Ruurd Oosterwoud: “GAFA will be destroyed by disinformation”
Ruurd Oosterwoud organizes classes of “Russian troll factory” since 2016. He created DROG to better understand and fight disinformation online. This organisation based in The Hague researches how to combat fake news. If GAFA, public authorities and private companies have an important role to play in this fight, he highlights that the strongest weapon we have is always the same: citizens.
What is DROG?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: The idea that we should try to deal with disinformation, rather than blocking it, was an idea that came to me in the week after the Ukraine association agreement in the Netherlands (april 2016). I had been working on the subject of disinformation for over a year at that time (I had written my master’s thesis on the subject and had worked at the MFA as research intern on policy advice regarding disinformation) and figured out that we should just let people experience making disinformation to come to the most effective way of reducing its impact.
Pushed by KPIs and “like economy”, fake news are stronger than “real news”. Do you have some figures to better understand the phenomenon?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: To give you a personal example: We let students (10–20) create their own fake news articles online during workshops. Within 1,5 hour they write, publish and spread their fake stories. (a pop-up warns everybody who visits the site, so no real harm is done) Then we measure how many unique visitors have come to the site in 24 hours. That figure is always astonishingly high, ranging between 1000 and 5000 unique visitors.
If you can recognize it, you can resist it.
Which are the consequences of fake news in the society? Can you give some real examples?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: Polarization is I think the worst result. It is this slow emotional manipulation that even harms relatively open and well-established media media landscapes. Of course there have been also concrete examples where disinformation has lead to social/physical reactions, like the Lisa case in Germany and many more, where societies do not realize that the commotion is also fueled by disinformation and trolls.
Around 47 million Twitter accounts (approximately 15%) are bots. You mean that robots have already won the war against humans?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: I think Twitter could really easily shut down its API, leaving all bots disabled. The most influential bots are often hybrids, steered by real people.
What is the Inoculation theory ?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: Inoculation theory, which has its roots in social psychology, states that people are able to build up a resistance against false or misleading information by being presented with a weakened version of a misleading argument before being exposed to the “real” information. You can see this as giving people a kind of “vaccine” against misleading information. If you can recognize it, you can resist it.
GAFA could try to change their business model :)
Social media are turning into something evil? And what is the role/responsibility of GAFA?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: Evil often triggers a stronger reaction than positivity. It’s not so much the platforms that are evil, but the people. However, the business model of these platforms only strengthens this tendency. The hypocracy is that these companies, in the short term, would actually only make more profit from a more engaged, evil audience. They should however, not try to block disinformation through algorithms focusing on content. That will only bog them down in unsolvable questions about censorship. They could try to change their business model :)
No authority should regulate based on the contents of messages.
Do you think that public authorities should regulate them? How?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: No. I think in the long term, disinformation will destroy the platforms if they won’t do anything about it. They should however be more transparent: share more about the structures and networks that are only visible for their developers. But no authority should regulate based on the contents of messages.
What about Facebook or Twitter, what should they do?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: Be more transparent and invest in media literacy campaigns. They could for instance promote our game, as a non-biased way of making people aware. Where you cannot judge on content without questions about censorship, they should learn better how to detect fake accounts and disable them. Because everybody would agree that they don’t need fake people messing around.
OK, gouvernements and GAFA have their own responsibilities. What media industry should put in place to fight fake news and defend the citizens?
Ruurd Oosterwoud: We should not want to defend our citizens. Our citizens should be able to defend themselves. In that sense, journalism can’t do much more than just be good at their jobs. We would need more innovative campaigns to help all different victim audiences. Because changing peoples opinions is something they have to initiate themselves. If we push them, they will only believe in disinformation even stronger.
DROG develops programs and courses and conducts research aimed at recognizing disinformation. I have founded the company during the process of creating our first awareness campaign in 2016. We were working on that with a group of six and saw the potential for more materials based on our principles. The word itself is the root of the Dutch word for ‘deceit’.
