fighting online passivity
This week we held the first meeting of “Disinformation and Influence in the Digital Age,” a course I’m teaching for the second time at Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Public Policy. Since the last time I taught the course, during the summer of 2021, the disinformation landscape has shifted consequentially; whistleblower Frances Haugen released troves of documents detailing how Facebook products were causing harm (and researchers who have been studying the platform for years felt vindicated, if a little annoyed it took so long to be taken seriously); more recently, a Twitter executive also blew the whistle on his former company’s lax security posture and claims about spam accounts; and Facebook changed its name to Meta reflecting what Mark Zuckerberg believes is the company’s future direction toward a “metaverse” (God help us). We’ve learned more about the role social media played in the January 6 insurrection (and will probably gain an even deeper understanding this fall), and we’re headed into another contentious midterm election cycle, with election deniers poised to win power in key 2024 battleground states.
Previously, I taught a Master’s-level version of this course, but my students this semester are college juniors and seniors. They were all of 15 and 16 years old when disinformation reached mainstream awareness and Donald Trump was elected. This in and of itself presents an interesting teaching opportunity; the students are unlikely to know many of the details of Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign, so reading an indictment in the Russia investigation and perusing the archive of Russian Facebook ads should expose them to new information.
What’s even more exciting to me, though, is to be teaching students that are firmly members of Gen Z. Yes, we Millennials are “digital natives,” but a lot of behaviors we had to learn—like managing the consequences of an elephantine internet (that is, an internet that never forgets) through the toggling of privacy settings and “brand management”—are as natural as breathing to our younger friends. In focus groups I’ve conducted, I’m always pleasantly surprised how much members of Gen Z know about digital security and the baked-in skepticism with which they consume certain online content. In a lot of ways, Gen Z is wiser about the internet than their elders.
But Gen Z has one huge disadvantage in comparison to Millennials and Gen X: the young adults of Gen Z have never known an internet that does not precisely cater to their interests. When we informally discussed our social media usage in our first class meeting, heavily algorithmically-controlled platforms like YouTube and TikTok were those with the most uptake among students. These platforms are based around a passive model of consumption, feeding the user content they are likely to engage with on autoplay for as long as the site or app is open. A user can swipe away from a TikTok or “dislike” a YouTube video, but they have few other inputs toward the content they are fed in their algorithmically-generated feed.
It’s that passivity I hope to challenge in my students. I’m not going to tell them not to use these platforms or avoid certain sources—even I have trouble resisting the lure of the baby care tips and animal videos that Instagram and TikTok offer me—but I want to push them toward more intentional, discerning consumption of information online. We’re doing this in a couple of ways:
My students will be sharing their thoughts about our course readings on Twitter. A majority of them have accounts already (which frankly surprised me, but they are public policy and communications students, after all). In their weekly “commonplace tweets”— a concept based on the commonplace books of olde, in which people in the early modern era wrote down quotes and ideas they liked from books they read in a notebook they carried with them—they’ll practice professional social media usage and hopefully begin to see online public policy discourse as an area to which they can actively contribute.
They have to track all the information they consume for one 24-hour period and reflect on what they learn. Everything from memes that Grandma sends to snippets of the news seen in a sports bar to TikTok videos viewed late at night in bed is fair game and should lead them to some interesting conclusions about the quality of information they obtain from each platform or source.
They will research and explain the evolution of a public-policy-related lie of their choosing, including where the lie started, how it spread, and whether any known foreign actors amplified it.
Finally, beyond encouraging more active online consumption, I hope my students gain a more holistic understanding of how disinformation works in 2022. There are a lot of courses that focus on one element of the problem—foreign campaigns or domestic influencers, tech or the mainstream media—or one element of the solution—legal issues, tech policy, or government oversight. In my course, we frame the problem, reading the work that is definitional in this space (namely Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan’s “Information Disorder”); learn about the infrastructure of the platforms that allows disinformation to flourish (for this we turn to, among others, An Ugly Truth by Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang); get acquainted with the tools and tactics of malign foreign actors like Russia, China, and Iran; and finally turn to domestic disinformation during the U.S. elections, COVID-19, and campaigns affecting minorities. With that broad understanding of the landscape in hand, we consider responses in the government, private sector, and civil society spheres, and we attempt to apply those solutions in a fun, end-of-semester, live simulation.
You can’t take the course with us (sorry, that’s why they pay me the adequate-bucks), but I have included the course readings I’ve assigned below. If you’re interested in getting a bit more intentional about your information consumption habits, maybe consider doing one of the assignments above. Let me know how you make out; I’d love to hear from you.
Syllabus: Disinformation and Influence in the Digital Age
UNIT 1: FRAMEWORKS
How do we define the terms related to the disinformation and online influence problem, and how does disinformation support authoritarians and autocrats?
Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, “Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making,” Council of Europe, September 2017, pp 10-48.
UK Government Communications Service, “RESIST 2 Counter-Disinformation Toolkit,” 2021, pp 10-16 (Recognize Disinformation)
Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, “The Meaning of Sharp Power: How Authoritarian States Project Influence,” Foreign Affairs, November 16, 2017.
Nina Jankowicz, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury/IBTauris, 2020), Prologue (pp xi-xxvii).
Optional
Seva Gunitsky, “The Great Online Convergence: Digital Authoritarianism Comes to Democracies,” War on the Rocks, February 19, 2020.
Claire Wardle, “Fake News, It’s Complicated,” First Draft News, February 16, 2017.
UNIT 2: INFRASTRUCTURE
What does recent reporting/your own experience with and understanding of Facebook’s microtargeting mechanisms mean for the spread of disinformation?
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, (Harper: 2021), pgs 1-147.
Pick a story that interests you from the Facebook Papers from this list.
How do mainstream and social media play into the broader disinformation ecosystem?
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, (Harper: 2021), pgs 150-300.
Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman. “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda.” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017.
Choose one of the following articles/videos:
[Video] “How TikTok’s Algorithm Figures You Out,” The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2021
Evelyn Douek, “1 Billion TikTok Users Understand What Congress Doesn’t,” The Atlantic, October 10, 2021
Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, The Great Radicalizer,” The New York Times, March 10, 2018.
Shoshana Zuboff, “You Are Now Remotely Controlled,” The New York Times, January 24, 2020.
UNIT 3: RUSSIA
How has Russia used disinformation in the modern era?
Nina Jankowicz, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict (Bloomsbury/IBTauris, 2020), pp 1-51.
United States v. Elena Alekseevna Khusyanynova, 1:18-MJ-464 (E.D. Va 2018).
[Audio] Bellingcat, “Bellingcat Podcast: MH17, Episode 2 Guide: A Pack of Lies,” July 24, 2019.
Adam Rawnsley, “Russia’s Infamous Troll Farm Is Back — and Sh*tting the Bed,” Rolling Stone, August 4, 2022.
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Elections,” March 10, 2021.
Jacob Silverman, “A Russian Disinformation Outlet Tried to Recruit Me,” Slate, September 7, 2020.
UK Government Communications Service, “RESIST Counter-Disinformation Toolkit,” 2021, pp 20-32 (Situational Insight and Impact Analysis)
United States v. Internet Research Agency et al, (18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 371, 1349, 1028A)
Optional
David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, “Introduction” and“Chapter 6- The Troll: The Empire Strikes Back”
Melissa Hooper, “Six ways (other than hacking) that Russia is exploiting divisions and the rise of xenophobia in Europe,” Human Rights First.
Edward Lucas and Peter Pomerantsev, “Winning the Information War,” CEPA, August 2016, pp 2-41.
UNIT 4: CHINA AND IRAN
Muyi Xiao et al, “Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter,” The New York Times, December 20, 2021
Raymond Zhong et al, “Leaked Documents Show How China’s Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus,” ProPublica, December 19, 2020
Charlotte Godart and Johanna Wild, “Case study: Finding evidence of automated Twitter activity during the Hong Kong protests,” Verification Handbook, 2020
Peter Mattis “Contrasting China's and Russia's Influence Operations,” War on the Rocks, January 2018
Sheera Frenkel, “Iranian Disinformation Effort Went Small to Stay Under Big Tech’s Radar,” The New York Times, June 30, 2021
Ellen Nakashima et al, “U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats,” The Washington Post, October 22, 2020.
Ariane M. Tabatabai, “A Brief History of Iranian Fake News: How Disinformation Campaigns Shaped the Islamic Republic,” Foreign Affairs, August 24, 2018
The Guardian, “US takes down dozens of Iran-linked news sites, accusing them of disinformation,” June 22, 2021
Optional:
Lindsay Gorman, “A Way Forward for U.S. Policy on TikTok,” Lawfare, November 10, 2020
Timothy Heath, “Beijing's Influence Operations Target Chinese Diaspora,” War on the Rocks, March 1, 2018
UNIT 5: DOMESTIC DISINFORMATION
How does domestic disinformation leave democracies more vulnerable to outside manipulation? What are the effects on the democratic process, journalism, and extremism?
Nina Jankowicz and Cindy Otis, “Facebook Groups are Destroying America,” WIRED, June 17, 2020.
Jane Lytvynenko, “In 2020, Disinformation Broke The US,” BuzzFeed News, December 6, 2020.
Election Integrity Partnership, “Repeat Offenders: Voting Misinformation on Twitter in the 2020 United States Election.” October 29, 2020.
Election Integrity Partnership, “Seeking To Help and Doing Harm: The Case of Well-Intentioned Misinformation.” October 28, 2020.
[VIDEO; 00:00-28:33] “How to Report on COVID-19 Disinformation,” Global Investigative Journalism Network, June 25, 2019
Craig Silverman et al, The Verification Handbook, European Journalism Center and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, 2020, Chapters 1 and 3.
Nina Jankowicz, “How Disinformation Became a New Threat to Women,” Coda Story, December 11, 2017.
Nina Jankowicz et al, “Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online,” Wilson Center, January 25, 2021.
Jane Lytvynenko, “Thousands Of Women Have No Idea A Telegram Network Is Sharing Fake Nude Images Of Them,” BuzzFeed News, October 20, 2021.
UNIT 6: RESPONSES
How should governments respond to disinformation?
[Video] Amy Hoggart, Tyler Hall and Lauren Walker, “Finnish Fake News,” Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, October 11, 2017.
Nina Jankowicz and Henry Collis, "Enduring Information Vigilance: Government after COVID-19," Parameters 50, no. 3 (2020).
Heather Conley and Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, “Successfully Countering Russian Electoral Interference,” CSIS, June 21, 2018.
UK Government Communications Service, “RESIST Counter-Disinformation Toolkit,” 2020, pp 33-52 (Strategic Communication).
Optional
Laura Rosenberger & Lindsay Gorman, “How Democracies Can Win the Information Contest,” The Washington Quarterly, 43:2 (2020), 75-96.
How should civil society and the private sector respond to disinformation?
David Kaye, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (Columbia Global Reports: 2019).
Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, “How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2021.
Optional
Edward Lucas and Peter Pomerantsev, “Winning the Information War,” CEPA, August 2016, pp 42-53.