Harmful Online Content Responsible for Political Discourse and Encouraging Extremism

With the 2020 U.S. elections just around the corner, speculations have started to erupt, keeping the previous 2016 elections in mind. Many researchers have pointed out that we will see an upward trend in spreading of disinformation, similar to the recent spread in the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan.

It is also believed that big actors like Russia and China are not only the ones involved in these misinformation campaigns, but even lone actors, countries like Iran, and private entities like Israel’s Archimedes Group and Psy-Group.

Private Entities/Groups

The whole extent of private entities being involved in propagation of disinformation is unclear, but due to the fact that there have been many examples uncovered since 2016, more are to be expected.

Social media platforms like Facebook, have taken down a number of private companies and entities based in countries like Philippines, showing an increased presence of non-governmental actors within this space.

Facebook revealed the it banned approximately 200 accounts link to Archimedes Group, which targeted mostly African countries and users in Latin America and Southeast Asia,

Social Media firm “New Knowledge” ran a disinformation campaign in favor of winning Democratic candidate Doug Jones. The campaign was funded by tech billionaire Reid Hoffman.

In 2018, the Private Israeli firm, “Psy-Group,” which is staffed by former Israeli spies, was found to be responsible for influencing American Hospital board elections and pitched Trump campaigns.

Lone Actors

Lone actors or independent trolls, are even harder to spot, since these are small-scale operations. The concern is high as Russian trolls can pose as American actors and vice versa, making them difficult to track.

A doctored video, which surfaced to justify CNN’s Jim Acosta’s revoked White House press credentials, gained prominence when it was tweeted by Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee and a prominent Infowars reported, even though its origins were never determined. Similarly, Jacob Wahl, who is considered more famously as a right-wing troll, was banned from Twitter when he bragged about his methods in a USA Today story of planting disinformation over the platform. The problem is that such actors only surface when they are indiscreet about their doings are not caught in the act.

Countries

Twitter, Facebook, Google, all have found Iran, China and Russia to be responsible for swaying foreign opinions about countries and spreading disinformation on their platforms regarding a number of events.

Iran, which is responsible for spreading messages and posts criticizing Saudi Arabia and other rivals openly and also backing its own religious authority. China, on the other hand was active on social media with a number of fake accounts criticizing Hong Kong anti-Chinese government protests.