Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections

In my country I've been seeing a constant campaign of subtle disinformation against opposition figures that is very powerful. You check the "user's" Twitter profile and they'll have a bunch of pro-opposition opinions on it. Then, the "user" will start to express disillusionment about certain people, asking them not to betray "our side" etc. By the end, it's a full blown attack against "traitors".

This kind of stuff is very subtle and powerful. I've seen it over and over and people will get dragged into believing this stuff and it's very damaging.

It's almost stuff straight out of the movie "Inception". You just need to plant that "seed" of doubt and it will grow in a lot people. It might just be the nature of our political climate, so it might not work everywhere though.

We have pretty significant evidence over the last decade indicating otherwise. The RAND institute did an entire paper about it.

>If the politicians are persuaded that any of this matters, then they'll be more inclined to stop it mattering. And that means laws that curb free speech online

Pretty sure misinforming the voting public matters? Uneditorialized journalism and publishing created this issue. Don't try to pretend any law addressing this problem is somehow constraining the free speech of the public.

You are right that normal people don't read Twitter.

But Twitter users read Twitter. And there are many of them. And they amplify what each other says, conspiracy theories, telephone game, and intentional disinformation alike.

And… eventually some of that disinformation reaches critical mass and graduates from the disinformation Petri dish of twitter.com and releases spores into the mindspace of journalists, "journalists", and normal people who happen to be on Twitter sometimes.

And then, having evolved into a truth-resistant strain, that disinformation spreads through Facebook, InfoWars, well-meaning television news outlets, and television news outlets owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, into memorable one-liners that reinforce one's own beliefs just enough to avoid application of even the hint of rational thought, which get tucked away in that special space of the mind used to store those juicy "gotchas" you're saving up for next Thanksgiving.

And come Thanksgiving, you use them – take that, Hillary-loving millennial nephew! And, you find out they're wrong, because of course they're wrong, they're ridiculous – why would Hillary Clinton be performing satanic rituals underneath a pizza place? – but it doesn't matter. You've spent the past year reinforcing your beliefs because you half-remembered that you heard somewhere a vague description that Hillary did this awful thing, and you told your friends and it reinforced their beliefs, because even if it made no sense to you, it was vague enough to make sense to them, and, well, she probably did something else terrible anyway, and in fact, your just buddy told you about how Wall Street is paying her to get rid of US borders. Sounds about right!

In the US 2018 congressional races many of them were decided by an incredibly small numbers of voters, a tremendous amount were decided by less than 5% and quite a few were decided by margins of a fraction of a percent.

I'm literally in a car leaving for the airport so I can't verify the exact numbers, but I'm confident I'm close enough[1]: Kansas' 2nd district was decided by like .87%; Florida's US Senate Rick Scott won by .12%; Georgia 7th was .15%; Minnesota 1st was for sure .45%; Illinois' 13th district was something like .77%; New York's 27th district was like .28%. In 2016 presidential race, New Hampshire was decided by like 1500 votes. That's just a sample of the extremely close races across the country.

Now, while those races might seem concerning, it gets even more concerning when we consider smaller districts, county elections, and city elections where it isn't uncommon for seats to be decided by margins of 25 people or less.

The worrying thing about disinformation campaigns isn't that the disinformation is going to suddenly convert 90% of our population into propaganda vessels, it's our modern ability to target smaller and smaller demographics in key locations with information in ways that we previously were unable to do in cost effective ways. The concern (and it is a concern) is that the disinformation and often intentional outright lies will misinform just tiny tiny fraction of a percent of vulnerable logic challenged people in key areas where the ripple effects punch outside their weight.

And also of course how easy it is to swing local county and city elections, considering that a rather high ratio of local voters tend to be elderly people who may not have their skeptical hats on when the magic box tells them the opposing party is eating babies or whatever.

If you've spent any time having long casual conversations with many of our voters, you'd find out that many of these people have been convinced of and believe in truly outlandish things, they want to believe in fantastic explanations rather than what is usually a mundane explanation. We don't have to look far to find outlandish ideas floating around our population--just consider anti-vax and how it spread mostly organically, it was not a highly funded and highly targeted campaign.

Our people can make rational decisions and vote for their interests, provided they are given solid information and are not exposed to outright disinformation. It doesn't matter which direction people vote, as long as their decisions are not based on disinformation spread intentionally.

[1] I'll verify those numbers once I'm settled in, but I am confident they're within a reasonable accuracy for this topic. If you're still not convinced of the larger implications here, I'd be happy to list more. There were a whole shitload of key counties where elections were decided by margins of less than 10 people and quite a few were less than 5.

Yes, but multiply that by the number of targets, then by the number of messages, and then by exposures and you'll see that very small chance turn into a massive tide. That's how advertising works.

All people are like that, just everyone for different topics. I heard so many people say "There are not enough resources on earth so that everyone can have a mobile phone" or the like, which obviously is false. Don't get me started on all the beliefs of lefts and rights in the refugee crisis in Germany. Or take "the free market solves it all" from many liberals, "capitalism is evil" from young contrarians and whatever conservative thoughts from older folks.

My point is, the problem of blind belief is not specific to the audience of those tweets, it seems human nature.

Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.

And nobody is attributing right wing success purely to bots. That's just some strawman that you invented. The issue is that is a significant factor and is causing polarisation and distrust in institutions. And you need those instutitions to work in order to solve the hardest problems e.g. mass migration, ageing population, climate change etc.