What I learned at #Disinfoweek
Last week, I attended the Atlantic Council’s #Disinfoweek conference: Disinformation: The Next Frontier and How to Strike Back. I’ve been making an effort to better understand the global political situation and how it relates to US politics and policy, so the conference was well timed for my personal education. I’ve talked before about how many different audiences attend fake news events and how little overlap there is, and this event was no exception. Despite the fact that I’ve attended several events on fake news this year, I recognized few faces and names.
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For the most part, speakers talked about disinformation campaigns from Russia, which makes sense, given just how many countries have been the victim of Russian cyberattacks. The conference opened with a joint keynote from Senators Chris Murphy and Rob Portman, both members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and co-authors of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which passed through Congress and was signed by President Obama in December of last year. Both senators took great pains to portray the fight against disinformation as Americans against hostile actors rather than resistance to the Trump Administration.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was also a keynote speaker. Her remarks, which you can read in full over at DFRLab, really resonated with me, particularly when she talked about how just a few years ago we were all hailing activism on the same social media channels that we’re now drowning in:
I remember thinking about those tapes in 2011, as I watched activists in Tunisia and Egypt use social media to organize, communicate, and ultimately topple two entrenched regimes.
It was easy, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, to believe that these new tools of communication had only transformed politics for the better, and that the spread of Twitter and Facebook would inevitably lead to more open and democratic societies.
But as our agenda today attests, those views did turn out to be too optimistic — because like so many other things, technology is a double-edged sword.
In recent years, democracy’s enemies have become adept at polluting social media platforms with rumors, disinformation, and anti-democratic propaganda.
And has let some of the same people who once heralded the birth of the social media age to wonder whether democracy can survive it.
Albright’s remarks captured what we’re living through, and also how this moment would be unimaginable just three or four years ago (unless your name is Eli Pariser). Social media is such a huge part of our professional and personal lives, and while I can’t speak for anyone else, I can’t help but feel at times like we were betrayed by it. Albright ended on a more optimistic note, pointing out that resistance and fact-checking efforts are also being waged on these same social media platforms.
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The program itself was packed with panels. Three highlights:
- Benjamin Haddad, who worked on the Macron campaign, talked through how the campaign was proactive in dealing with disinformation. They knew it was inevitable and made an effort to neutralize disinformation before it spread. Haddad also talked about how Macron as a candidate positioned himself as both a counter to the “Putinism” embraced by the far right in Europe, and embracing an open vs. closed frame as opposed to right vs. left.
- There was an entire panel devoted to learning from Ukraine’s experience with fake news, which felt particularly important in light of this recent Wired article. If Russia is in fact using Ukraine as a “test lab for cyberwar,” those in Ukraine who’ve been battling back against this for years have invaluable insight to offer. Moderator and TV anchor Myroslava Gongadze repeatedly reminded the audience that the West was only now starting to pay attention, while reporter Simon Ostrovsky said that covering disinformation in the Ukraine was difficult (and a war Russia denied was happening entirely) because, much like climate change, journalists were covering both sides as valid.
- I was most impressed by Finnish reporter Jessikka Aro, one of the first journalists to cover Russian bots and troll farms in 2014. Aro received an unprecedented level of harassment, and doxing, including creepy text messages from someone claiming to be her deceased father. The harassment changed her life, but didn’t stop Aro from reporting. You can learn more about her story, in her own voice, here.
This conference was just one in a series of three events built #disinfoweek. Conferences were also held in Palo Alto and London.
The above is an excerpt from Ctrl Alt Right Delete, a weekly newsletter devoted to understanding how the right operates online and developing strategies and tactics to fight back.
