Crisis

13 “A Step Backward for Same-Sex Couples in Chile,” Human Rights Watch, October 28, 2020, www.hrw.org/ news/2020/09/24/step-backward-same-sex-coupleschile. 14 “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year,” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, February 2, 2021, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/02/ global-democracy-has-a-very-bad-year. 15 Richard Rose, “Referendum or Plebiscite: What’s the Difference?,” UK in a Changing Europe, October 8, 2020, ukandeu.ac.uk/referendum-or-plebiscite-whatsthe-difference/.

An Avalanche of “Fake News”: The Global Misinformation Crisis

By Benjamin Zelnick

Over the past five years, Americans have been bombarded with the term “fake news,” particularly as a description of politically slanted media outlets. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were marked by invective about the alleged spread of inaccurate or misleading information pertaining to the candidates. In fact, during the first weeks of November 2016, the number of Google searches for “fake news” in the United States increased by 1,100 percent; in American literature published in 2019, the term is referenced 35,000 percent more often than it was at the beginning of the millennium.1 Even though the public is searching for, writing about, and referencing fake news, few truly understand that “[f]ake news is not news you disagree with.”2 The most pressing threat to information integrity, rather than biased news, is deliberately circulated fake news: disinformation propagated by foreign actors as an efficient “weapon of mass distraction,” intended to destabilize societies and generate panic while remaining difficult to detect and rectify.3 One of the potent and insidious methods of foreign interference in American politics, especially during the recent 2020 elections, was the coordination of disinformation campaigns on the Internet. According to a 2012 methodical analysis, three out of ten Barack Obama followers (totaling 5.3 million “people”) on Twitter show behavior consistent with that of bots: accounts that are controlled by computer programs rather than humans.4 These bots could be used not only to mislead Americans about Obama’s popularity, but also to unleash a barrage of false information to sway public opinion; each of these accounts can post up to 2,400 Tweets per day, adding up to a staggering daily tsunami of 12.7 billion lies.5 A recently declassified National Intelligence Council report confirms that foreign governments used such disinformation warfare in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 elections. The document, released on March 15, 2021, reveals that Russia was responsible for disseminating injurious, false claims about Hunter Biden to support the Trump campaign; then-President Trump’s lawyer was even used to magnify false claims and channel them to the American public. It additionally confirms that Iran attempted to encourage Biden’s election by forging threatening emails from the Proud Boys, a far-right white nationalist group.6 Both of these disinformation attacks wielded a destabilizing influence in the United States, causing

confusion and increasing division. Disinformation by foreign actors has also promoted conspiracy theories and generated panic during the coronavirus pandemic. One of the best-known allegations is that the virus and vaccines are part of a government plot involving 5G cellular technology. On July 16, 2020, an Italian journal published an article entitled “5G Technology and Induction of Coronavirus in Skin Cells.” Three of its authors were affiliated with the I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, which receives funding from the Russian government. The report, which concluded that 5G radiation could be a main factor in promoting the production of SARS-CoV-2 within the body, was later retracted, but not before it had been cataloged on PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database of journal articles.7 Rumors about connections between the coronavirus and 5G technology spread rapidly and detrimentally throughout Italy and across the world, with theorists showcasing a mislabeled diagram of a guitar pedal as the wireless chip allegedly included in vaccine doses.8 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have discovered that foreign governments were largely responsible for sowing panic about COVID on social media, reporting that forty-five percent of Tweets about the pandemic had been posted by suspected bot accounts. These bots circulated over one hundred “false narratives” about the virus, including the 5G conspiracy and claims that hospital beds were filled with mannequins, not COVID patients.9 One of the scientists working on the investigation stated that the campaign “definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks,” underscoring a European Union document that exposes a “significant disinformation campaign by Russian state media and pro-Kremlin outlets regarding COVID-19.”10 The purpose of this effort, according to the document, is “to aggravate the public health crisis in Western countries” and to “subvert European societies.”11 False claims about the pandemic, largely spread by foreign powers such as Russia and China, intentionally provoke fear and deepen fissures in American society. As misinformation propagates rampantly, it remains extremely difficult to pinpoint and thwart, allowing it to wreak havoc that could be eliminated by proper regulation. Worldwide, there are 547,200 websites created daily, and any one of these may be used to spread fake news.12 Even if a website is found to be spreading false information, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for allocating domain names, is not permitted to suspend or revoke an assignment based on site content.13 On social media platforms, which have policies that enable the removal of misleading content, the sheer number of posts makes effective regulation nearly impossible. Twitter users, for instance, post six thousand Tweets per second.14 Furthermore, for a relatively low cost, an individual or foreign government can purchase a large number of social media accounts to spread false information. In 2017, for example, an investigative journalist at The Daily Beast spent $45 on a Russian website to instantaneously gain access to one thousand already-created Twitter accounts.15 Another issue with regulating access to social media platforms is controlling their application programming interface, or API, which allows computers to perform actions such as creating or replying to posts with simple lines of code.

While some companies use this feature for legitimate purposes, such as automating posts to their social media accounts, malicious actors can abuse it to simplify the creation of bots to spread disinformation. From June to November of 2017, Twitter suspended 117,000 parties who had used the API to produce 1.5 billion “low-quality tweets”—a description that was likely a euphemism for fake news.16 Because of insufficient regulations and preventative measures, the threat to information integrity has reached record heights. Although widespread strategies to combat disinformation have not yet been implemented, individuals have many resources for recognizing and rejecting fake news. The most useful of these strategies is to critically evaluate the information provided by media outlets. According to Common Sense, a nonprofit organization that promotes media literacy, readers can use a five-step process to verify the reliability of their online sources: checking the URL for irregularities, looking for grammatical mistakes and sensationalism, finding more information on the author and publisher, corroborating facts with trusted sources, and searching for images that are reused in irrelevant stories.17 On social media platforms such as Instagram, users can help the community by flagging false or misleading information.18 Finally, independent organizations such as NewsGuard Technologies offer browser extensions that detect fake news websites, warn users, and provide understandable summaries of media outlets’ reporting practices.19 Although the misinformation crisis remains dire and the world’s governments must work together to disarm these “weapons of mass distraction,” individuals can still protect themselves from the avalanche of fake news by vigilantly controlling their own media consumption.

1 Google, Google Trends, accessed March 28, 2021, https://trends.google.com/; Google, Google Books Ngram Viewer, last modified 2019, accessed March 28, 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/ graph?content=fake+news&year_start=2000&year_ end=2019&corpus=26. 2 Cornell University Library, “Fake News, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Learning to Critically Evaluate Media Sources: What Is Fake News?,” LibGuides at Cornell University, last modified March 11, 2021, accessed March 25, 2021, https://guides.library.cornell. edu/evaluate_news. 3 Christina Nemr and William Gangware, Weapons of Mass Distraction: Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Digital Age, title page, March 2019, accessed March 25, 2021, https://www.parkadvisors.com/s/PA_WMD_Report_2019-dcjm.pdf. 4 Marco Camisani Calzolari, Analysis of Twitter Followers of the US Presidential Election Candidates: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, 7, August 8, 2012, accessed March 16, 2021, https://web.archive.org/ web/20140307095016/http://digitalevaluations.com/ DigitalEvaluations-Obama_Romney.pdf. 5 Twitter, “About Twitter Limits,” Twitter Help Center, accessed March 26, 2021, https://help.twitter.com/en/ rules-and-policies/twitter-limits. 6 Julian E. Barnes, “Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says,” The New York Times, accessed March 25, 2021, https:// www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/politics/electioninterference-russia-2020-assessment.html. 7 M. Fioranelli et al., “5G Technology and Induction of Coronavirus in Skin Cells,” Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents 34, no. 4 (2020): 9, https://doi.org/10.23812/20-269-e-4; Federal State Autonomous, “Grants to Universities Are the Key to National Academic Excellence,” Sechenov University, last modified May 30, 2016, accessed April 3, 2021, https://www.sechenov.ru/pressroom/news/grantsto-universities-are-the-key-to-national-academicexcellence/.