(Dis)Information, Influence and Interference Measures in Europe 2014-2020

• In Event: Monitoring Digital Disinformation: Innovative Methods and Empirical Results

Abstract

Informed by data collected from a large-scale multi-national project designed to understand the causes and consequences of recent hostile state disinformation campaigns in Europe, this paper considers how we can conceptualise these distorting and deceptive modes of communication.

The causes and consequences of disinformation have recently risen up the hierarchy of public and political concerns. Deliberately misleading public communications have been found embedded within a number of information, interference and influence operations and campaigns, authored and amplified by a range of state and non-state actors, variously targeting: significant democratic events, such as the 2016 US Presidential election; ‘anti-vaxxer’ narratives, that have significantly reduced ‘herd immunity’ for highly infectious diseases such as measles; fueling inter-ethnic conflicts in geo-political ‘hot-spots’, such as Syria; and climate change denial conspiracies (see Pomerantsev, 2019; Kakutani, 2018). Disinformation is thus both a problem in and of its own right, but also because of how it is functioning as a centrifugal influence upon other pressing social problems. This trajectory of development has revived interest in a number of established perspectives from across the social and behavioural sciences in the social functions and political uses of rumours, conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Using the ‘techniques of disinformation’ framework set out by Innes (2020, British Journal of Sociology), the analysis draws upon a series of case studies from the UK, Ukraine and Estonia amongst others, to illuminate key features of the principal influence and interference playbooks that have been operationalised. A critical distinction is made between ‘disinformation campaigns’ and information, influence and interference operations. The former are more ‘horizontal’ and work through manipulating more peer-to-peer influence mechanisms. In comparison the latter pivot around other methods, for instance, exposing hacked or leaked’ documents. The analysis also differentiates between those techniques designed for ‘fact softening’ (weakening the credibility of knowledge) and ‘fact hardening’ (boosting the provenance of contested claims).

Empirically, the analysis and interpretative framework are underpinned by the precepts of digital behavioural analytics. Rather than focusing upon structural network topologies, or the contents of messages, this approach attends principally to the actions and interactions of social media users as they transmit and receive messages and information from each other. The purpose being to distil platform and language agnostic concepts that illuminate how digital influence is engineered.

The paper concludes by considering the implications of the evidence and insights that have been adduced for the US Presidential elections and other significant future democratic events are then assessed.

Authors

• Martin Innes, Cardiff University Crime and Security Institute

• Andrew Dawson

• Diyana Dobreva, Cardiff University

• Daniel Grinnell, Cardiff University