overuse of marginally effective or potentially dangerous drugs for minor conditions.” PharmedOut warns that this practice can harm public health, especially as more companies rely on social media ads to get in front of potential customers.

Although it’s rare, plenty of the antidepressants that these companies prescribe can cause serotonin syndrome, a serious and potentially fatal response. The anxiety drug propranolol, described by Hims & Hers as a medication that can help you ace “a public speaking engagement, interview, or audition,” can trigger asthma attacks for people with the disease. Last year, Bloomberg investigated the telehealth company Cerebral, which focuses on mental health treatment, and found that patients were prescribed medications that led to complications and even death from overdoses. In short, the actual health risks that these companies might present for consumers are real.

Then there’s the matter of the telehealth companies’ business model. Alongside payments for the services they provide, companies like Hims & Hers also collect a good deal of customer data. We all know what it’s like to be asked to consent to the terms of service of data privacy agreements. They’re incredibly long, written in legalese and impossible to negotiate with. If you want the service, you select “I agree” and hope for the best.

The mere fact that these companies deal with people’s health data might make customers think that it will be covered by HIPAA, the U.S. federal law that requires healthcare and insurance providers to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent. But just because you’re sharing your health data does not mean it’s protected. In fact, Hims & Hers’ privacy policy mentions that it is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA. This suggests that the company is collecting demographic data and medical information, as well as images and messages, all on behalf of the diagnosing providers and with no guarantee of privacy protection under U.S. law. We asked Hims & Hers for more information about their business and how they handle customer data but did not receive a response prior to publication.

What happens to your data after it is collected? Researchers have shown that it can be bought and sold by third-party data brokers. Last year, The Markup reported that private information about the medications prescribed through telehealth services (Hims & Hers was among those they tested) had been shared with Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Snapchat. This data is often used to improve ad-targeting and prompt customers to purchase even more products or services based on their browsing habits. But it could be used or abused in other ways, too.

The lack of HIPAA oversight over some telehealth companies is a concern for Keith Porcaro, who researches law and technology at Duke University. He explained that these kinds of companies can get around privacy protections that traditional healthcare companies would otherwise be subject to and said that regulations need to catch up with the market.

“Companies like this are changing people's expectations about healthcare,” he said. “There's an assumption, especially if you talk to doctors, that there's sort of one model of getting care: You go to your doctor and rely on doctors for everything. Putting doctor shortages aside, there’s a lot of evidence that says that most people take care of most of their health problems on their own,” Porcaro told me.

Bypassing traditional healthcare routes in favor of for-profit, start-up companies may be making consumers more vulnerable to medical misinformation. Influenced by a growing self-care movement that has popularized the idea that “you know your situation best,” consumers increasingly turn to these companies. 

Porcaro puts some of this on people’s legitimate “mistrust of the medical establishment,” based on their negative experiences with traditional healthcare. In a 2022 Pew research study on race and disparities in healthcare, more than 70% of Black female respondents between the ages of 18 and 49 said that they had had a negative experience with healthcare providers, ranging from pain they reported not being taken seriously to being treated with less respect than other patients. The same report found that most Black Americans were skeptical of “medical researchers when it comes to issues of openness and accountability” and suspected that misconduct in medical research remains just as likely to happen today as in the past. Long-standing stigma may drive prospective patients to seek alternative routes to healthcare. But people looking for quick solutions might be willing to accept help from just about anyone. 

“People who are going to services like this, especially mental health or addiction treatment, are vulnerable,” Porcaro said. And they’re not just vulnerable to misinformation, he said, “they're vulnerable to actual harm.”

The convenience and branding of telehealth start-ups may have plenty of appeal for Gen Zers and people with legitimate reservations about the medical establishment. But they come with some serious trade-offs that could affect your health data — and your health itself.

CORRECTION [05/15/2023 11:08 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said Duke University lawyer and technologist Keith Porcaro. Keith Porcaro researches law and technology at Duke University.

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The post Telehealth start-ups are monetizing misinformation – and your data appeared first on Coda Story.

Not long after, the armed men came to her polling booth and began ordering people to leave. Godwin, a first-time voter, was frightened and confused. A woman standing close by was in tears. She asked Godwin if she was Igbo. “They’re chasing Igbo people away,” she told Godwin. The mostly Christian Igbos comprise between 15 and 18% of the Nigerian population and are the third largest ethnic group, behind the Yoruba and the Hausa. 

Across Nigeria that day, there were many such incidents of ethnicity-based voter intimidation. The 2023 Nigerian elections were reported to have been so marred by violence and vote-rigging that both major opposition parties immediately called for the results to be overturned. Legal challenges have been filed but the disputed winner, Bola Tinubu, will be sworn in on May 29. 

The elections may now be over, barring an unlikely overturning of the result by the courts, but millions of Nigerians are still reeling from the divisive campaigning. Since Nigeria transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1999, no Igbo has been elected president. And though there has been an informal arrangement to rotate the presidency between the Muslim north and Christian south of Nigeria in order to bring together a linguistically, religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse country, there has also been no president from the southeast, where Igbos are the dominant ethnic group. 

But by February 2023, it seemed likely that Nigeria’s new president would be Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria who is ethnically Igbo and who led most polls. Obi defeated Tinubu on his home turf in Lagos State, but Tinubu still won the election. That Obi would not be president — after all the hope and promise he represented for many Igbos — was a bitter pill to swallow. Even if the courts rule that there are no grounds to overturn the election results, the violence, the disenfranchisement of Igbos in particular and various flaws reported in the voting process are enough to conclude, as international observers did, that the “election fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations.” 

“We now understand that we are not one in Nigeria,” said Ebuka, who was forced to leave his polling unit in Surulere because he was Igbo. He later came back and voted with the help of the police. “Left to me, if the Yorubas and Hausas aren’t comfortable with the Igbos ruling them, then there should be freedom. Biafra should come, and everybody should go to their land,” he said. Ebuka is referring to the secessionist state founded by the Igbo people in 1967, the creation of which led to the Nigerian Civil War. By 1970, when the war ended with Biafra’s surrender, more than two million people had died and millions more had been displaced. 

The campaigning in the presidential election this February, and in state elections in March, showed that tribalism is resurgent in Nigeria and that ethnic prejudice and division still run deep. Tinubu, the incoming Nigerian president, will find he is in charge of a country that is once again asking itself existential questions, asking what it means to be Nigerian.

At the polling booth in Surulere on February 25, there were only two people ahead of Godwin in the queue when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Two men told her to leave the queue. “As I was leaving, the men started laughing. They said I was very stupid and that I should have gone to Nnewi to vote,” she told me. Nnewi is a commercial and industrial city in Anambra State, where Igbos are in the majority. 

Godwin looked at the electoral officials at the booth for help but they were powerless. “I walked away feeling very sad,” she told me. “I’d never felt that useless before. I had looked forward to voting.”

The ethnic profiling targeted at the Igbos living in Lagos during the elections was deliberate and amplified by social media, says Timi Olagunju, a policy consultant. It was a whipping up, he told me, of Nigeria’s “primordial public.” This is a reference to the work of Peter Palmer Ekeh, a Nigerian sociologist, known for his 1975 paper, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa.” According to Ekeh, the African experience of colonialism resulted in “the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West.” Ekeh characterizes these two publics as primordial and civic. The primordial concerns private interests and attachments such as ethnicity, religion and tribalism, while the civic refers to national and civil structures, such as the military or the bureaucracy. “Many of Africa’s political problems,” Ekeh wrote, “are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics.” 

In the heat of Nigeria’s rancorous presidential election, politically motivated tribalistic disinformation spread like wildfire across social media. Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, who is a Christian, was accused of destroying Muslim communities when he was a governor and portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, the secessionist organization in southeastern Nigeria.

Online narratives were further spun to imply that Igbo people wanted to take over Lagos. On March 18, three weeks after the presidential elections, most of Nigeria’s 36 states went back to the polls to elect state governors. In Lagos State, WhatsApp groups lit up with messages that warned that the Labor Party gubernatorial aspirant Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour intended to empower the Indigenous People of Biafra. If Rhodes-Vivour came into power, the messages said, he’d lay off civil servants in Lagos and hire Igbos to replace them. Rhodes-Vivour is Yoruba, but his marriage to an Igbo apparently raised hackles.

Anti-Igbo messages and threats were widespread in the days before the Lagos gubernatorial election. A video went viral on social media of Musiliu Akinsanya, a well-known Lagos civil servant and political operative, telling voters to stay home if they weren’t planning on voting for the ruling APC party. 

“Tell them,” Akinsanya was filmed saying, “‘Mama Chukwudi,’ if you don’t want to vote for us, sit down at home. Sit down at home.” Mama Chukwudi is a reference to a typical Igbo name. After the video attracted outrage on social media, Akinsanya claimed it was just a friendly joke. And the Nigerian police backed him up. But during the presidential elections on February 25, Akinsanya had been caught on camera preventing Igbo voters from voting in a polling unit in Lagos. He was not even reprimanded, let alone punished.

“If Akinsanya had been arrested and questioned, even if not imprisoned,” the policy consultant Timi Olagunju told me, “it would have sent shivers through the APC camp and empowered people to come out to vote.” The violent rhetoric and bullying at the ballot box had its desired effect. The voter turnout for the presidential election was a record low of 27%, and the turnout for the gubernatorial elections just weeks later was equally disappointing.

Ugo Ude, a second-year English student at Lagos State University, showed up to vote in the presidential election at 7:05 in the morning. The booths opened at eight and within 25 minutes she had cast her vote. Not long after she voted, she says, a gang of “fierce-looking” men showed up, singled a man out from the queue and told him to leave. As he did, Ugo heard an elderly woman say, “let Igbo go to their states to vote Igbo, and let Yorubas do the same.”

For Ude, the woman’s words were an insight into the mentality of some of her compatriots. She herself was told to leave the booth. “Go away,” Ude says people, including the elderly woman, shouted at her. “You’re a stranger.” Something broke inside her that day, she told me. When she meets fellow Nigerians, she is wary: “I’m now asking myself, ‘Would you stand up for me or would you be part of the machinery that’ll be used to attack me?’” 

Ude, who runs a nonprofit organization that provides educational materials to children, says she’s “always been optimistic about Nigeria.” She acknowledged that she had been shocked by the bigotry on display during the elections but took solace in the messages she’d seen that rejected tribalism. 

“I will keep voting and I will keep doing my nonprofit work,” she told me. “Although there will be times when I’ll doubt the effectiveness of what I’m doing, I just can’t let it slide. If the kids want to grow up and become tribal bigots that’s up to them.”

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But just like at the start of the invasion, physical resistance to mobilization soon began to fade. Russian resistance to the war today is mostly an online operation, and Telegram has become its central platform. With Facebook and Instagram banned under an “extremism” law, and Russian social media giant VK under almost direct control of the Kremlin, Telegram has offered a relatively safe harbor where one can find Russians expressing grief, anger and frustration about the war. But this comes right alongside political narratives and disinformation from across the spectrum and plenty of tall tales from the twisted world of conspiracy theories. It is from these foundations that an organization called the Council of Mothers and Wives has sprung into existence.

The Council launched its Telegram channel on September 29, just days after Putin instituted the partial draft, and now has more than 23,000 followers. Behind it is Olga Tsukanova, a 46-year-old mother who had a brief moment in the limelight when a video she posted on VK went viral. In the video, Tsukanova spoke of how her son was pressured on two separate occasions to sign a contract to be “voluntarily” sent to the front. “I address all Russian mothers,” she said into the camera. “Stop winding snot on your fist and crying into your pillow. Let’s band together.” After her video touched the hearts of mothers across the country, she decided to create the Council.

When I first sat down to read through the channel, I found testimony about conditions on the front and stories of families’ difficult experiences after their loved ones were drafted. In its second post, the Council demanded practical information about the deployment: How much training would draftees receive? What winter clothing would they be issued? How would food be organized? All were reasonable demands, given the news that Russian troops were hugely under-equipped for war. Pictures of supporters across the country, mailing their demands to the authorities, right up to the office of President Putin, followed.

But then another side of the channel began to emerge. Again and again, when I clicked through the links shared, I found myself on the page of another organization, the National Union of the Revival of Russia (OSVR). Established in 2019 to restore “the destroyed state of the USSR,” the OSVR looks longingly at the bygone days of the Soviet Union. It also fosters conspiracy theories on the coronavirus and 5G. According to the OSVR’s manifesto on partial mobilization, which was shared by the Council on Telegram, the war in Ukraine was “started by Chabad adherents” to build a “new Khazaria” on the territory of Russia and Ukraine — an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is grounded in the geography of the medieval Khazar empire and has prospered since the invasion. The OSVR is led by Svetlana Lada-Rus, a conspiracy theorist who believes that a third force is committing atrocities in Ukraine and has claimed that dangerous reptiles from the planet Nibiru would fly to earth and unleash chaos.

The OSVR’s influence on the Council is not an accident. Tsukanova spoke at an OSVR meeting in October and was a member of the now-defunct Volya party that Lada-Rus once led. Tsukanova told a reporter from Novaya Gazeta that the OSVR helped her to create the Council: “A lot of effort is needed for this, without the support of like-minded people, it is difficult to do this. The movement itself supported me.” Both women hail from Samara, a small city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

“Internationally there has been a slight misinterpretation, or at least a superficial understanding, of this [Council] movement that is not to be confused with the more long-standing Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia,” Jaroslava Barbieri, a doctoral researcher on Russia at Birmingham University, told me. “If you look at Olga Tsukanova’s social media prior to the announced [partial] mobilization there is not so much talk about the so-called military operation, actually you will find content about conspiracy theories, a rogue government,” she said. “That is a bit more emblematic of a broader political stance of the members of this Council of Mothers and Wives.” 

In addition to promoting OSVR materials, the channel also features a not-so-healthy dose of anti-vax propaganda. Coda Story’s partners at Democracy Reporting International ran an analysis of the channel and found that more anti-vaccination content was reposted in the first week and a half of its existence than content that could be described as clearly anti-war.

This peculiar cocktail of quackery, conspiracy and seemingly genuine grief about the war maintained a steady beat until mid-November, when the Council staged a public demonstration. On November 14 and 15, 2022, members of the group picketed the Western Military District headquarters in St. Petersburg where they demanded the return of mobilized troops from the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine. Eager to get media attention, the group stressed on their Telegram channel that “no anti-war statements” were made, only a wish to open “dialogue with officials” about “specific shortcomings.” After the event, the Council got some national media coverage, which they hailed as a success. 

Several days later, Putin announced plans to meet with a select group of soldiers’ mothers on the outskirts of Moscow. Handpicked for their association with pro-war NGOs, or for their outright support of the so-called special military operation, these were the women the Kremlin wanted to use to calm fears around mobilization. “This is a sensitive topic for [Putin],” said Maxim Alyukov, a research fellow at the King’s College Russia Institute. “The government perceives this issue of mothers and wives as a more dangerous issue than some kinds of political criticism, because it is something which can resonate with the public, and that’s why [the Kremlin] ran their own council of mothers and wives,” he told me.

For Tsukanova and her followers, the roundtable was a snub. They duly took to social media to air their grievances. “[Putin] wants to declare real mothers and wives extremists and agents. CIA?”, one Telegram post read. International media also took note. The BBC ran clips of Tsukanova saying that the Russian authorities were “absolutely” afraid of women. Democracy Reporting International’s modeling for Coda Story shows that, in the midst of these events, the Council’s Telegram channel saw a significant increase in followers. 

Soon, the Council’s VK page was blocked on orders from the Prosecutor General’s office and a car carrying Tsukanova was stopped in Samara under the pretext of a drug search while the passengers were questioned. But while thousands have been arrested for their anti-war activism, and others subjected to exile, the Council has been able to continue its work weaving concerns about mobilization with the world of conspiracies. Pro-Kremlin media have been quick to point out links to the OSVR, and Russia’s pro-government, anti-cult organizations have also taken pains to call out the Council and accuse them of being provocateurs. The Center for Religious Studies, led by Alexander Dvorkin, also accused the OSVR of being financed by Poland and Ukraine, a common tactic used to undermine anti-war individuals and groups in Russia.

For Jakub Kalensky, a senior analyst at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, criticism from these corners is not surprising. “This might be very beneficial for you [as the Kremlin], if you have an anti-mobilization organization that is headed by questionable characters,” said Kalensky. “You can use their background to discredit the anti-mobilization position as a whole, this is a hypothesis we could work with,” he told me. 

In this landscape, Russia’s anti-war activism has become ever more fragmented. Years of authoritarian rule have hollowed out the country’s civil society and stripped people of the ability to express dissent without serious repercussions. More than 2,300 people have been arrested in anti-war street protests since the partial mobilization was announced. In March 2022, legislation was introduced imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading “fake news” about the so-called special military operation. The war has only made the stakes higher, no matter which side you’re on. 

Motivations for subscribing to Telegram channels undoubtedly vary — from a desire to stop mobilization to an outright anti-war, anti-Putin position. Groups that gain traction are quickly branded as extremist by the authorities. Those that aren’t often attract suspicion as having some nefarious link to the FSB, Russia’s security service. “There has been a history of infiltration of different opposition movements by the FSB either directly by speaking to members of those movements or most probably trying to send different messages to make them less appealing to different audiences,” Kasia Kaczmarska, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Edinburgh University, said. “This can sometimes work via multiple channels which the FSB is capable of organizing.” 

“It's important to highlight these more complex networks and the processes of how certain institutions came about, to not conflate them with genuine anti-war movements,” Barbieri, the Birmingham University doctoral researcher, added. “We also need to start thinking about how these disinformation narratives could also work as a coping mechanism for people so as not to face the reality of how the war in Ukraine began.”

Meanwhile the Council of Mothers and Wives continues to grow. As the full-scale invasion approaches its one-year anniversary, the channel blasts out condemnations of the mobilization alongside the wholesale promotion of conspiracy theories. It’s clear that the channel offers solace for some people, a place to vent their frustrations with a war they didn’t want in their lives. But for its leaders, it may be better understood as a vehicle for bringing an organization on the fringes of society to a new, and much more influential, audience.

This story was produced in partnership with Democracy Reporting International

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In the months leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which, in a close runoff, Lula da Silva from the leftist Worker’s Party defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social networks were flooded with disinformation, calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and Bolsonaro’s insistence that the elections would be rigged. 

On January 8, a week after Lula began his third term as Brazil’s president, followers of Bolsonaro took the country’s capital by storm. Frustrated right-wing radicals armed with weapons, flags, mobile phones and conspiracy theories occupied and destroyed the three pillars of the federal government in Brasília: the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. They not only left a trail of destruction but also stole documents and hard drives, and destroyed artworks and infrastructure. 

“There was no surprise at all, they [right-wing radicals] followed the extreme-right playbook, step by step. They are just pawns in a bigger game,” said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far-right. According to Prado, people who stormed the capital were “domestic terrorists” moved by conspiracy theories that reject liberal democracy and its institutions. The researcher added that the group views violence as a legitimate response to what it wrongly perceives as a fraudulent election. Prado also called attention to how people were proud to take part in the invasion, boasting of their presence on social media and inviting others to join. “It raises their in-group status,” she said. “The more they perform on social media, the higher their ‘score’ before their peers, the more radicalized they become.”

Bolsonaro has always welcomed and incentivized radicalization. His so-called “Office of Hate” — a pro-Bolsonaro online apparatus known for attacking government opponents and journalists — and his supporters have a long record of spreading hate speech, fake news and disinformation online. But since he lost his re-election bid in a highly-anticipated runoff vote, tensions and accusations have taken on a tone of all-out denialism. This narrative has dominated B-38, a pro-Bolsonaro Telegram channel with military roots and more than 60,000 members. On the night Bolsonaro lost the runoff, before the results were even announced, a member of B-38 claimed that the Brazil Supreme Court's vote-counting "algorithm" — no such thing exists — was stealing votes from Bolsonaro and giving them to Lula. An avalanche of baseless rumors about election fraud followed.

Refusing to accept defeat, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and camped out in front of the quarters of the Brazilian Armed Forces, calling for a military intervention. All of these efforts were orchestrated online. By the end of November, paid ads on Facebook and Instagram called for a military coup, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the elections. Despite this going against Meta's content policies, Agência Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism outlet, found that the ads were viewed more than 400,000 times. In December, lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro began taking to the floor of Brazil’s Congress to call for a military coup and generate online engagement. These calls were broadcast on TV Senado, Brazil’s version of C-SPAN, and were viewed by more than two million people. 

Bolsonaro’s international allies were also quick to respond to his defeat. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former strategist, had warned of a “stolen election” in the lead-up to polling day and promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring across his social media channels. On the day of the invasion of Brasília, Bannon applauded the insurrectionists, calling them “freedom fighters,” even as Bolsonaro himself was keeping a low profile. Bannon’s strategy worked. Some rioters were photographed holding up a banner demanding (in both English and Portuguese) the “source code” of the elections, a reference to the technology behind voting machines that right-wing figures like Bannon and Trump have accused of swinging the election.

Right-wing radicals and their puppeteers baptized the invasion as “Festa da Selma,” or, in English, “Selma’s Party.” The #FestadaSelma hashtag saw plenty of action on Twitter, where users tracked its popularity in southern Brazil and Miami, Florida. According to the Washington Post, Elon Musk recently fired nearly all of the company’s staff in Brazil, except for a few salespeople, leaving the country of 217 million people with virtually no staff dedicated to  moderating content that incites violence in Brazil.  

The term “Festa da Selma” began popping up on social media on January 5. It is a word play on “Festa da Selva,” which is a military war cry: organizers substituted the “v” for an “m,” perhaps in hopes of avoiding detection by Brazilian authorities or even by social media platforms. “A very common practice of [right-wing radicals] is to talk things over through codes, under the radar. They use codenames and words with modified spelling,” said Leonardo Nascimento, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a researcher at the Internet Lab, which monitors more than 500 extreme-right Telegram groups. Nascimento explained that on mainstream platforms, far-right individuals are more careful about the content they post and promote because they fear being banned. But the same caution does not apply to  “low-moderation” platforms. The researcher said that Telegram’s architecture, built on groups and the diffusion of messages, makes it a relative safe haven for extremism.

Telegram took on a key role in Brazilian elections in 2021, when Bolsonaro’s more prominent family members created profiles and began to direct traffic from their other social networks to Telegram. “But the platform is just a vessel. The real center of disinformation isn’t Telegram itself, it’s YouTube and YouTube videos that circulate on Telegram,” said Nascimento. And then the safe haven was forced to dissolve, at least in part. In 2022, in anticipation of the highly contested elections ahead, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the company to shut down select Telegram groups and remove election-related disinformation they had distributed. The aforementioned B-38 group was temporarily suspended shortly thereafter, presumably due to this decision.

The move made Bolsonaro and his supporters turn to other platforms in the far-right online ecosystem such as Gettr, Parler and CloudHub, but also to more ephemeral and privacy-intensive applications like Zello and Signal. Still, according to Nascimento, four days before “Selma’s Party,” Telegram messages were circulating among extreme-right groups advising followers on what to bring to demonstrations, how to behave on arrival and how to withstand tear gas. They also posted information about caravans and buses heading for Brasília. 

“They [rioters] wanted to make it look spontaneous so people would believe [Selma’s Party] was a movement that worked on a certain degree of legitimacy, of popular demand,” said Viktor Chagas, a professor at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro state who researches online far-right movements. Chagas contends that Brazil’s extreme-right is now in deep dispute over the identity of Bolsonarism. “The Bolsonaro supporters are losing cohesion. We have the ultraliberals, the monarchists, the gun owners, the neo-Pentecostals and other subgroups going from a process of high centralization in the figure of Bolsonaro to a high level of fragmentation with his defeat,” explained Chagas. “We now have a network that is much more dispersed and much more difficult to monitor.”

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The broad-based, lucrative online campaign targeting Harry and Meghan with conspiracy theories and mass trolling is “by far the worst, worse than anything I’ve experienced doing this,” Bouzy told me.

According to a Bot Sentinel report released earlier this year, online campaigns targeting the royal couple have become a cottage industry for a handful of online influencers. Bouzy calls them “single purpose hate accounts.” Their platforms are devoted solely to posting about the couple and, according to the report, have become “a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise” where “racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators.” 

The report describes the conspiracy theories they promote as “reminiscent of QAnon.” 

One popular theory holds that Meghan was never pregnant, her pregnancy bump faked. The followers of this theory call themselves “Meghan Truthers.” The most extreme proponents of the conspiracy maintain that her children Archie and Lilibet aren’t real at all. 

One of the most prominent anti-Meghan and Harry accounts promoting the “moonbump” theory was run by Sadie Quinlan, a Welsh pensioner who heavily promoted the false narrative that Meghan was never pregnant. Her account, called Yankee Wally, accumulated almost 19 million views and earned around $44,000 a year, according to Bot Sentinel’s findings. YouTube banned the account in March, citing violations of its policy against content designed to harass, bully or threaten. 

“I truly believe that Meghan Markle was NEVER pregnant. I believe she is barren,” Quinlan told Buzzfeed in March. “As a British taxpayer I am not happy paying for a FRAUDULENT pair of children.” 

According to Bot Sentinel, Quinlan inadvertently revealed she had been buying up fake Twitter accounts in bulk to promote her cause. She also posted videos on YouTube showing viewers how to make negative reviews about Meghan’s book rise to the top of Amazon’s book review list. 

Bouzy’s research identified Yankee Wally as one of at least 25 accounts devoted to posting round-the-clock anti-Meghan content on YouTube, with almost 500 million combined views and an estimated $3.5 million in YouTube earnings. 

A YouTube spokesperson responded to a Coda inquiry, but offered no comment for publication.

Bot Sentinel identified a core group of “predominantly Caucasian women” who have been able to successfully run a coordinated fake news campaign that gained massive influence, using YouTube to monetize their work and using Twitter to manipulate conversations on that platform, too.

In recent weeks, Bouzy has seen heightened levels of inauthentic activity designed to target the couple. In the comments section beneath the Netflix trailer on YouTube, thousands of almost identical sarcastic comments have been posted.

“I love the part where they say they are drawing a line under Megxit after an interview with Oprah, a podcast, a Netflix series and a book. Brings a tear to my left eye,” wrote one commenter. “I love the part where Harry talks about bravely escaping his castle and servants. This obvious discrimination is triggering a tear from my left eye,” wrote another. 

The structure, repeated thousands of times, begins with “I love the part” and ends with “it brings a tear to my left eye.” Many of the accounts are devoted solely to commenting on the trailer, with little or no other activity. 

This is a “copypasta” spamming technique where “accounts take a string of text and repeat it over and over again,” Bouzy said. And then organically, real people begin following suit. The resulting comments are a mixture of fake accounts and real people copying an inauthentic campaign. 

Attacks on Meghan and Harry have intensified since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, while people have been continuing to post videos explaining how to amplify negative content about the couple by using VPNs and swarming websites associated with Meghan. “It's quite astonishing,” said Bouzy. 

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On April 27, Musk took a cheap shot at Gadde, mocking past decisions made by her team. Gadde, who is female and hails from India, soon faced a barrage of harassing messages, including racist and sexist insults. Musk was all but proving that point that many had made surrounding his bid to buy the company: under his ownership, Twitter may become a much more hostile place, especially for women and LGBTQ people.

Whether it’s a top executive at Twitter, a BBC reporter in Iran, or a Muslim feminist activist in India, or a journalist at The Washington Post in the U.S., women and sexual minorities — especially those with a public profile — face various kinds of online abuse, from violent threats and hate speech on social media to doxxing attacks that expose their personal information. Since the start of the pandemic, online abuse and harassment has become more severe for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.

Many advocates say tech companies should do more to tackle online abuse, but with people like Musk in charge, it’s hard to see this happening any time soon.

For the foreseeable future, it will be up to those who are targeted to take individual actions to protect themselves. Last week, I spoke with a few key voices dealing with online harassment and gathered their insights.

Speak out, but don’t feed the trolls

Zeba Warsi, a journalist from India, has extensive experience with online abuse. 

“In the beginning I used to reply to every single troll who would lash out with abusive language or be disrespectful. I used to respond to them and then I started realizing when I would respond to people — especially to accounts which were just like bots, with close to no followers, who were thriving on hate — I was in fact giving them more traction by engaging with them. So then I eventually stopped responding.”

Though it doesn’t mean she’s not speaking out. “Address the issue on your own platform, post about it, tweet it, but don’t engage with them. Don't give them the platform, they don't deserve it,” Warsi told me.

The latest major attack she endured was in January, when she appeared in a fake auction app in India, called Bulli Bai, that included profiles and photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, offering them up “for sale.” Like Warsi, most of the women featured in the app are Muslim and do public-facing work — among its targets were politicians, other journalists, and the Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.

She said disengaging with the trolls has helped her mental wellbeing. Warsi is now pursuing a journalism degree at Columbia University.

“I decided to take a break from my career in India and get this distance from all that hate. And despite all that distance, it still haunts me. You wake up to it, on the 1st of January, the beginning of new year and you get so many messages from your friends and colleagues that your picture is being plastered on this disgusting, degrading, humiliating, fake auction.”

“It gets to you,” she said. I had a very distressing phone call with my father back home in India. He was really upset and he was really scared for my safety, even though I'm not physically in India, because that's the kind of fear that it creates.”

Separate the personal from the professional

Warsi also recommends keeping personal and professional lives separated online as much as possible. 

“I have this sort of division between what is public for me and what is private. I think it helps me to have more control over my social media. So my Twitter is public where I put out my work and my Instagram is private, which is only for my friends and family. So I keep my account private so random Twitter or Instagram trolls are not going to find me there,” Warsi said. 

Keep a record

Gwen Taylor, a program manager at Glitch, a U.K.-based nonprofit working to eliminate online abuse, suggests documenting the abuse.

“Documenting online abuse is a really important step, not only to empower yourself to understand the patterns that are happening, but also to empower you to report it if you decide to do so, and it’s validating, in a way, that it is difficult and it is traumatic,” they said.

Be an ‘active bystander’

Warsi and Taylor both said when it comes to online abuse, having support and community is essential. But being a part of that supporting network also requires knowledge of how to do it.

Taylor says reaching out to people is extremely useful, as online abuse can be so isolating, but it requires thoughtfulness: “Whether you know them or not, just don't take action without their consent. Online abuse can feel very disempowering. You might think you're doing the right thing by reporting it, or by replying to it, but actually that might not be what the person wants. So reaching out, checking in with the person. Maybe giving them options of like, 'I was thinking of doing this. Is that okay? Is there something else you want?'”

Having a network that can report abuse on your behalf can be very powerful and much more effective than doing it alone, says Taylor.

They pointed to a group of women parliamentarians across countries in Africa who had formed a WhatsApp group to organize this kind of support. “Whenever one of them receives online abuse they go into chat and they're like, 'Can you help?' It's really powerful, having this network that empowered people that can go in and be like 'Yes, I'm going to come and report that for you and help,'” Taylor told me.

Amplify their voice, not their victimhood

The other advice Taylor gave on how to empower people being harassed and abused online is to amplify the person, not the abuse.

“Not amplifying the post that's getting the abuse, but in general, just amplifying their messages, their work. If it's an artist, retweeting. If it's somebody writing, saying that you like their writing or encouraging other people to read it,” they told me. “Because often what happens in incidents of online abuse is that the conversation ends up getting totally focused around the abuse. And actually, we want to take away from that. We don't want to give the person being abusive that power.”

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Out of the 23 million tweets that posted the hashtag #IstandwithVladimir Putin, around 10,000 repeated the tweet five or more times. Before the invasion, these accounts had busied themselves tweeting about a range of political issues. Some pledged continual support for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, others were in favor of Pakistan’s leader Imran Khan, still others backed former South African president Jacob Zuma or were concerned with Nigerian fuel shortages, or else trumpeted Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka. 

But on the morning of the same day, they all began marching in unison. Thousands and thousands of times, they tweeted pro-Putin hashtags, along with memes and pictures in support of the Russian invasion. The hashtags began trending on Twitter, and was yet further boosted by Twitter’s algorithm. 

“I was pretty astonished that Twitter was letting this trend,” said Carl Miller, a disinformation researcher at Demos, a London-based thinktank, who woke up on the morning of March 2 to find his Twitter feed blowing up with the hashtag. Using data from the site, he scrutinized the networks pushing the pro-Putin narrative, and found that many of the accounts appeared to be brand new, fake, hacked, or working in coordination with one another.

What’s going on? 

In the enormous echo chamber that is Western social media, we have seen a wave of blue and yellow, an overwhelming level of support for the people of Ukraine. There is near unanimous agreement that Ukraine is winning, hands down, the information war against Russia. 

“There’s loads of articles considering it such a truism — really now it’s just about explaining why — that ‘Putin’s left his propagandists flat footed’ or ‘Zelensky is such a genius media operator,’” said Miller. “I’m just never really sure these ideas are true. It’s very hard for us to say who’s winning or not.”

One thing is for certain: the West presently is not the main target of Russia’s information offensive. And in other parts of the world, the Russian narrative is being pushed and gaining traction.

In India, more than 500 Hindi-language, pro-Bharatiya Janata Party spam accounts switched from sharing millions of pro-Modi messages to sharing pro-invasion memes in English in early March. The accounts have since pivoted back to just promoting BJP content.

In South Africa, an anti-colonial set of voices usually tweets about former South African President Jacob Zuma, and pushes out content in solidarity with BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.) Miller said the South African group appears to be more organic than the Indian group — and yet, it jumped on the #IStandWithPutin hashtag.

What do the posts have in common?

Posts expand on how Russia has supported India, or focus on “whataboutism” -– looking at past offensives by the U.S. and NATO. Some of the posts are not necessarily “disinformation” in the strict definition of the term. But they are deceptive. For instance, a meme highlighting past western invasions — such as Iraq and Afghanistan — is designed to shift focus away from Russian aggression and violence in Ukraine. And when it’s amplified inauthentically, by thousands of fake accounts, then it begins to skew thinking, inflating the pro-Russian narrative in a way that’s misleading. 

“There’s one meme I remember very vividly, which shows Russia as a kind of mighty mother bear. Ukraine is a kid with a stick that’s prodding this bear. And the U.K., U.S. and NATO are behind, prodding this kid. So the bear is having to come out of her cave to protect her cub. That’s probably not literally disinformation. To my eyes it’s a ridiculous misportrayal of the narrative around NATO. But I wouldn’t say there’s a truth claim there,” said Miller. “It’s not to say anyone’s spending too much time worrying about telling the truth. Whether you want to call it emotionally dis-informative is the reader’s call to make.” 

Who is behind it?

That’s the tough question. At this stage, without a full investigation using open-source data into the roots of these accounts, we can’t definitively say who’s behind it just by looking at the accounts. But we can look at who benefits from this kind of information war.

Miller says: “if this isn’t Russia or someone being funded by Russia, I don’t understand what the interest, or the benefit would be. There’s nothing else really being gained here other than an attempt to try and garner pro-invasion support.” 

How should we read this?

This digital swarm of support for Putin’s invasion shows the information war is shapeshifting every day, it’s important not to hold up this activity as a bellwether for real-life sentiment in these countries. They don’t reflect reality, and they don’t necessarily reflect public opinion, because they are being pushed and promoted in a way that’s deceptive. 

“The world is a much bigger place than our own timelines,” said Miller. “There is a whole world out there for Russia to play for.”

The post Ukraine is winning the information war in the West. What about elsewhere? appeared first on Coda Story.

From polling, data research or scientific analysis, here are some of the most important recent studies about disinformation.

1) Remember the fake news campaign that brought disinformation into the mainstream discussion? Yes, that one: Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This research from 2018 by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a leading computer network analysis firm, for the United States Senate was, at the time, the most comprehensive analysis of Russian meddling. The researchers analyzed millions of posts and reactions online and determined how the notorious troll farm, the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, tailored different messages to galvanize individual Trump supporters and discourage non-supporters from casting votes at all. The focus had been on Facebook and Twitter; these researchers unraveled how the Internet Research Agency used YouTube in their campaign and also uncovered their sloppiness, like cases of them paying for political ads with Russian rubles.

2) How were scientists in different disciplines discussing fake news before disinformation went literally everywhere? In 2018, as fake news became a catch-all buzz term, a group of 16 political scientists, psychologists, computer scientists, media experts, historians, and journalists led by Harvard professors David Lazer and Matthew Baum teamed up to publish a paper about the science of fake news, looking at how it works on an individual and societal level.

3) In 2020 EU DisinfoLab published Indian Chronicles, an exhaustive research project uncovering a 15-year long international pro-India and anti-Pakistan disinformation campaign run by the New Delhi-based Srivastava Group, mainly targeting the UN and EU. Fake and “resurrected” think tanks and NGOs lobbied the European Parliament, spoke at sessions, and convinced parliamentarians to write pro-India and anti-Pakistan op-eds for over 750 of their fake media outlets across 119 countries. Reportedly, ANI, South Asia’s leading news agency, played a major role in spreading content from these websites, giving them credibility. Srivastava Group was also the organizer of controversial trips to Kashmir in 2019, when a couple dozen far-right European Parliamentarians visited the Indian-controlled disputed regions in Kashmir.

4) In 2020 QAnon, a conspiracy theory about how a global child trafficking ring is ruling the world, conquered every other outlandish conspiracy theory and went global. It infiltrated politics, public health, yoga groups, the hip-hop scene and disrupted the personal lives of thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad. Huge numbers of disinformation stories in the past year had something to do with QAnon, and this poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core published last May made clear just how far QAnon has traveled. In the U.S. alone, 30 million people believe at least some QAnon tenets, ranking QAnon next to major religions.

5) Last spring, amid Covid-19 vaccine rollouts, an international non-profit research organization, The Center for Countering Digital Hate, investigated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for harmful, Covid-19 related disinformation. They uncovered the “Disinformation Dozen” —  the influencers who accounted for 65% of Covid-19 related misinformation online. The list includes notorious anti-vaccine campaigners like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alternative medicine practitioners like Christiane Northrup and the leading pseudoscientific influencer-physician Joseph Mercola. Mercola, who has been profiting from his misinformation, also made our list of top business owners profiting off bad science. “He will continue to express his professional opinions and defend his freedom of speech,” his representative told Coda when approached for a comment.

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1. Jennifer Lincoln, known to her over 2 million TikTok followers as @drjenniferlincoln, is a Portland, Oregon-based obstetrician-gynecologist. Lincoln’s short, humorous videos, based on scientific research, covers a wide range of subjects about health, mythbusting about period pains, treating vaginal infections with pseudoscientific cures or misinformation about sexually transmitted infections and safety of Covid-19 vaccines. She also uses her platform to discuss pressing issues like widespread inaccessibility of hygienic menstrual products, birth control, abortion or how to become an OB GYN whose practice is inclusive of people with different gender identities.

2. Alease Daniel, or @aleasetheembryologist on TikTok, is a Raleigh-based embryologist, who has introduced her more than 124,000 TikTok followers to her IVF lab. IVF is a method of assisted reproduction with sperm and eggs combined outside of the body in a laboratory dish. Millions of TikTok viewers have seen her work in the lab, talking through the procedures like prepping dishes for IVF to retrieving the eggs or counting sperm. She also uses her videos to debunk reproductive misconceptions. Daniel has told Wral that she’s posting videos because fertility treatment can leave people feeling out of control and having knowledge about the process provides a little bit of peace of mind.

3. Tanaya Narendra, @dr_cuterus on Instagram, is a gynecologist, who uses her social media account to post videos and illustrations about reproductive health, safe sex, body positivity or safety of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, that prevent some strains of virus causing cervical cancer. Her posts in English and Hindi are short, funny and educational, like this video titled “Dude, where’s my vagina?” explaining the anatomy of the uterus using an anatomical model.

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4. Ali Rodriguez, also known as The Latina Doc or @alirodmd on TikTok, is using her dancing TikTok videos to answer questions and clear misconceptions about reproductive health in English and Spanish. In October, she told VerywellHealth that being a Latina, she understands the stigma and secrecy surrounding reproductive health and contraception and her patients from the Latinx community often are exposed to misinformation or lack of information about it. 

5. Natalie Crawford, or @nataliecrawfordmd on TikTok, is a Texas-based obstetrician-gynecologist and fertility specialist. Since 2019 she’s been sharing fertility-related information on ovulation, reproductive health and diets. She’s also been posting informative videos about endometriosis, a long-term condition where tissue that normally lines the inside uterus grows outside of it, usually causing severe pain and sometimes other issues such as infertility. Endometriosis can be debilitating and can take years to diagnose and treat accordingly. Crawford also runs Instagram and YouTube accounts to share information more extensively than she can do in few-second TikTok videos.

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This week’s Letter from London illustrates the friction between rumor and reality on an extremely hyperlocal scale, so please bear with me. On the morning of Saturday, August 7, I woke at my usual time of around 6.30am and made myself a cup of coffee. After a 15-month-long pandemic, which has seen gyms and group sports largely locked down, I had begun retraining for ParkRun, a free, weekly series of timed events held across the world and organized by a U.K. charity. 

I was almost certainly going to leave my house around 7.30 a.m. for a run around the local Finsbury Park, which would end with another coffee overlooking a nearby nature reserve. That might sound like a healthy way to begin the weekend, but unfortunately, I was also scrolling through my Twitter feed. #FinsburyPark was trending — a rare phenomenon — and I decided to have a look. I now wish I hadn’t. 

The hashtag’s top tweets were a mixture of chaos, rumors and rebuttals. In a nutshell, something major had happened or not happened overnight. Getting to the bottom of it took some time, but a toxic mixture of facts and lies eventually emerged. At around 7.45 p.m. the previous evening, dozens of police were dispatched to an address around the corner, to investigate a tip-off that that as many as 70 venomous snakes had escaped a residential address. Officers shut down a road close to my home at around 8 p.m. and carried out a series of searches for just over an hour, before declaring the incident to be the result of a hoax call. 

One reason why the rumor went viral was because a Twitter account with over 100,000 followers named @CrimeLdn had posted footage, ostensibly from the scene, showing a large police presence, with the caption: “Estimated 70 poisonous snakes have escaped from a flat (according to the police) on the road between Manor House and Finsbury Park.” The footage can be viewed here. 

While @CrimeLdn, an account that usually shares reports of knife crime in the U.K., later confirmed that a member of the public had sent in false information, dozens of Twitter users were still sharing news of the allegedly escaped reptiles the following morning. @CrimeLdn’s correction also prompted criticism from other Twitter users about the importance of verification, using second sources, and the dangers of spreading fake news. 

By the time I had fixed myself a second coffee on Saturday morning to continue reading through the hashtag, I was half wondering whether running through my local park would be safe. I didn’t actually believe that 70 venomous snakes were on the loose in the area. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what to believe. I mean, venomous snakes have escaped residential buildings in other parts of the world. One actually made a break for freedom from a Cologne apartment in February. Coverage of the incident had also leaked to other parts of the internet. I saw the story published on several London news sites. Debunking of the hoax appeared throughout the day on national tabloid websites, including The Mirror and Metro. 

I did go for a run and, eventually, continued with the rest of my day, but the whole fiasco has reminded me of how the hollowing out of local news sources has left a void in our digital spaces. As much of Coda Story’s work demonstrates, a tsunami of fake news is an ongoing and persistent menace in countries around the world, including the U.S., Spain and Pakistan. Much of it is unleashed by political, religious, anti-science or business interests. Some of the most disturbing violence around the world has also been caused by the dissemination of fake news in hyperlocal situations. My experience seemed worthy of inquiry. 

I recently messaged @CrimeLdn to ask about the incident, in an attempt to find out how this kind of misinformation can spread across digital platforms and affect the lives of ordinary people. After several requests, an account administrator agreed to a short interview via Twitter Messages. I asked if moderators felt bad about posting the original material. “We got a little bit of criticism but at the same time I think people know it was a hoax call and it did make us feel a bit bad,” read the reply. 

I also asked the media team at Twitter. The response I received wasn’t particularly informative about this specific incident, but here’s an extract: “We use a combination of technology and human review to identify misleading information on the service. This includes Tweets that contain content that violates our synthetic and manipulated media policy, our civic integrity policy, and our Covid-19 medical misinformation policy. As a uniquely open, public service, the clarification of falsehoods happens in seconds on Twitter.” 

I felt like I needed to speak with an expert, so arranged an interview with Professor Shakuntala Banaji, professor of media culture and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I wanted to find out why so many people would share false information, even after it had been fact checked, eventually leading to the deployment of police at taxpayers’ expense. 

“People have come to believe that passing on information of whatever kind, whether you have checked it out or not, is a civic duty,” she said. “So, a lot of people who unwittingly get caught up in these kinds of both hyperlocal and national chains of misinformation are not necessarily fools or violent people or inclined towards prejudice. They have thought of themselves in this context as being a good citizen. They have a belief in their own integrity and have a belief in the person from whom they found the information.”

Later the same day, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and related the story to some guests who live in other parts of London. A couple said they had also experienced their own examples of hyperlocal fake news. There was also some light relief. I looked at Twitter again in the evening and one user had posted about Finsbury Park. The story had obviously moved on. He was paraphrasing actor Samuel L. Jackson’s soliloquy from “Snakes on a Plane.”

The post Letter From London: Snake news is fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

ASPI’s research analyzed online behavior in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and Australia and found evidence of financially driven content farms, coordinated websites and social media accounts producing unoriginal, low quality articles and videos to drive traffic and revenue. 

One of the starkest examples highlighted in the report examines how a hired online campaign in Indonesia in November 2020 flooded Twitter with the hashtag #AdaApaDenganBBC (“What’s up with the BBC)”. The campaign involved hundreds of tweets aimed at discrediting a BBC article that suggested recent fires in Papua in eastern Indonesia had been deliberately lit to clear forests for palm oil plantations, benefiting a Korean company that had been buying local land. 

Researchers analyzed hundreds of tweets using the hashtag and found that a coordinated network of accounts, mainly created in 2020, regularly posted screenshots from Indonesian news articles that contained criticisms of the BBC’s palm oil deforestation story. Twitter has since suspended many of the accounts.

In another example of online manipulation, ASPI and the Taiwan-based civil society organization DoubleThink Lab analyzed a Chinese-language content farm and a news outlet targeting audiences in Australia and Taiwan. Research showed both online entities — Au123.com, a Chinese-language news outlet based in Australia and Qiqis.org, a content farm that targets Taiwanese audiences — regularly published articles that favored Chinese government policies and narratives. 

Jacob Wallis, who directs research on disinformation operations at ASPI, told me that online content farms are becoming an important part of the digital landscape in Asia Pacific countries where cheap digital labor is abundant. “Elections and periods of heightened political engagement are now a business model for operators at the base of the digital economy.”

Disinformation campaigns have become a lucrative sector for digital creators. According to ASPI, independent content writers can earn up to $2,000 a month. Research by the NGO Indonesia Corruption Watch in 2020 found that the Indonesian government has spent $6 million paying influencers to promote government policies on social media.

“There's a really dangerous nexus emerging between financially motivated scammers, content farms and state actors,” said Wallis. “State actors are beginning to understand that if they align with propaganda from the Chinese state, for example, that that will bring them an audience, which will drive revenue.”

The post ‘Influence for hire’ networks are manipulating online discussions throughout the Asia Pacific region appeared first on Coda Story.

According to Claudio Michelizza, founder of the Italian fact-checking site Bufale.net, during the first wave of Italy’s coronavirus crisis, “disinformation websites contributed to the climate of uncertainty. People started believing that Covid was planned.”

The online spread of misleading narratives is a particular cause for concern in Italy. According to an April 2021 report by the global activist platform Avaaz, Italian speakers are the non-English users in Europe “least protected” against disinformation on Facebook, with 69% of the content examined not fact-checked by the platform’s moderators. And while social networks like Facebook and Twitter have removed many “superspreader” accounts, a multitude of smaller pages still seem to fly under their radar — including Oltre.Tv, which had operated on Facebook since 2011.

In December 2020, the global misinformation-tracking organization NewsGuard identified an network of seven Italian websites and Facebook pages that shared each other’s posts and articles almost simultaneously. The network includes Oltre.Tv. NewsGuard calculated the network’s reach at over 1.5 million followers. Since then, a sister site to Oltre.tv has appeared — Gasp.News — that publishes and shares similar content.

The network of Facebook pages mainly share articles from Oltre.Tv with false claims about the pandemic, such as an interview with an Italian psychiatrist who referred to Bill Gates as “a nerdy psychopath”, whose efforts to fund Covid vaccines would transform people into robots.

From the outset, Oltre.Tv had strong anti-science leanings. “The Facebook page was born with a focus against multinationals. Its first name was ‘Let’s boycott multinationals,’” said Luca Nicotra, a campaign director at Avaaz, who has been following Oltre.Tv’s network since 2019. “Since the beginning, it had an anti-vax position.”

Oltre.Tv’s Facebook page was taken down in May 2019, after an investigation by Avaaz revealed its participation in a wide network promoting the populist Five Star Movement and right-wing Lega Nord, which swept Italy’s Parliamentary elections in 2018 and 2019. Over 23 Italian Facebook pages that had been posting disinformation and hate speech in support of the parties were removed.

Days later, however, a new Oltre.Tv Facebook page appeared. It has been sharing questionable content ever since. 

Oltre.Tv and Gasp.News both run ads through Google. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra has stated that the network could generate between 2,000-4,000 euros a month. 

Oltre.Tv and Gasp.News share a publishing team and an owner — ArcanetWeb SRLS, a digital marketing and communication company. The sites’ content editor, Daniele di Luciano, told Coda in an email that he does indeed run the seven Facebook pages that NewsGuard identified and the Gasp.News page. NewsGuard also characterizes Oltre.Tv’s content as having a right-wing, anti-immigration and anti-abortion bias.

Di Luciano disagreed with NewsGuard’s findings and said Oltre.tv is neither right nor left wing. He also questioned NewsGuard’s rating and analysis process. Writing in Italian, he said, “Oltre is a simple news site, like many others.”

The post The Italian disinformation networks flying under Facebook’s radar appeared first on Coda Story.

The report immediately touched off well defined political hotwires. Conservative pundits decried freedom of speech infringement, painting a picture of the government dictating to social media companies what content they can allow on their platforms. 

The report was couched in the language of togetherness, making suggestions for what we can all do to fight fake news. To pitch in, the social media giants could, Murthy wrote, consider letting academics see how platforms moderate content, and re-jig their recommendation algorithm to stop prioritizing fake news. 

That won’t happen, said David Robert Grimes, a scientist and vaccine advocate who campaigns against misinformation. “I’ve always said social media platforms do not give a continental damn about the ramifications of what’s on their platforms,” he said. “They care about engagement; they are not really going to shut down communities of hundreds of thousands of very active users unless they are forced to do that by legislation.”

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose research was cited in the report, was in agreement. “I’m delighted the White House has acknowledged our research and recognized that the disinformation does pose a public health threat that amounts to a crisis,” he said. “The trouble is that asking people to fix it and relying on voluntary measures by social media companies just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.”

The report also had advice for how to psychologically combat misinformation – Murthy called on people to speak gently to family members about their medical misjudgements, advising them to “stay calm, and don’t expect success from one conversation.” 

Murthy advocated for more research into techniques like “pre-bunking” where falsehoods are pre-emptively quashed before conspiracy theories can gain ground. Psychological studies suggest that priming people to spot fake narratives before they encounter them in the wild is a highly effective way to combat disinformation. “You can immunize people against falsehoods,” Grimes explained. There’s just one problem: “Social media has meant that the falsehoods are already out there. Prebunking is like a very slow vaccine rollout when there’s a raging pandemic that’s highly infectious.” 

Ahmed was also skeptical: “this behavioral change stuff is not enough. We’re not on a level playing field,” he said. “The playing field is tilted toward the bad guys because the algorithm recognizes that conspiracism is highly addictive, so it makes people spend more time on the site and actively serves it up to them.”

The surgeon general also called on the American education system to teach students critical thinking and media and health literacy skills. 

This, Grimes said, would take generations – but will be key to fighting the infodemic once and for all. “We have to treat information as potentially carcinogenic,” he said. “Before you hit share, especially if that information chimes with what you want to be true, you have to question it twice as hard. We’re bad at doing that. And that is why social media is like crack cocaine.”

Erica Hellerstein contributed to reporting.

The post US Surgeon General lambasts social media as urgent health threat appeared first on Coda Story.

On the other line, a friend told him he heard Jovenel Moïse, the country's president, may have been assassinated. Louis scoured the news for more information, and the official confirmation came about an hour later. “It was on all the networks, the social networks, everybody interpreting it their own way” recalled Louis, the coordinator of Panos Institute, a Haitian nonprofit that trains journalists and youth on media literacy and identifying disinformation. 

The attack plunged Haiti—which has no functioning parliament and has long been riven by protests calling for Moïse’s resignation over corruption allegations—into a deeper political abyss. 

When I reached Louise by phone on Wednesday night, Haiti’s acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, had imposed martial law, and people were still struggling to make sense of a shocking act of political violence that left Moïse’s body riddled with bullets and signs of torture. “There are still issues that are still not clarified, so there are many unknowns about this assassination,” he told me.

The unresolved circumstances of Moïse’s death have left Haitians with an information void that’s being filled with rumor and conspiracy. In the hours and days after Moïse’s murder, Louise — a former reporter— saw speculation and disinformation abound. “There are so many rumors and so much fake news,” he said, with a weary chuckle. “Everybody is using their own theory to justify what has happened.” 

On Wednesday morning, the acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, said the attack was carried out by an “armed commando group” that included foreigners, and some assailants spoke Spanish—an allegation fueling speculation and fake news, Louis said. Among the rumors circulating are claims that the killers may have been hired assassins from the Dominican Republic, where local officials are investigating if the attackers used the country to escape, according to reports from the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre.

On social media, a video circulated of a man, allegedly near where the attack took place at the president’s home on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, yelling in English over a megaphone: “DEA operation. Everybody stand down.” 

Late Wednesday evening, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, Bocchit Edmond, told the Guardian the men who killed Moïse claimed they were U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration members when they entered his home. Haitian officials told the Miami Herald the attackers were not part of the DEA. Officials with the Biden administration said the DEA was not involved and a U.S. State Department employee called the claim “absolutely false.” But that hasn’t prevented the steady hum of conspiracy. “People are alleging that the president might have done some wrong deal and the DEA guys came for him,” Louis said. “This is not official news,” he added. “This is fake news.” 

On Facebook, a Haitian radio and “media personality” with more than 41,000 followers wrote Moïse was “assassinated in his private residence by a Venezuelan and Colombian commando.” Louis shared a post of unknown origin circulating on WhatsApp claiming the unit that killed Moïse included two members of the Haitian National Police. He said he also saw speculation online questioning the role of the country’s national intelligence service and why it was unable to prevent the attack.

The disinformation over Wednesday’s events spread to people monitoring events from afar. U.S.-based Brian Concannon, founder of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, a coalition of Haitian and U.S. human rights advocates, said he came across a WhatsApp post that had been reshared from someone who said they believed the attack was a DEA operation gone bad. “Not saying that’s true, just what people are reporting,” he told me. “I'm seeing a lot of stuff. Some of the things I think are people trying to get the best information, and then there's some that's probably intentional disinformation.”

The prevalence of disinformation in Haiti’s digital ecosystem predated Moïse’s attack. Louis said fake news is primarily spread on WhatsApp, which people prefer using because they are able to send voice memos. In the summer of 2020, Panos surveyed 288 Haitians on their media consumption habits, and more than half said they used WhatsApp and Facebook as their primary means of accessing news. 62 percent of people surveyed said disinformation eroded their trust in local leaders and the media. 

“There are many people who think everything said on WhatsApp is true and they forward it without analyzing it and that’s an issue,” Louis said. “Social media is an information tool but at the same time it can destroy you.”

The post Assassination of president plunges Haiti into conspiracy theories, rumor and fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

I spoke to Pacheco about how he tracks bots and fake social media behavior. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda: How would you describe your job to someone who’s not in the bot world?

Diogo Pacheco: I try to be like a — not a spy, but an investigator. How can I try to exploit and unveil bad actors? I’m trying to do reverse engineering. I start with the assumption that there are bad guys out there, and I'm just trying to find them.

Coda: Why should people worry or care about bad actors, bots and automated information campaigns?

DP: So the problem is not necessarily having bots. There are bots that are benign, they do good stuff, they explain things for people and make information readily available. The problem is when you have someone misleading you, someone trying to impersonate someone else, or trying to amplify some narrative or some discourse. Everything that you interact with, everything you read and you perceive affects your opinion. 

Coda: How easy is it to actually figure out what’s going on and whether an account you are looking at is fake?

DP: Bots are evolving, and bot detectors are also evolving.  So every time it's more difficult to detect because the bots get more elaborate. But the original intention is the same. There are people that are trying to exploit the system, trying to amplify their agenda. 

Coda: Has disinformation from bots intensified during the pandemic?

DP: Every day we see more and more people distrusting very well known scientific facts. Like, people not believing anymore in the efficacy of vaccines, people believing the earth is flat. It’s unimaginable — how are we going back instead of moving forwards? I think this is in part due to these types of accounts. We have our own bias, our psychological bias. If these accounts manage to get you into their network, it’s hard not to conform with the group. 

Coda: Tell me about what your research revealed about the Hong Kong protests in 2019. 

DP: In that case, we knew there was this huge warfare going on social media. One side was trying to ban and shut down the internet, the other side was trying to organize online. The pro-Hong Kong protest messages were mostly in English, trying to divert international attention towards the problem. On the Chinese side, they were trying to target local people, and there was a clear message to stay home and to keep people away from the streets. On both sides, there was a high bot score on the “botometer.” 

Coda: People who work in areas of disinformation and authoritarian technology are now on the lookout for inauthentic behavior online. What will the next generation of bots look like? 

Every time, it’s more difficult to detect bots because they become more complex and elaborate, and you have cyborg accounts that are operated by a normal human, and then become automated. The problems arise when you start seeing coordinated action, where there are accounts that are both very human-like and very bot-like. But the idea is the same: there will still be people that are trying to exploit the system, trying to evade or amplify the agenda.

The post Hunting down bots and ‘bad guys’ on social media appeared first on Coda Story.

The Center for Digital Hate, based in Washington D.C., has called on social media companies to deplatform leading anti-vaxxers, who are responsible for the majority of vaccine misinformation generated online. The Center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said that the $36 million estimate was conservative and that their real profits could be much higher. 

In March, the Center identified a “disinformation dozen” of influencers who have been responsible for almost two-thirds of all anti-vaccine social media content shared or posted in February and March. According to Ahmed, influencers’ confidence in spreading propaganda online comes from “years of impunity,” during which they have been allowed to broadcast their message without consequences. 

A Facebook company spokesperson disputed the report’s estimates about advertising revenue generated by anti-vaxxers, adding: “We are running the world’s largest online vaccine information campaign, labelling every post regarding the vaccines with accurate information and we’ve removed profiles, pages and content identified in these reports. During the pandemic we’ve removed 18 million pieces of harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and worked with 80 fact-checking organizations to label over 167m posts as false.” 

“Anti-vaxxers are dependent on Big Tech’s failure to take enforcement action against them, despite serially breaking the community standards of the major platforms,” said Ahmed. “We need government authorities, including regulators and prosecutors, to take rapid action to establish the scale of their malignant activity and then clamp down on criminal profiteering from health misinformation.”

The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s investigation also found that influencers’ attempts to push their followers onto “lifeboat” accounts on smaller platforms such as Telegram has had limited success, while deplatforming is successful in preventing them gaining wider audiences. The report states that leading anti-vaccine organizations led by big names in the industry, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and Larry Cook, have admitted in legal filings that they need mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, in order to make money and spread their ideas. 

“Deplatforming disinformation superspreaders doesn’t mean they move elsewhere and carry on as normal — in their own words, it has ‘demolished’ their ability to spread misinformation,” Ahmed said. 

The report also delves into the complex web of marketing and profiteering that makes up the anti-vaccine industry, highlighting how influencers often collaborate to promote each others’ content and sell products via affiliate links. One example highlights the case of the U.S.-based anti-vaccination entrepreneurs Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who claimed to have paid out $14 million to others who promoted their digital and physical products online. 

Covid-19 has provided a marketing bonanza for anti-vaccine influencers, according to Ahmed. “Throughout this pandemic, people around the world took unprecedented steps to keep each other safe, but it was Christmas morning for anti-vaxxers, who profited at the expense of public health,” he said.

The post Anti-vaxxers make up to $1.1 billion for social media companies appeared first on Coda Story.

Many political analysts now believe that this interference played a role in the shock victory of the pro-China candidate Han Kuo-yu as mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city. That result was so unexpected that it drew comparisons to the election of President Donald Trump in the United States. Once the election was over, researchers and Taiwanese officials evidenced that much of the disinformation, distributed via content mills, fake accounts, and the use of bots, originated in China.

In January 2019, V-Dem Institute, an independent research institute based in Sweden, declared Taiwan one of a few democracies most affected by disinformation. These incursions have continued throughout the nation’s January 2020 presidential election and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Taiwan-based disinformation research center Doublethink Lab, China’s strategy has evolved. While previous disinformation campaigns focused on open social networks — including the Reddit-like message board PTT, Facebook, and Twitter — they have now shifted towards a popular Tokyo-based messaging app named Line.

Line is similar in function to China’s WeChat or WhatsApp. In 2019, the company reported 194 million monthly users around the world. Eighteen million of them are in Taiwan — a country of just under 24 million people. It is also the most popular messaging app in Japan and Thailand.

“There is no more important platform in how Taiwanese communicate with each other or interact in a social way online,” Nick Monaco, research director at the California-based Institute for the Future’s Digital Intelligence Lab, told me, during a recent telephone conversation. 

Owing to its very nature, Line presents a number of challenges for researchers and journalists seeking to understand and combat disinformation in Taiwan.

“Line is relatively closed in comparison to Facebook and PTT,” said Monaco. “You can’t often see where messages came from, how popular they are, and how much they are spreading.”

Last month, an Institute for the Future report identified an obscure Malaysia-based operation named the Qiqi News Network as playing a key role in the creation and spread of Covid-19 disinformation, via Line groups and activity on a number of other platforms. Monaco believes that Qiqi’s use of mainland-specific Chinese phrasing and its frequent promotion of content produced by Chinese state-owned media offer evidence of a connection to Beijing.

Some messages linked to Qiqi and other unidentified sources have also downplayed or cast doubt on foreign reporting of Uyghur human rights abuses in Xinjiang, accused the Taiwanese government of hiding the scale of the coronavirus pandemic and questioned the academic background of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.

Chat bots to counter disinformation

Around the world, independent fact-checking and academic research are viewed as some of the most crucial lines of defense against disinformation. 

Johnson Hsiang-Sheng Liang, however, is concerned about the limitations of this approach. He believes that the reach and influence of the media and educational institutions can’t compete with that of hugely popular chat apps like Line. 

“Personally I often receive hoaxes from Line groups,” said Liang during a series of online messages. “Finding information to reply to them every time is pretty time consuming.”

Liang is a Taiwan-based hacker with a background in electrical engineering and computer science. In 2017, he and local social worker Billion Lee got together to found CoFacts — a decentralized, open-source project staffed by volunteers.

One of Line’s features is that it allows verified users to create chat bots. CoFacts decided to exploit this aspect of its functionality to counter fake news and disinformation. It built its own chatbot, to which users can send suspect posts. Once it receives a message, the bot analyzes it to see if it matches anything it has previously received. If so, the bot sends an automated response, saying whether the message should be trusted or not. If the content of the message has not been seen before, it is sent to a team of volunteer fact-checkers.

Line also uses CoFacts’ findings and content on its own official fact-checking account. The Institute for the Future has also used information from the CoFacts database in its research.

Risks in other markets

While Taiwan’s difficult relationship with China poses unique geopolitical challenges, it is not the only country in East Asia dealing with disinformation spread via Line.

“China obviously has a strategic interest in the greater East and Southeast Asia regions,” said Monaco, adding that the platform “may be used in other places” to disseminate fake news and propaganda.

In Thailand, the media watchdog Sure and Share Center has been monitoring disinformation on the app since 2015. Until recently, the main misleading stories it encountered were related to matters of health.

“The source of the disinformation often came from people who want to sell something — a herbal medicine or supplement,” said Peerapon Anutarasoat, one of the organization’s fact-checkers.

Even in the age of coronavirus, this is changing. Student-led protests that began in July against the Thai military’s powerful role in government have led to an increase in political disinformation on Line. Recent examples include a widely shared story claiming that the U.S. government was funding activists and demonstrations. 

“Political misinformation is seasonal,” said Anutarasoat. “Now, we have protests in Thailand, so there is a lot of information and misinformation that makes people confused.” 

Anutarasoat fears that closed channels such as Line help to create hard-to-penetrate echo chambers in which disinformation thrives. He also believes that Line is taking fewer steps to address these issues in Thailand than it has in Taiwan.

“Thailand is Line’s number-two market, but we cannot find many efforts around disinformation,” he said. 

In Japan — Line’s largest market, with 80 million active users — the app is not seen as a major vector for disinformation. This can largely be attributed to media consumption habits within the nation, where, according to a 2020 Reuters Institute study, print newspapers still dominate and online sharing of news lags far behind other Asian countries. 

“Misinformation there isn’t a big problem,” said Masato Kajimoto, a professor of media studies at Hong Kong University, during a telephone conversation. “If you look at research, people in Japan tend to be less willing to share political news with certain viewpoints.” 

He will be watching closely, though, as sudden domestic unrest, or a shift in relations with China could significantly alter the nation’s information landscape.

For now, observers believe that since being hit by a campaign in 2018, Taiwan has responded well to the challenges posed by external disinformation. CoFact’s Line bot and the work of organizations such as Doublethink Lab have all played a part in minimizing the risk posed by fake news and conspiracy theories. 

Kajimoto sees this is largely a result of widespread sharing of knowledge about disinformation and its proliferation.

When it comes to fake news, he believes that the majority of Taiwanese people are “aware of potential threats from mainland China.” This, he partly attributes to the growing visibility of organizations dedicated to providing reliable information to an increasing number of individuals and institutions. 

“Even if the proportion of people who use fact-checking platforms like CoFacts is not high, everyone knows they exist now,” he said.

The post Disinformation from China floods Taiwan’s most popular messaging app appeared first on Coda Story.