TechStuff Takes a Gander at Propaganda

lot of qualifiers. So in late September twenty nineteen, University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project released the two thousand nineteen Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation, And apart from misspelling the word organized, those wacky ox ford Ians turned the Z into an S, so it's an easy mistake.

But otherwise it's a great report. And yeah, I'm making a joke about the differences in spelling conventions between America and the UK, because in all honesty, this report is pretty scary and I need to get in my oofswell I can now. I say the report is scary, but

it's also not exactly surprising. We've heard plenty of reports all around the world over the last few years about governments and political parties using social media as a way to spread misinformation in an effort to manipulate people to do whatever it is the party in question wants them to do, or in some cases, to not do something, depending on the circumstances. But the scale of the issue is a truly global one and it's only becoming a bigger problem as time goes on. Now, it's also important

to note how the researchers generated this report. This was not some sort of deep undercover mission in which dozens of security experts infiltrated various countries to monitor social media activity. Instead, the researchers relied heavily on published accounts of governments and political parties manipulating social media for the purposes of propit Ganda, typically from a lot of news outlets, and they created a process in which they would score news sources on

a scale of one to three. One being a pretty reliable and reputable source of information, something that is has got a nice long standing reputation for for being a foundational source for news, and then three is on the opposite end of that right, Three would be a partisan,

biased or unreliable source. Articles that ranked a three were removed from the the whole set of articles before the next step in the process began, and that next step was to review all of those articles and then go into a mode called secondary literature review, in which researchers would focus on specific countries and do a deeper dive into the news stories about manipulation and social media sites. This included further research that collected stuff like research papers,

govern ment reports, and other publicly available information. Then the researchers prepared country case studies for most of the countries they covered in their initial search. Their case studies laid out specific instances and strategies that were found in the

respective countries. The researchers then called upon experts to review the case studies, and the experts were there to evaluate the reliability of the data and also whether or not the case studies accurately reflected the information that was available. So not just are these facts accurate, but is the way that that the report presents the facts is that in itself accurate? Because you could have some accurate stats and then still report on it in a way that

is not, you know, entirely representational of the truth. So the experts were sort of the peer review process for this report, and you could argue that the report is itself sort of a meta study that would be a study that pulls information from many other established sources as opposed to an original study that does new and original research. This one was dependent upon stuff that had already been

read written about these various countries. One thing I think the report does particularly well is that the researchers acknowledged what makes this manipulation possible in the first place. The amount of information we have access to at any given time is truly monumental. Let's think back a few decades imagine what it would be like before the eras of radio and television. Back when you would get your news from print. You would get newspapers or journals or magazines

or other periodicals. That was pretty much the only way you were going to get any news beyond what's just going on in your immediate neighborhood. Radio and TV brought with them the ability to spread news faster and in a wider distribution. Then came cable and the invention of twenty four hour cable news, and now we had a whole new p problem. Suddenly we had to find a way to fill up twenty four hours of news time

every single day. When before newspapers, radio programs, television programs, they would curate the most important news stories because you know, you had a limited amount of space and or time. But with twenty four hours, suddenly time was not as big of a problem. In fact, it was the opposite problem. How do you fill it all up? Then we get to the Internet, which, like the twenty four hour cable news channels, is also always on. And much of the business that is on the Internet relies on doing a

few things, and they're all related. And this is not going to come as news to any of you, but I want to lay it out. So business on the internet, if that's in fact where you are, are really dependent upon generating revenue. As the Internet itself, you want to attract as many sets of eyeballs as possible, so get as many people to visit your website as you possibly can. You want to keep those eyeballs on the company's web pages as much as possible, so you don't want people

bouncing off and leaving. And as a consequence, you also want to serve up as many ads to those eyeballs as possible, because that's generally how most web based businesses are generating their revenue. Uh. You know, obviously you've got other businesses like retail that use the web as a

portal to shop the inventory of the retail store. But for anything that's specifically dependent upon the web itself for revenue, that's generally how this works unless you're doing a subscription model, and all of these things I just mentioned contributes to add revenue. So yeah, I know, again I'm starting with the obvious and that if you didn't know this already,

you probably had noticed it at the very least. But this is why you find so many web pages that take kind of irritating approaches, like they'll create a gallery or slide show approach which forces you to click on the next button to generate another page view. So rather than just lay it all out in one page where you can just scroll through and read everything, you're clicking

over and over again. Well, those clicks count as page views, which help the the company that makes the web page market it to advertisers, or the websites that are designed for mobile that just have super long articles that scroll and scroll and scroll. You might get a picture a line of text, and then an AD, and then you'll get another picture in a line of text and another AD, and then you finally get around to finding the point where the article actually tells you whatever the headline was

claiming at the top. And that's not even really touching on the whole concept of click bait, in which a title and thumbnail image are carefully curated to get as many clicks as possible, sometimes with no regard as to whether or not the final web page actually reflects whatever the original promise was of the title and the thumbnail.

And one of the consequences of all this data around us, coupled with the various methods companies are using to get our attention, means we don't tend to spend a lot of time actually, you know, attending to anything. We can't. Instead, our attention drifts over data point after data point. Meanwhile, we've got a limitation on how much we trust information sources, so skillful manipulators take all of this into account when

designing an approach to manipulate the public. The executive summary of the report lays out the scale of the problem right away, and according to the researchers, their work uncovered instances of governments or political parties using social media manipulation in twenty eight countries. In a year later, the number of countries had grown to forty eight, and this year twenty nineteen, the number of countries in which at least one political party, if not the government itself, is using

social media for manipulation purposes is at seventy countries. The researchers also point out this doesn't necessarily mean the number of countries with governmental agencies using misinformation online is doubling year over year. Part of the increase maybe do not to more countries doing this, but rather are growing awareness

and ability to detect social manipulation. So it's not just that more people are using these techniques though that seems like it's a pretty safe bet, but also that we're getting better at detecting them, so in places where it may once have been overlooked, we now know about it. So and again, it's just that our our tool set has gotten better, so that's also contributing to this growing number.

And listing all the countries of those seventy would be pretty tedious, but pretty much everyone you would expect to be there is there. That includes the United States and the United Kingdom. It also includes Russia and China. Other countries on the list include India, Greece, the Check Republic, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Brazil, Cambodia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, and many many more. So the researchers were casting a

broad net around the globe. In this study, much of that focus has been on how governments use social platforms to manipulate things within their own borders, so, in other words, domestic concerns. But the researchers also found some reports about foreign influence operations or attempts to manipulate people who are

living in other countries entirely. Now, this focus was more narrow than the overall domestic focus because it's a challenge to get a handle on how frequently this foreign influence operation stuff is happening because platforms like Twitter and Facebook have either limited the investigations into such things or the reporting of any findings they've had has been pretty limited.

For example, those platforms have at least in their reporting, limited all their actions against campaigns that originated in just seven countries, those seven being China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. And to be clear, we're talking about just the stuff the researchers were able to find. I think it's safe to say there are probably instances of this that have yet to be uncovered, and some

countries they didn't have time to look into thoroughly. There are on countries in the world, or three if you only go with countries recognized by the United Nations. So this is a really big deal. Seventy out of a hundred, that's a significant Now, in this episode, I'm going to go through the report with you guys to talk about what they found and what it all means, and maybe think about what we might do to protect ourselves and

those around us from being manipulated bad news. There's not a whole lot we can do on an individual basis, but we'll get there now. Part of what makes this all challenging is that the Internet isn't exactly the same

all across the world, as you guys know. I live in the United States, and despite a few attempts to shut down access to servers that were hosting pirated media, because corporations have enormous sway in the United States, internet access in the States is largely unfettered, so essentially, if it's out there, you can access it in the United States. This is an over generalization but you get the idea. There are other countries that restrict, to one degree or

another that sort of access. In China, for example, there is the famous Great Firewall of China. The term describes not just the technology used, but the political policies. In China, the restrict citizens access to the Internet. State approved sites and services are fine, they can access those. The Chinese government subjects other stuff to heavy censorship or just blocks it outright. Controlling information is one way to maintain control over a population, and China is one of the most

obvious examples of that happening today. Another one would be North Korea. One of the big developments in twenty nineteen saw China get more involved in foreign influence operations. Previously, nearly all of China's propaganda efforts were confined to China itself and its strict control over Internet access to its citizens.

But in two thousand nineteen, with the rise of public demonstrations and protests in Hong Kong, the country began to initiate misinformation campaigns on social media to attempt to undermine public support for Hong Kong, casting the protesters as lawless and violent. The researchers state that there's no reason to assume China will stop using social media in an effort to shape the public understanding of things that are of importance to the country, So we'll probably see that country

continue it's foreign influence operations. Now, a lot of countries fall between these extremes I've just laid out, and you could also argue that neither the US nor China are truly on the very opposite ends of the spectrum, but that's the way they're often portrayed. Now, for the purposes of the report, the researchers decided to focus only on cases in which there was a clear mandate from a

government or political party to initiate the manipulation. This is important to distinguish because there may be many cases in which hackers, activists, companies, subcultures, or other groups of people could act on their own without the explicit permission or mandate of a government or political party. In cases like those, the ideologies and the goals of the group and the government just happened to align, but there's no explicit direction

from the state to commit any acts. You may remember that in the wake of the massive two thousand fourteen cyber attack on Sony which involved the theft of a ton of confidential information within the company. A hacker group called the Guardians of Peace claimed responsibility, and while the hacker group's goals were in line with those of North Korea as a whole, the country of North Korea maintained it had not directed any hackers to go after Sony.

If that were the case, which is still a matter of dispute, then it would be an example of what I was saying earlier. So the report would focus only on stories that link back to official government or political agencies, and not campaigns from apparent independent groups that just happened to align with those governments. Okay, so those are the basics when we come back. I'll talk more about specifics in the report, but first let's take a quick break.

According to the report, authoritarian governments and political parties use social manipulation to achieve one or more of three general outcomes, and the first is to suppress fundamental human rights, which I think we can all agree is pretty horrifying. The second is to discredit political opponents, and the third is to drown out any dissenting opinions. Now, those last two points show that these manipulators are relying on a tool

set used by Internet trolls. In general, trolls will use all sorts of manipulative tactics to dismiss anyone they target, and to rely on strategies to start flame wars or other distractions to keep the targeted party from being able to make any sort of impact. So, in some ways, the techniques being used in social manipulation are already incredibly

familiar to us. It's just that instead of popping up on a message board centered around no Dancing with the stars, it's a government or political party trying to establish control over a population. However, it does get more complicated than

just rilling up folks on the internet. The report's introduction starts off with the sentence and I quote around the world, government actors are using social media to manufacture consensus, automate suppression, and undermine trust in the liberal international order end quote. Now some of that still falls in the troll wheelhouse.

Manufacturing consensus, for example, this is when a party attempts to make it seem as though the majority of people around you all believe a certain philosophy or a course of action is the right one. It's the whole concept of go with the crowd, right, or if you're being

particularly cynical, it's likening people to sheep or cattle. People tend to go along with what others are doing because to do otherwise, to go outside of that, is to invite scrutiny or criticism, and a lot of us just prefer to avoid that, so, rather than make waves, will go with the flow. Trolls do this online through stuff

like sock puppet accounts. That's when a troll makes two or more accounts for an online discussion, and the troll will use their primary account to make whatever statement they want, and then the sock puppets are used to help the troll achieve that goal, typically by adding support in some way, so the trolls controlling all three or four, however many of these accounts there are, and using the sock puppet accounts to add support and credence to whatever the troll

is saying. So to an outside viewer, it's as if the troll has said something and that other people are now chiming in to support that's something, But in reality, it's just the troll, or sometimes a group of trolls, manufacturing that consensus, when in fact no such consensus exists within the group of at large well countries and political parties are doing the same thing, but on a much

larger scale. Governments do this by employing either directly or otherwise agents to do the dirty work, and the report refers to these agents as cyber troops. And some of those cyber troops are a little extra cyber. That is, some of the agents working on behalf of achieving the goals of these various governments and political parties are bots. They are programs that generate automated responses with the goal of either suppressing messages in opposition to the party's goals

or elevating an escalating language that supports those goals. The researchers identify three types of fake accounts in the report, human bot, and then cyborg. Now, out of the seventy countries that the researchers looked at, fifty were found using fake accounts run by bots in some way, mostly to

spread certain messages while drowning out dissent. Interestingly, human run accounts were even more widespread, with sixty out of the seventy countries employing them in some way to run fake accounts, and typically the people who are running these fake accounts would engage with others people who have real accounts, like the real users of these sites, by leaving comments on posts or sending private messages, and otherwise attempting to start

up conversations aligned with the overall goals of the communication strategy. The report also looked into instances of hacked accounts, in which a person's online account would become compromised and then pulled out of their control. Then a bot or a human agent or the hybrid cyborg could post as that person.

This strategy accomplishes two things at once. It can silence someone who otherwise might speak the scent against a government or political party, and it can appear to lend credibility to that government or political party by having a quote unquote real person add to the conversation in a way

that further is the political goals. Complicating matters is that in some countries governments encourage citizens to engage in spreading propaganda and silencing dissenting voices on behalf of the government. This would be a strategy where you say it's all part of being a good patriotic citizen of that country. In those cases, you're not talking about compromised or fake accounts. Instead, you're talking about indoctrinated people using their accounts to support

their respective governments. And because we're starting to see some platforms actually make moves against bots and other fake accounts, this could become a more common practice in the future. It's a lot harder for social platforms to remove quote unquote real accounts that happen to spread propaganda without running the risk of being labeled as partisan or advocating for censorship. As for the messaging, the research team identified five general

types of messages and their intended effects. So number one is the straightforward pro government propaganda. So these are messages that praise whatever power is behind the manipulation, just you know, yea America, or yea our glorious leader, or go socks. Next our messages designed to discredit or defame political dissidents and opponents, which might include a mixture of truth and

misinformation about the target. So this is where you have identified some potential opponent to the powers that be, and you use every tool in your tool chest to make that person seem like the worst human being in the world and no one should ever support him or her. The third path is to use misinformation to distract from

important issues. In the United States, you'll hear a lot of people complain about this sort of activity, in particular in which let's say a government official or an agency issues an outrageous or a controversial mess edge, and people will say it's an effort to pull the focus off

of matters of more critical importance. I'm not saying this actually happens all the time in the United States, instead of saying people talk about it happening all the time in the United States that when someone does make such a statement, one of the frequent responses is, this is just a pull focus away from X, you know, and it's not really a genuine attempt to start a real

conversation about this other thing. And the fourth type of message is one meant specifically to polarize and divide a population, because if you divide the people, if you push them further to extremes, it means that the people will not unify on anything. They're they're less powerful divided than they

would be unified. So while that can lead to other major social problems, as you push people to political extremes, you've also really decreased the ability of them to organ eyes on any meaningful level, and they can't really counteract what the government is doing. The fifth type of message, the final one, is a direct attack on dissidents themselves, made in an effort to drown out their voices through

any means necessary. And the researchers also pointed out that authoritarian regimes use social media propaganda in conjunction with other methods of intimidation, including surveillance and threats of violence. Frequent targets would be political opponents, journalists, and sometimes members of the population or at least large segments of the population

as a whole. If such a government can intimidate those who would otherwise speak out against it while simultaneously manipulating the conversation on social media to be in support of that same government, it's in a stronger position to maintain power. The report also details the actual communication strategies governments and political parties are using. So we've talked about the types of messages that the organization's propagate, but how are they

propagating the messages? What are those strategies and the report identifies five key ways. Number one is creating outright disinformation. This can include fake news articles, fake videos, that kind of thing, and as technology becomes more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly challenging for the average person to determine if something

they encounter is genuine or has been faked. In some cases, all it takes is a few edits to remove some context, and suddenly a message can have a very different meaning than the original intended one. So you can take video of a politician making a speech, for example, you trem a little bit off the beginning, a little bit off the end, and you can make it sound like that politician is saying the very opposite of what they actually intend.

In other cases, such as with deep fakes, there's the opportunity to manufacture an entirely fake video of a person, and this is only going to get harder as we go on. This is also the most common communication strategy. It's employed by fifty two of the countries that the team researched, though in many cases we're talking about more modest examples, such as fake news sites like a like

an article as opposed to a fake video. The second strategy involves mass reporting accounts or content as being against the terms of service of various platforms or organizations, so an example of this would be a concentrated effort to remove a person from Twitter by coordinating a big effort to report that user uh to Twitter with a claim that the user had violated Twitter's policies. So it's sort

of like a brute force attack. You overwhelm a provider a platform with requests saying this person, this page, this entity is breaking the rules and has to be banned, and it's all on an effort to ban that person

or that thing. We've seen instances of this recent lye with people going after figures they don't like and sending complaints to that figures employer I'm thinking of specifically, like James Gunn and Disney, and James Gunn was at least temporarily removed from being able to direct movies like Guardians of the Galaxy because of things he had done in his past that were, you know, legit not cool. But he had since apologized, acknowledged them, and pledged to do

better long long before anyone brought this up. But it was enough to get him removed from the project for a while, and so we have seen that this is an effective tactic. The third strategy is to use data to target specific groups of people with messaging that the attackers tailored to that group of people, because it turns out that if you tell a group of people what

they want to hear, that works great. So if you identify what your target audience is and what they want to hear, and then you convey your message in a way that falls in line with that, you get more success. Fourth is the awful practice of trolling and doxing. This is all about silencing people by intimidation, like I mentioned earlier, and can include revealing a person's real world address, phone number, and other personal information information about people connected to that person.

It's it's kind of the mafia approach of putting pressure on a person by intimidating and threatening them. And fifth is actually the easiest strategy. It involves amplifying messages that are already out there. So in this case, a government or political party can just add resources to boost the signal that are already in line with the organization's goals.

They don't have to create it themselves. They just can create a whole bunch of let's say, fake accounts and retweet a message that happens to fall in line with what they believe. Now as you can imagine, the scope of these efforts varies around the world. In some countries, the researcher saw activities centered around specific events such as elections, and then it would die down. In other countries, it was more of an ongoing effort that the government would

perpetually support. Likewise, some countries spend a relatively modest amount funding cyber troops, while others might dedicate many millions of dollars to a single campaign. One of the larger efforts cited by researchers was the case of Cambridge Analytica, which I covered in a past episode of Tech Stuff. So I recommend you go and hunt that one down and listen to that to hear about how that unfolded, because

that was an enormous mess. All right. When we come back, I'll go into a little bit more about what was in the report and the ramifications we have to consider, but first let's take another quick break. The researchers created a four point scale to describe the size and capability

of cybertroop forces around the world. On the low end of the scale is the designation minimal cyber troop teams, and these are efforts that haven't been around for very long, or they only manifest temporarily around those political events I mentioned earlier, like elections. They tend to be limited in what they can accomplish, and as a result, they typically will focus on a single social media platform to maximize their results, and they also focus exclusively on domestic misinformation

campaigns and not foreign influence operations. So countries that have minimal cyber troop teams would be things like our country's like Argentina, Australia, Croatia, Greece, South Korea, and a few others on the opposite end of the scale, so that's on the lowest end. On the highest end is high cyber troop capacity. These countries dedicate a large budget to funding online propaganda campaigns. They maintain a large permanent staff

of people in order to do that. They not only execute comprehensive campaigns, they also research ways to do it more effectively, so they're always working to improve the staff works full time, not just in election years or around other political events. They focus on both domestic and foreign operations, and countries in this category include China, Israel, Iran, Russia,

Saudi Arabia, and yes, the United States. Now I didn't include the other two categories because I'm sure you can all extrapolate that they fit between the lowest level and the highest level of cybertroop capacity. So really it's just stages of capability and how much these countries are spending

on those efforts, making matters more complicated. As countries end up developing more effective ways to leverage social media to spread misinformation, they're also spreading those techniques around the world. The researchers specifically call out a case in which Russian operatives taught military officials in Myanmar how to manipulate people through social media, So we're seeing the skills being shared

across territorial borders. So which online platforms are the most important for people who want to spread propaganda, Well, it should come as no surprise that Facebook leads the pack. Now, not saying that because I think Facebook has a wretched track record when it comes to dealing with misinformation, although that happens to be my opinion, But that's not why I'm saying this. I'm saying because Facebook is just so darned popular analysts estimate that two point for one billion

people use Facebook. The world's population is approximately seven point five three billion people, so about a third of all the people in the world are using Facebook. So if you want to get a message out there, you have to go where the people are that happens to be Facebook. So it's not necessarily the case that Facebook is less effective at policing these things than other platforms are. Instead, it's more like it's a target rich environment. It's where

the people happen to be. The researchers state that as other platforms grow in use, particularly for the purposes of political discourse, they will no doubt become targets for cyber troops wishing to spread propaganda in the future. Another thing working against Facebook is that it's pretty easy to figure out how Facebook works, at least from a very high level. The entire platform is built around the concept of engagement.

Facebook makes money when people interact with Facebook, so posts that inspire more interaction with the platform, whether that's in the form of comments, sharing a post, or sending likes or whatever. These things, by the way, are not equal, but they're all very anyway, those posts end up getting more visibility thanks to Facebook's algorithms. If a particular post is doing well, Facebook's more likely to show that to more people because it's already proven to drive engagement, and

engagement is how Facebook makes money. Essentially, what it's doing is it's selling your time to advertisers. So the more time you spend on Facebook, the more money it's gonna make. So if you know that as someone who's trying to run a propaganda campaign, you can start to build posts that drive that kind of engagement in various ways, or you might even game the system a little bit by using some state backed accounts, some fake accounts to boost the signal. You post something, you get a bunch of

people sharing it and liking it. Maybe some of those people are real, maybe a lot of them are fake accounts, and then you try and make it go viral from there. If it's inflammatory, all the better because it's going to make people either want to share it because it has uh it has affirmed a belief that they hold that other people find wrong, or people are so upset at how terrible the statement is they share it to let other people know, Hey, do you see how horrible this is?

Either way, the message keeps on spreading. Other platforms that the researchers cited included Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram, and of course others will grow in importance over time. In fact, I've already heard about TikTok being another platform that merits special attention in the near future, if not right darn

now now. On the one hand, it is distressing to think that a tool like the Internet, which has often been seen as a means to facilitate communication and the sharing of ideas and ideals in a positive sense, has been twisted to spread misinformation in various ways to make people behave the way some government or some political party wants those people to behave. On the other hand, this

isn't new. Propaganda is an old, old idea. Social media hasn't made propaganda possible because those ideas and approaches have been around for centuries, but it has made it much more efficient and scalable than it ever was before. Also, you can tailor it to a level that you couldn't before. And it's a bit ironic that the platforms that were ostensibly designed to let us connect with friends online and make new ones, is simultaneously the tool of groups that

are dedicated to driving deeper divides within populations. The very things that are supposed to bring us together are pushing us further apart. That a tool that is supposedly meant to allow for communication can also be a tool that suppresses it is incredibly ironic to me, and again that wasn't necessarily the intent of the people who made the platform. But because people work the way they do, and because people who are spreading misinformation know how to leverage these platforms,

that's what's happening. And there's been a lot of pressure, particularly on Facebook and Twitter to do something about this. A few weeks before I recorded this episode, Twitter announced it had deleted nearly a thousand accounts that had linked to quote significant state backed information operations end quote that was in relation to the protest demonstrations in Hong Kong, and the state in question at this point was China. According to Twitter, the purpose of those accounts was to

divide Hong Kong, diminishing the support for protests. Likewise, Facebook removed a few users and groups that it had identified as being part of a state backed effort to undermine the Hong Kong protesters. And because both Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China due to the aforementioned Great Firewall of China, the implication here is that the accounts were attempting to shape the international perception of the story because

people in China wouldn't be able to see it. It also indicates the yes this was state backed, because no one in China would be able to access those platforms without the permission and cooperation of the Chinese government itself, otherwise just be blocked off. Over the summer of twenty nineteen, the BBC organized a Trusted News Summit in an effort to devise a strategy to combat the spread of disinformation.

The company reached out to major platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to come up with a strategy to minimize the spread of false information and to make sure that reputable reporting could rise to the top. Some of the solutions the group came up with included the formation of an early warning system in which one company would quickly reach out to the others in the event and identified

a misinformation campaign. So if Twitter got wind of an effort like the one we just mentioned with Hong Kong, Twitter executives could send out an alert through this system so that the folks at Google and Facebook would also know to be on the lookout. Those efforts actually go

beyond the political propaganda covered by the Oxford Report. They also encompass stuff like anti vaccination rhetoric, which is on scientific and ultimately it's deadly because it discourages people from immunizing children against diseases, which then raises the possibility of serious and deadly outbreaks. The summit also called for newsmakers and platforms to take more care to educate readers about issues,

educating and informing on top of reporting the news. In the United States, DARPA, which is the agency that funds research and development into technologies intended to contribute to the defense of the United States, has initiated its own program to counteract disinformation campaigns, which, you know, it is great, but I suspect more than a few disinformation campaigns originating from the United States have some relation distant or otherwise to DARPA. So take that with a grain of alt.

I guess you could say it's kind of a case of when we do it, it's a strategic tool in our arsenal that guarantees national security, but when they do it, it's dirty, rotten, cheating. The researchers note that we can't just look to the social platforms to fix this problem because the problem extends beyond the platforms. Companies like Twitter and Facebook can form policies and enforce them to help mitigate the spread of misinformation, but they aren't ultimately at

fault for the actual content on their services. They enable the spread of that information, they might even promote it, and they're certainly responsible for that. Their algorithms can be co opted by those who know how they work and used to malicious ends, But the root of the problem is systemic within governments and cultures themselves, not in technology

in general or social media in particular. So to that end, addressing propaganda really means taking a look at the institutions and says stems within a political framework that allow it to exist in the first place. Until we do that, it stands to reason that the various governments and political parties will make use of every communications tool they have at their disposal to spread messages and suppress dissenting opinions.

The timing of the study is also interesting. It's in the wake of Brexit, which many in the UK say was supported in part because of a misinformation campaign, that they were misled with false promises and pretenses, and that social media played a big part in spreading that misinformation, which ultimately lead to a vote in favor of Brexit, which a lot of people now are second guessing. Not everyone, I mean, there are a lot of people who still fully believe that the UK should exit the EU, but

it did muddy the waters. There's also been reports of election interference for an election interference in the United States during the elections. Uh, And so awareness of how vulnerable we all are to manipulation is on the rise. Now, that doesn't mean our ability to suss it out has improved dramatically. If anything, it has encouraged more tribalism, in which groups of people inherently trust anything that aligns with their own worldview and distrust anything that is outside of

that worldview. And to be fair, it can be quite hard to identify misinformation just on the face of it. It requires critical thinking and often a lot of research to make sure the information you're receiving is reasonably accurate. And as I mentioned earlier in this episode, with the sheer amount of data we encounter in our lives, that's not really practical. So what are we to do. Well, we could back out on our consumption and take a

more critical approach to selecting our news sources. But that's a lot to ask. It would mean making a dramatic shift away from the behaviors we've cultivated over the last decade or so longer. If you want to get issues that kind of grew out of the twenty four hour

cable news cycle. We can push for more transparent and democratic processes and government, but that's obviously not something everyone can do everywhere, at least not without significant personal risk, and even in countries that pride themselves on being founded on principles like that, pointing out shortcomings can lead to some ugly consequences. Just ask anyone in the United States who has publicly questioned any politician. You get attacked pretty quickly.

Doesn't matter which side you're looking at either, the attacks will follow. I think pressuring companies to be more proactive when detecting misinformation is a good step, but we have to take it upon ourselves to develop strong critical thinking skills, and we have to be willing to hold public officials accountable when they engage in shift e misinformation campaigns and we find out about it. Like the researchers stated in the paper, nothing will change unless we tackle the root

of the problem. Just dealing with the symptoms isn't enough, and that sums up this episode of tech Stuff. If you've guys got suggestions for future episodes, send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Pop on over to the website that's text stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find an archive of all of our past episodes. There. You also find links to where we are on social media. You can reach out to me on the Facebook or the Twitter with your information.

I'm sure none of you would send me misinformation, and you can also at our website click on the little link that takes you to our merchandise store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two