scientificamerican--2020-10-11--COVID Misinformation Is Killing People

COVID Misinformation Is Killing People

The confluence of misinformation and infectious disease isn ’ t unique to COVID-19 .
Misinformation contributed to the spread of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa , and it plagues efforts to educate the public on the importance of vaccinating against measles .
But when it comes to COVID-19 , the pandemic has come to be defined by a tsunami of persistent misinformation to the public on everything from the utility of masks and the efficacy of school closures , to the wisdom behind social distancing , and even the promise of untested remedies .
According to a study published @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , areas of the country exposed to television programming that downplayed the severity of the pandemic saw greater numbers of cases and deaths—because people didn ’ t follow public health precautions .
In the United States , misinformation spread by elements of the media , by public leaders and by individuals with large social media platforms has contributed to a disproportionately large share of COVID-19 burden : we house 4 percent of the global population but account for 22 percent of global COVID-19 deaths .
With winter around the corner and people spending @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imperative than ever that we counter misinformation and clearly communicate risks to the public ; in addition , as we await the arrival of a vaccine , it is equally important to arm the public with facts .
We have work to do : a recent poll found that just half of the American public plans to get a COVID-19 vaccine .
Below are some key recommendations for the science community , public health professionals , members of the public , and industry on what they can do to effectively blunt the effect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A coordinated campaign of influencers supporting science and public health .
A study of COVID-19 messaging on social media revealed misinformation from politicians , celebrities and other prominent figures made up about 20 percent of claims but accounted for 69 percent of total social media engagement .
Therefore , public health figures who have credibility must partner with social media influencers who have the reach .
Harnessing the wide reach of local , regional and national influencers from a wide swath of sectors both within and outside of the public health community is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ misinformation thrust into the information ecosystem .
A coordinated campaign of influencers that combines subject matter experts with entertainers , political figures , businesspeople and civil society sectors will help to amplify consistent public health guidance across social media , digital and traditional media outlets .
An aggressive and transparent effort by social media companies working in cooperation with governments to remove markedly false information regarding COVID-19 .
The single largest category of misleading or false claims ( 39 percent ) are mischaracterizations or misleading messages about actions or policies of public authorities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their efforts to remove misinformation regarding COVID-19 from their platforms , their efforts are largely reactive and delayed , during which damaging information circulates among unwitting viewers .
That ’ s why public health officials must work with social media companies through robust partnerships in order to identify common sources of misinformation ; proactively anticipate future misinformation from those sources ; and enable its removal in a near real-time fashion .
To be credible , this process must be robust , transparent and nonpartisan .
Beyond debunking and removal of false information : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ further than the government ’ s traditional one-way message .
Social media is popular because it provides individuals , groups and institutions the opportunity to have dynamic conversations .
However , public health messages from officials typically need to be cleared through a lengthy review process that does not allow officials to converse in real time with audiences in order to educate and debunk misinformation .
To be more effective , public health officials should develop standards and guidance that allows them to dynamically interact with the public in a more timely fashion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public health officials and the public can be more impactful than removing false information from social media platforms , especially since removal typically occurs long after a significant number of individuals have already been exposed to the false message .
A more promising approach is for public health officials and science- and health-based institutions to provide the public with a steady stream of facts .
Detect , understand and expose COVID-19-related misinformation through data science and behavioral analytics .
Any effort aimed at conveying facts to large audiences requires harnessing and understanding audience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advertisement industry so powerful .
Unfortunately , our public health communicators have not adopted basic capabilities to which industry is accustomed .
These capabilities include understanding the preferences of various sectors of the public active on social media platforms so as to deliver timely and salient information that resonate with them .
These are capabilities routinely used by the ad industry , and they would serve the public health sector well in its effort to better understand audiences and in order to persuade them in favor of preferred behaviors .
Match public health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that can deliver Lessons from past public health mass media campaigns indicate that any advice from public health officials must be matched with the ability to deliver services to those audiences .
For example , guidance for testing must be accompanied by readily accessible COVID-19 tests .
Guidance for wearing masks must be met with ample availability of masks .
And any education campaign on the efficacy of vaccines or therapeutics must be met with a sufficient availability and affordability of those measures .
Effectively countering the misinformation infodemic surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the curve and ultimately defeating the virus .
Lessons from communicable diseases highlight the fact that aggressive public health communications strategies are imperative in curbing disease .
In the age of social media , the spread of misinformation provides a major hindrance to those efforts and requires an even more sophisticated response .
The execution of the recommendations detailed above will help to effectively counter misinformation surrounding the current pandemic and help to protect us from the next one .

The confluence of misinformation and infectious disease isn’t unique to COVID-19. Misinformation contributed to the spread of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and it plagues efforts to educate the public on the importance of vaccinating against measles. But when it comes to COVID-19, the pandemic has come to be defined by a tsunami of persistent misinformation to the public on everything from the utility of masks and the efficacy of school closures, to the wisdom behind social distancing, and even the promise of untested remedies. According to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, areas of the country exposed to television programming that downplayed the severity of the pandemic saw greater numbers of cases and deaths—because people didn’t follow public health precautions.
In the United States, misinformation spread by elements of the media, by public leaders and by individuals with large social media platforms has contributed to a disproportionately large share of COVID-19 burden: we house 4 percent of the global population but account for 22 percent of global COVID-19 deaths. With winter around the corner and people spending more time indoors, it is more imperative than ever that we counter misinformation and clearly communicate risks to the public; in addition, as we await the arrival of a vaccine, it is equally important to arm the public with facts. We have work to do: a recent poll found that just half of the American public plans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Below are some key recommendations for the science community, public health professionals, members of the public, and industry on what they can do to effectively blunt the effect of misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 response.
A coordinated campaign of influencers supporting science and public health. A study of COVID-19 messaging on social media revealed misinformation from politicians, celebrities and other prominent figures made up about 20 percent of claims but accounted for 69 percent of total social media engagement. Therefore, public health figures who have credibility must partner with social media influencers who have the reach. Harnessing the wide reach of local, regional and national influencers from a wide swath of sectors both within and outside of the public health community is necessary to counter the large volume of misinformation thrust into the information ecosystem. A coordinated campaign of influencers that combines subject matter experts with entertainers, political figures, businesspeople and civil society sectors will help to amplify consistent public health guidance across social media, digital and traditional media outlets.
An aggressive and transparent effort by social media companies working in cooperation with governments to remove markedly false information regarding COVID-19. The single largest category of misleading or false claims (39 percent) are mischaracterizations or misleading messages about actions or policies of public authorities. Although social media companies are increasing their efforts to remove misinformation regarding COVID-19 from their platforms, their efforts are largely reactive and delayed, during which damaging information circulates among unwitting viewers. That’s why public health officials must work with social media companies through robust partnerships in order to identify common sources of misinformation; proactively anticipate future misinformation from those sources; and enable its removal in a near real-time fashion. To be credible, this process must be robust, transparent and nonpartisan.
Beyond debunking and removal of false information: a robust public messaging campaign that goes further than the government’s traditional one-way message. Social media is popular because it provides individuals, groups and institutions the opportunity to have dynamic conversations. However, public health messages from officials typically need to be cleared through a lengthy review process that does not allow officials to converse in real time with audiences in order to educate and debunk misinformation. To be more effective, public health officials should develop standards and guidance that allows them to dynamically interact with the public in a more timely fashion. Dynamic conversations and proactive messaging between public health officials and the public can be more impactful than removing false information from social media platforms, especially since removal typically occurs long after a significant number of individuals have already been exposed to the false message. A more promising approach is for public health officials and science- and health-based institutions to provide the public with a steady stream of facts.
Detect, understand and expose COVID-19-related misinformation through data science and behavioral analytics. Any effort aimed at conveying facts to large audiences requires harnessing and understanding audience data. This is what makes the advertisement industry so powerful. Unfortunately, our public health communicators have not adopted basic capabilities to which industry is accustomed. These capabilities include understanding the preferences of various sectors of the public active on social media platforms so as to deliver timely and salient information that resonate with them. These are capabilities routinely used by the ad industry, and they would serve the public health sector well in its effort to better understand audiences and in order to persuade them in favor of preferred behaviors.
Match public health promises with the capabilities of a government that can deliver Lessons from past public health mass media campaigns indicate that any advice from public health officials must be matched with the ability to deliver services to those audiences. For example, guidance for testing must be accompanied by readily accessible COVID-19 tests. Guidance for wearing masks must be met with ample availability of masks. And any education campaign on the efficacy of vaccines or therapeutics must be met with a sufficient availability and affordability of those measures.
Effectively countering the misinformation infodemic surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic will play a significant role in flattening the curve and ultimately defeating the virus. Lessons from communicable diseases highlight the fact that aggressive public health communications strategies are imperative in curbing disease. In the age of social media, the spread of misinformation provides a major hindrance to those efforts and requires an even more sophisticated response. The execution of the recommendations detailed above will help to effectively counter misinformation surrounding the current pandemic and help to protect us from the next one.


scientificamerican--2020-10-11--What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?

How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain , which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs ?
Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission , but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party ?
These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects .
After all , this is not how medicine works .
But a new mental health treatment , set to be licensed next year , poses just this sort of problem .
Psychotherapy assisted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ magic mushrooms , ” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies , but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine .
Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear , clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting , prayer or meditation .
Arguably , then , it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients : studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation , plus robust shifts in personality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even leading some atheists to find God .
What ’ s more , these experiences appear to be a feature , rather than a bug , of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy , with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit .
These are undoubtedly interesting findings , but should any of it matter ?
However unusual a treatment ’ s consequences , shouldn ’ t we prioritize the preferences of an informed , consenting patient ?
Yes , I understand that this might change me in strange ways .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ will roll that dice .
Putting aside the matter of how well-informed one could really be about such radical transformations , political realities make things more complicated , with the case of psilocybin— currently a Schedule 1 , highly illicit drug—showing vividly how values , politics and social narratives can influence the development of biomedical science .
The taboo of the illicit is not an insuperable obstacle .
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies ( MAPS ) , an organization that advocates for “ careful uses ” of psychedelics , has gone an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ecstasy ) into a legitimate medicine .
MAPS ’ s masterstroke was to focus on demonstrating its potential for treating PTSD .
By articulating how MDMA-assisted therapy could help veterans , support for whom enjoys a rare level of bipartisan agreement , MAPS have attracted supporters from across the political spectrum , receiving positive coverage from MSNBC and Fox News alike .
Advocates of psilocybin-assisted therapy tout it as the solution to the burgeoning mental health crisis .
But , like MDMA , psilocybin is far from a culturally neutral drug , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ status and a checkered social history .
It too may need to build the kind of politically heterogeneous coalition of supporters that MDMA-assisted therapy enjoys .
But to generate a breadth of appeal , one challenge stands out : psilocybin seems to make people more liberal .
Scientific reports associating psychedelic use and liberal values stretch back as far as 1971 , and although these findings have been replicated more recently , a noncausal explanation is readily available .
Those with conservative attitudes tend to look more disapprovingly on illicit drug use , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try a psychedelic drug in the first place .
However , emerging evidence suggests the relationship could be causal , with clinically administered psilocybin actively shifting political values , just as it shifts many other nonclinical characteristics .
Notably , one study of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression reported that the treatment decreased authoritarian political views in patients .
That clinical trial also detected another effect that had previously been reported in healthy participants : psilocybin use leads to increases in the personality domain of openness , itself a predictor of liberal values .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the significance of this effect goes deeper than which politicians or media outlets will seek to support or impede psilocybin-assisted therapy .
A well-established consensus on the secular democratic state is that it should remain neutral and agnostic on a number of matters , allowing a diversity of values , political attitudes and religious beliefs among its citizens .
Where such states have universal health care systems , is it permissible to not only endorse , but fund through taxpayer contributions , a treatment which shifts values in one direction ?
With sample @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needed to understand whether there truly is a causal relationship at work , and , if so , what its nature might be .
Perhaps psilocybin doesn ’ t so much induce liberal values , but rather consolidates whatever values were present before treatment .
A health care modality that entrenches preexisting political sentiments is , at the least , unlikely to make enemies .
The same could not be said of a treatment that shifts patients in one direction along the political spectrum .
To overcome this obstacle , advocates of psilocybin-assisted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of any political tribe could rally around .
With few things that unite us as powerfully as politics can divide us , perhaps the most alluring banner will be the one thing that unites us all : death .
While psilocybin is neither a cure for , nor a prophylactic against , death , studies have repeatedly demonstrated that it could play a profound role in the future of palliative care .
The existential distress experienced when faced with a life-threatening or terminal illness can steal away what little quality of life remains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poorly to our standard pharmaceutical approaches , but the powerful mystical experiences induced by psilocybin consistently transmute demoralization , anxiety and depression into acceptance , peacefulness and meaning , as patients prepare to meet their death .
However else they differ , conservatives and liberals are united in knowing that they , and their loved ones , will eventually die .
And for conservatives and liberals alike , psilocybin could help them welcome the end with greater acceptance and less fear .
Psilocybin looks set to become a licensed medicine by 2022 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ will be a matter not just of how well it works , but also the narrative surrounding it when it arrives : does psilocybin underline how we are different , or how we are the same ?

How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party?
These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem. Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine.
Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear, clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting, prayer or meditation. Arguably, then, it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients: studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation, plus robust shifts in personality, values and attitudes to life, even leading some atheists to find God. What’s more, these experiences appear to be a feature, rather than a bug, of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit.
These are undoubtedly interesting findings, but should any of it matter? However unusual a treatment’s consequences, shouldn’t we prioritize the preferences of an informed, consenting patient? Yes, I understand that this might change me in strange ways. But my depression is debilitating. I will roll that dice. Putting aside the matter of how well-informed one could really be about such radical transformations, political realities make things more complicated, with the case of psilocybin— currently a Schedule 1, highly illicit drug—showing vividly how values, politics and social narratives can influence the development of biomedical science.
The taboo of the illicit is not an insuperable obstacle. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an organization that advocates for “careful uses” of psychedelics, has gone an impressive way in rehabilitating MDMA (i.e., ecstasy) into a legitimate medicine. MAPS’s masterstroke was to focus on demonstrating its potential for treating PTSD. By articulating how MDMA-assisted therapy could help veterans, support for whom enjoys a rare level of bipartisan agreement, MAPS have attracted supporters from across the political spectrum, receiving positive coverage from MSNBC and Fox News alike.
Advocates of psilocybin-assisted therapy tout it as the solution to the burgeoning mental health crisis. But, like MDMA, psilocybin is far from a culturally neutral drug, carrying both the shame of Schedule 1 status and a checkered social history. It too may need to build the kind of politically heterogeneous coalition of supporters that MDMA-assisted therapy enjoys.
But to generate a breadth of appeal, one challenge stands out: psilocybin seems to make people more liberal. Scientific reports associating psychedelic use and liberal values stretch back as far as 1971, and although these findings have been replicated more recently, a noncausal explanation is readily available. Those with conservative attitudes tend to look more disapprovingly on illicit drug use, making them less likely than liberals to try a psychedelic drug in the first place.
However, emerging evidence suggests the relationship could be causal, with clinically administered psilocybin actively shifting political values, just as it shifts many other nonclinical characteristics. Notably, one study of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression reported that the treatment decreased authoritarian political views in patients. That clinical trial also detected another effect that had previously been reported in healthy participants: psilocybin use leads to increases in the personality domain of openness, itself a predictor of liberal values.
If psilocybin does change political values, the significance of this effect goes deeper than which politicians or media outlets will seek to support or impede psilocybin-assisted therapy. A well-established consensus on the secular democratic state is that it should remain neutral and agnostic on a number of matters, allowing a diversity of values, political attitudes and religious beliefs among its citizens. Where such states have universal health care systems, is it permissible to not only endorse, but fund through taxpayer contributions, a treatment which shifts values in one direction?
With sample sizes currently small, more research is needed to understand whether there truly is a causal relationship at work, and, if so, what its nature might be. Perhaps psilocybin doesn’t so much induce liberal values, but rather consolidates whatever values were present before treatment. A health care modality that entrenches preexisting political sentiments is, at the least, unlikely to make enemies. The same could not be said of a treatment that shifts patients in one direction along the political spectrum.
To overcome this obstacle, advocates of psilocybin-assisted therapy need an inspiring banner that members of any political tribe could rally around. With few things that unite us as powerfully as politics can divide us, perhaps the most alluring banner will be the one thing that unites us all: death. While psilocybin is neither a cure for, nor a prophylactic against, death, studies have repeatedly demonstrated that it could play a profound role in the future of palliative care. The existential distress experienced when faced with a life-threatening or terminal illness can steal away what little quality of life remains for the dying. Such distress responds poorly to our standard pharmaceutical approaches, but the powerful mystical experiences induced by psilocybin consistently transmute demoralization, anxiety and depression into acceptance, peacefulness and meaning, as patients prepare to meet their death.
However else they differ, conservatives and liberals are united in knowing that they, and their loved ones, will eventually die. And for conservatives and liberals alike, psilocybin could help them welcome the end with greater acceptance and less fear. Psilocybin looks set to become a licensed medicine by 2022. But how many ultimately benefit from it will be a matter not just of how well it works, but also the narrative surrounding it when it arrives: does psilocybin underline how we are different, or how we are the same?


scientificamerican--2020-10-12--When a Journalist Becomes a Disinformation Agent

I am not the editor in chief of a propaganda farm disguised as a far-right breaking news outlet .
But one day last February , just before the world shut down , I got to play one .
About 70 journalists , students and digital media types had gathered at the City University of New York to participate in a crisis simulation .
The crisis at hand was the 2020 U.S. presidential election .
The game was designed to illuminate how we , as reporters and editors , would respond to a cascade of false and misleading information on voting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our coverage .
The exercise was hosted by First Draft , a research group that trains people to understand and outsmart disinformation .
After a morning workshop on strategies for reporting on conspiracy theories and writing headlines that don ’ t entrench lies , the organizers split us up into groups of about 10 people , then gave each “ newsroom ” a mock publication name .
Sitting around communal tables , we assigned ourselves the roles of reporters , editors , social media managers and a communications director .
From our laptops @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the game interface .
It looked like a typical work desktop : There was an e-mail inbox , an intraoffice messaging system that functioned exactly like Slack , a microblogging platform that worked exactly like Twitter and a social feed that looked exactly like Facebook .
The game would send us messages with breaking events , press releases and tips , and the feeds would respond to our coverage .
Several First Draft staffers at a table were the “ communications desk , ” representing any agency , person or company we might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ questions .
Other than that , we received no instruction .
My newsroom was mostly made up of students from C.U.N.Y.
’ s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and other local universities .
The organizers gave us a few minutes to define our newsrooms ’ identities and plan our editorial strategies .
The room filled with nervous murmurings of journalists who wanted to fight the bad guys , to beat back misinformation and safeguard election day with earnest , clear-eyed coverage .
But I had a different agenda , and I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ include extreme scenarios if they are to properly scare people into preparing for the unexpected—into updating protocols and rearranging resources or tripping certain automated processes when things go awry .
Yet journalists and scientists tend to resist engaging with the outlandish .
We dismiss sensational outcomes , aiming to wrangle expectations back into the realm of reason and precedent .
In recent years that strategy has often left us reeling .
A Nature article published this past August explained why the U.S. was caught flat-footed in its response to COVID-19 : despite the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ business leaders have participated in dozens of pandemic simulations over the past two decades , none of the exercises “ explored the consequences of a White House sidelining its own public health agency , ” wrote journalists Amy Maxmen and Jeff Tollefson .
The success of any scenario game , then , depends on the questions it raises .
The game doesn ’ t need to predict the future , but it does need to pry players away from the status quo , to expand their sense of what is possible .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on November 3 , 2020 , things needed to get weird .
Disinformation scholars often warn that focusing on the intent of influence operations or the sophistication of their techniques overestimates their impact .
It ’ s true that many disinformation tactics are not robust in isolation .
But the targeted victim is fragile ; pervasive anxiety and a deep social divide in America make us vulnerable to attacks from afar and within .
And because it ’ s cheap and easy for bad actors to throw proverbial spaghetti at social feeds , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ amplification by major news organizations .
This was my goal as an editor in chief of unreality .
The simulation started off slowly .
A tip came in through e-mail : Did we see the rumor circulating on social media that people can vote by text message ?
As other newsrooms began writing explainers debunking SMS voting , I assigned a reporter to write a “ tweet ” that would enhance confusion without outright supporting the lie .
After a quick edit , we posted : We ’ re hearing that it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Have you tried to vote by SMS ?
Tell us about your experience !
It went up faster than any other content , but the social Web reacted tepidly .
A couple of people called us out for spreading a false idea .
So we dug in with another post : Text message voting is the way of the future—but Democrats shut it down .
Why are elites trying to suppress your vote ?
Story coming soon !
We continued this pattern of baseless suggestions , targeted at whatever people on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ skeptical about .
Eventually some of the other newsrooms caught on that we might not be working in good faith .
At first they treated our manipulations as myths to debunk with fact-laden explainers .
But our coverage kept getting dirtier .
When an editor from a respectable outlet publicly questioned the integrity of my senior reporter , I threatened to take legal action against anyone who maligned her .
“ We apologize to no one !
” I yelled to my team .
My staff was having fun wreaking havoc .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by First Draft organizers ( who , I later learned , meted out eight “ chapters ” of preloaded content ) , as well as manual input from the simulation participants in real time .
We watched the feeds react with more and more outrage to the “ news ” we published .
Our comms director stonewalled our competitors , who kept asking us to take responsibility for our actions , even forming a coalition to call us out .
Then a new tip appeared : someone on social media said there was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Everyone ’ s attention shifted .
The first newsroom to get a comment from the “ local police ” posted it immediately : At this time , we are not aware of any active shooting threat or event .
We are investigating .
While other teams shared the message and went to work reporting , I saw a terrible opening in the statement ’ s inconclusiveness .
“ Let ’ s question the integrity of the cops , ” I whispered maniacally to my team .
We sent out a post asking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In a forest of fear , the suggestion that voters were at risk from violence was a lightning bolt .
Social media lit up with panic .
A celebrity with a huge following asked her fans to stay safe by staying home .
My newsroom quietly cheered .
We had found an editorial focus , and I instructed everyone to build on it .
We “ tweeted ” a dozen times , occasionally promising an in-depth story that never arrived .
Once we were on a roll , I paused to survey the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spending all their energy on facts and framing and to-be-sures , scrambling to publish just one article debunking the misleading ideas we had scattered like dandelion seeds .
We didn ’ t even need to lie outright : maybe there was an active shooter !
In the fog of uncertainty , we had exploited a grain of possible truth .
Abruptly , the organizers ended the game .
Ninety minutes had somehow passed .
I took stock of myself standing up , leaning forward with my hands pressed to the table , adrenaline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spent the previous year researching digital disinformation and producing articles on its history , techniques and impact on society .
Intellectually I knew that people and groups wanted to manipulate the information environment for power or money or even just for kicks .
But I hadn ’ t understood how that felt .
I scanned the faces of my “ colleagues , ” seeing them again as humans rather than foot soldiers , and flinched at the way they looked back at me with concern in their eyes .
Our debrief of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the media environment on Election Day.
“ You sent the other newsrooms into a tailspin , ” First Draft ’ s deputy director Aimee Rinehart later told me .
She said I was the first person to co-opt the game as a “ bad steward of the Internet , ” which made me wonder if future simulations should always secretly assign one group the role of wily propagandist .
It took hard alcohol and many hours for my nervous system to settle down .
The game had rewarded my gaslighting with amplification , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spread of my power , not just in likes and shares but through immediate “ real-world ” consequences .
Playing the bad guy showed me how the design of platforms is geared toward controlling minds , not expanding them .
I ’ d known this , but now I felt why journalism couldn ’ t compete against influence operations on the high-speed battlefield of social media—by taking up the same arms as the outrage machine , we would become them .
Instead we could strengthen our own turf by writing “ truth sandwich @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the public ’ s need for clarity .
Because ultimately the problem wasn ’ t about truths versus lies or facts versus falsehoods .
It was about stability and shared reality versus disorientation and chaos .
And in that day ’ s simulation of the 2020 election , chaos had won by suppressing the vote .

I am not the editor in chief of a propaganda farm disguised as a far-right breaking news outlet. But one day last February, just before the world shut down, I got to play one.
About 70 journalists, students and digital media types had gathered at the City University of New York to participate in a crisis simulation. The crisis at hand was the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The game was designed to illuminate how we, as reporters and editors, would respond to a cascade of false and misleading information on voting day—and how public discourse might respond to our coverage. The exercise was hosted by First Draft, a research group that trains people to understand and outsmart disinformation.
After a morning workshop on strategies for reporting on conspiracy theories and writing headlines that don’t entrench lies, the organizers split us up into groups of about 10 people, then gave each “newsroom” a mock publication name. Sitting around communal tables, we assigned ourselves the roles of reporters, editors, social media managers and a communications director. From our laptops we logged into a portal to access the game interface. It looked like a typical work desktop: There was an e-mail inbox, an intraoffice messaging system that functioned exactly like Slack, a microblogging platform that worked exactly like Twitter and a social feed that looked exactly like Facebook. The game would send us messages with breaking events, press releases and tips, and the feeds would respond to our coverage. Several First Draft staffers at a table were the “communications desk,” representing any agency, person or company we might need to “call” to answer questions. Other than that, we received no instruction.
My newsroom was mostly made up of students from C.U.N.Y.’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and other local universities. The organizers gave us a few minutes to define our newsrooms’ identities and plan our editorial strategies. The room filled with nervous murmurings of journalists who wanted to fight the bad guys, to beat back misinformation and safeguard election day with earnest, clear-eyed coverage. But I had a different agenda, and I was the one in charge.
“Sorry, team,” I said. “We’re going rogue.”
SIMULATIONS should include extreme scenarios if they are to properly scare people into preparing for the unexpected—into updating protocols and rearranging resources or tripping certain automated processes when things go awry. Yet journalists and scientists tend to resist engaging with the outlandish. We dismiss sensational outcomes, aiming to wrangle expectations back into the realm of reason and precedent. In recent years that strategy has often left us reeling. A Nature article published this past August explained why the U.S. was caught flat-footed in its response to COVID-19: despite the fact that government officials, academics and business leaders have participated in dozens of pandemic simulations over the past two decades, none of the exercises “explored the consequences of a White House sidelining its own public health agency,” wrote journalists Amy Maxmen and Jeff Tollefson.
The success of any scenario game, then, depends on the questions it raises. The game doesn’t need to predict the future, but it does need to pry players away from the status quo, to expand their sense of what is possible. And to stress-test the preparedness of a newsroom on November 3, 2020, things needed to get weird.
Disinformation scholars often warn that focusing on the intent of influence operations or the sophistication of their techniques overestimates their impact. It’s true that many disinformation tactics are not robust in isolation. But the targeted victim is fragile; pervasive anxiety and a deep social divide in America make us vulnerable to attacks from afar and within. And because it’s cheap and easy for bad actors to throw proverbial spaghetti at social feeds, occasionally something sticks, leading to massive amplification by major news organizations. This was my goal as an editor in chief of unreality.
The simulation started off slowly. A tip came in through e-mail: Did we see the rumor circulating on social media that people can vote by text message?
As other newsrooms began writing explainers debunking SMS voting, I assigned a reporter to write a “tweet” that would enhance confusion without outright supporting the lie. After a quick edit, we posted: We’re hearing that it’s possible to vote by text message. Have you tried to vote by SMS? Tell us about your experience! It went up faster than any other content, but the social Web reacted tepidly. A couple of people called us out for spreading a false idea. So we dug in with another post: Text message voting is the way of the future—but Democrats shut it down. Why are elites trying to suppress your vote? Story coming soon!
We continued this pattern of baseless suggestions, targeted at whatever people on the feed seemed to already be worried or skeptical about. Eventually some of the other newsrooms caught on that we might not be working in good faith. At first they treated our manipulations as myths to debunk with fact-laden explainers. But our coverage kept getting dirtier. When an editor from a respectable outlet publicly questioned the integrity of my senior reporter, I threatened to take legal action against anyone who maligned her. “We apologize to no one!” I yelled to my team.
My staff was having fun wreaking havoc. The social platforms in the game were controlled by First Draft organizers (who, I later learned, meted out eight “chapters” of preloaded content), as well as manual input from the simulation participants in real time. We watched the feeds react with more and more outrage to the “news” we published. Our comms director stonewalled our competitors, who kept asking us to take responsibility for our actions, even forming a coalition to call us out.
Then a new tip appeared: someone on social media said there was an active shooter at her polling place. Everyone’s attention shifted. The first newsroom to get a comment from the “local police” posted it immediately: At this time, we are not aware of any active shooting threat or event. We are investigating. While other teams shared the message and went to work reporting, I saw a terrible opening in the statement’s inconclusiveness. “Let’s question the integrity of the cops,” I whispered maniacally to my team.
We sent out a post asking whether the report could be trusted. In a forest of fear, the suggestion that voters were at risk from violence was a lightning bolt. Social media lit up with panic. A celebrity with a huge following asked her fans to stay safe by staying home. My newsroom quietly cheered. We had found an editorial focus, and I instructed everyone to build on it. We “tweeted” a dozen times, occasionally promising an in-depth story that never arrived.
Once we were on a roll, I paused to survey the room. I watched the other teams spending all their energy on facts and framing and to-be-sures, scrambling to publish just one article debunking the misleading ideas we had scattered like dandelion seeds. We didn’t even need to lie outright: maybe there was an active shooter! In the fog of uncertainty, we had exploited a grain of possible truth.
ABRUPTLY, the organizers ended the game. Ninety minutes had somehow passed.
I took stock of myself standing up, leaning forward with my hands pressed to the table, adrenaline rippling through my body. I had spent the previous year researching digital disinformation and producing articles on its history, techniques and impact on society. Intellectually I knew that people and groups wanted to manipulate the information environment for power or money or even just for kicks. But I hadn’t understood how that felt.
I scanned the faces of my “colleagues,” seeing them again as humans rather than foot soldiers, and flinched at the way they looked back at me with concern in their eyes.
Our debrief of the simulation confirmed that my newsroom had sabotaged the media environment on Election Day.“You sent the other newsrooms into a tailspin,” First Draft’s deputy director Aimee Rinehart later told me. She said I was the first person to co-opt the game as a “bad steward of the Internet,” which made me wonder if future simulations should always secretly assign one group the role of wily propagandist.
It took hard alcohol and many hours for my nervous system to settle down. The game had rewarded my gaslighting with amplification, and I had gotten to witness the spread of my power, not just in likes and shares but through immediate “real-world” consequences.
Playing the bad guy showed me how the design of platforms is geared toward controlling minds, not expanding them. I’d known this, but now I felt why journalism couldn’t compete against influence operations on the high-speed battlefield of social media—by taking up the same arms as the outrage machine, we would become them. Instead we could strengthen our own turf by writing “truth sandwich” headlines and service articles that anticipate the public’s need for clarity. Because ultimately the problem wasn’t about truths versus lies or facts versus falsehoods. It was about stability and shared reality versus disorientation and chaos. And in that day’s simulation of the 2020 election, chaos had won by suppressing the vote.


scientificamerican--2020-10-12--Trolling for Truth on Social Media

Trolling for Truth on Social Media

During the 1999 World Trade Organization ( WTO ) meeting in Seattle , tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets with banners and puppets to push back against economic globalization .
They were met with a violent militarized suppression .
At the same time , a small group of artist-activists called the Yes Men created a parody Web site pretending to be the WTO .
Cloaked in its official logos and design , they made critical claims about the organization .
This hoax was so successful it landed the Yes Men speaking engagements as the WTO at several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ absurdity grew , viewers began to question what they saw—which was the point .
Realizing that they could pull off similar pranks using mimicry of official Web sites , the Yes Men made a career out of punching up , posing as the National Rifle Association , the New York Times and Shell , among many others .
In an eerie foreshadowing of today ’ s disinformation campaigns , these activists poked fun at George W. Bush ’ s gaffes as a presidential candidate at GWBush.com .
Through spoofs , the Yes Men @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new networked terrain where battles over truth could be fought .
They played with the ambiguity of authenticity at a time when most Internet users were already skeptical of online content .
The “ culture jamming ” tactic used by the Yes Men took its cue from Guy Debord and the so-called situationists of the 1960s , who advanced social and political critique .
In the 1980s and 1990s culture jamming unified activists around a common cause and set of tactics , such as making minor edits of an advertisement to drastically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ artivism ” was championed by Adbusters , a Canadian magazine that ran numerous anticorporate campaigns , most notably initiating the call to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 .
Simply modifying the slogan under a Nike swoosh to read “ Just Buy It ” was an effective way of reorienting consumers ’ ideas about what it meant to wear corporate logos as fashion .
Crucially for activists such as the Yes Men , the big reveal was the raison d ’ être for the hoax .
The cognitive dissonance experienced by the reader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opened the way for critical thinking .
Once they produced that chasm of the mind , the real work would begin : convincing new audiences that these corporations were the real -enemies of democracy and justice .
The Yes Men ’ s tactics were a kind of media manipulation .
For them and other activists , the Internet provided a means of knowledge transmission and a way to counter the credulity of the mainstream press and hold corporations to account .
But the ingenuity of using the Internet as a canvas for mischief @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Just a couple of decades later technology companies have created a media ecosystem that allows governments , political operatives , marketers and other interested parties to routinely expose Internet users to dangerous misinformation and dupe them into amplifying it .
There is mounting evidence of foreign operatives , partisan pundits , white supremacists , violent misogynists , grifters and scammers using impersonation on social media as a way to make money , gain status and direct media attention .
How did we end up in a situation where lies travel farther and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ involves the promise of networked communication technology , the new data economy and the spiraling deluge of profitable strategic misinformation .
We must admit that the truth is often emotionally boring and that the motivation to take action online through , say , sharing a video requires some combination of outrage , novelty and hope .
But rather than proposing a set of solutions that involve tweaking social media systems , hunting down bots or insisting on verified identities , we can look to activism to understand how we got here—and how we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is difficult to remember that there was a time when what happened online was not so world-shattering .
Back in the mid-1990s heyday of America Online , Internet users protected anonymity via screen names and cryptic profiles littered with song lyrics .
Most would never have thought it safe to type a credit-card number into a Web site or share personal identifying information .
Because bandwidth was limited and you were yoked to the telephone wire , going online meant stopping everything “ in real life ” and forming bonds out of shared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Yahoo Games .
The Internet was a place you could go to be yourself or someone else .
John Perry Barlow and other early Internet pioneers cheered that it was the “ home of the mind ” where neither bodies nor laws much mattered .
Because news was still expensive to create and its distribution largely remained in the hands of media moguls , the Internet was not considered a place to seek authoritative information .
In the mid-1990s news organizations were contemplating “ going digital , ” which mostly meant putting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ widespread fear that local news would disappear .
If anything , it seemed like networked communications would produce the opposite outcome : any person with a connection could write about their community and interests and publish it for the world to see , anonymously or not .
I often joke that the Internet died the same day someone figured out how to get users to pay online for pizza delivery .
As the Internet developed into a digital economy , verifiable identity was indispensable to the flows of commerce .
Of course , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which illuminates an important point : it is often not the whizbang of disruptive innovation that drives social change but the technological adaptation of the ordinary and mundane .
As technology develops , so do humans ; in adopting new technologies , people become part of a recursive circuit that changes themselves and the world around them .
Whereas the printing press was the platform that gave birth to a society of readers , the Internet fashioned everyone as a publisher .
Early social-networking platforms such as LiveJournal , BlackPlanet , Friendster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; they gave people the capacity to share stories and converse .
Similarly , today ’ s biggest Silicon Valley tech companies began from modest intentions , a desire to connect people for specific reasons .
Facebook built its base by maintaining exclusivity .
It was social networking but only for the elite colleges .
Its earliest version included a misogynistic feature where users could compare and rate fellow women students ’ attractiveness .
YouTube began as an update on video dating , where the “ you ” in YouTube was an invitation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about their perfect partner in the hopes of finding true love .
Twitter was meant to function like group texts among co-workers but only seemed to find its purpose when the techno-elite of SXSW used it to enhance communication across an already technologically dense network .
In that context , Twitter ’ s character limit was celebrated as virtuous microblogging , where small strings of text were favored over the long-winded diatribes of traditional blogs .
Each of these tools has evolved not just technologically but also culturally , as society passed through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disillusionment .
Since their inception , big questions loomed about how social media companies could become financially lucrative .
The search for profit drove decisions about expanding the user base , remodeling advertising and converting users into market value .
Mobile technology and broadband accelerated the capabilities of tech companies to expand their services in new areas , including data harvesting .
Personal data were seen as an artifact of time spent on these services , and by simply interacting , online users sloughed off enough residual data to energize a digital economy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ share and mouse movement to be aggregated and monetized .
Social-networking sites transformed into social media , where the business model was no longer just to connect people to people and litter those pages with ads but also to connect people to “ content ” —information , pictures , videos , articles and entertainment .
The result was a digital economy built on engagement , where content farms making “ click-bait ” became the watchword of the Internet economy .
But not just junk news sites make money .
By creating a content-rich @ @ @ @ @ @ @ customers and users into cattle to be milked .
Behavioral data could be repackaged for purposes from marketing to research to political campaigning .
Profit-sharing models that made average users into content producers generated a so-called influencer culture , where entrepreneurial creators cultivated networks of followers and subscribers and then monetized them through donations , subscriptions or sponsored content .
As personal data became a cash cow for social media companies , user experience could be tailored to prolong their time on sites .
The consequence , as we know well today , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
No longer did Internet users see the same information .
Instead algorithmic echo chambers shaped individual news feeds and time lines to the extent that two people sitting side by side may receive very different recommendations based on their past behaviors online .
Scams and grifts that would have been shut down if they were taking place on city streets , like selling counterfeit merchandise or running an illegal taxi company , flourished online .
Yet technology companies shield themselves from accountability by claiming to be a humble set of rails on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to another .
Largely because of an early ideological commitment that cyberspace was no place at all , tech companies leveraged a metaphorical mirage , where jurisdiction in cyberspace is murky and accountability is elusive .
While scholars of gender , race and technology , such as Lisa Nakamura of the University of Michigan , Alice E. Marwick of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and T. L. Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , routinely wrote about the dangers of divesting the Internet of a material existence , politicians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Internet as a place where real damage could occur .
Just prior to the rollout of broadband in the 1990s , a hyperlocal model of media justice took shape through activist use of the Internet .
Jeffrey Juris , an anthropologist of networked social movements , ethnographically studied how the anticorporate globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s used every technology at its disposal to organize large summits to protest meetings of the WTO and International Monetary Fund .
As Juris has written , the Zapatista movement ’ s use of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ large protest gatherings : insurgents used online networks to connect with other like-minded groups globally and to provide the international press with updates on the struggle for independence in Chiapas .
To plan the 1999 protest against the WTO in Seattle , activists relied on Web sites and e-mail lists to coordinate their tactics and to forge trust across borders .
Juris wrote of this form of media activism in 2005 as he studied the development of a digital hub for citizen journalists calling itself .
He wrote that “ Indymedia has provided @ @ @ @ @ @ @ video , and text files , while activists have also created temporary media hubs to generate alternative information , experiment with new technologies , and exchange ideas and resources .
Influenced by anarchism and peer-to-peer networking logics , anti–corporate globalization activists have not only incorporated digital technologies as concrete tools , they have also used them to express alternative political imaginaries based on an emerging network ideal.
” This shared set of digital tools included Web site templates that could be quickly adapted and networked through a centralized repository .
The rallying cry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t Hate the Media , Become the Media !
” It was this same techno-optimism that later led activists to adopt Facebook , Twitter and YouTube alongside e-mail lists , SMS text groups and livestreaming during the so-called Arab Spring , the Occupy Movement and the early iterations of Black Lives Matter .
These networked social movements were multiplatform in several senses of the word : they existed on computational infrastructure that referred to itself as a tech platform where activists offered an alternative political platform geared toward social justice .
Because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ widespread change , technology companies envisioned a new purpose for their products .
To capture this momentum , companies such as Facebook and Twitter began to rebrand their products as tools for free speech .
In this new marketing scheme , social media companies were likened to the digital streets or public square , and their products were framed as synonymous with democracy itself .
In truth , the slipperiness of the term “ platform ” permitted companies such as YouTube , Facebook and Twitter to sidestep regulation and public-interest obligations that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in 2013 , the Edward Snowden scandal revealed a deep paradox to the public : The same technology used by activists to foment social change was being used by governments to spy on their citizens and for corporations and political campaigns to carry out different kinds of experiments .
( Shoshana Zuboff explored this theme in her 2019 treatise on surveillance capitalism . )
Activists ’ participation on tech platforms was largely about using any means necessary to achieve a more just society .
As the platforms ’ products changed , so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other actors , such as police , news organizations , brands and politicians .
By expanding their customer base to include all these types of professionals , tech companies diluted their reputation as a place for digital democracy and took on the sinister character of a panoptic media system—one bent on making a profit at the expense of users and anyone who threatened their growth .
Throughout the 2000s the Yes Men continued to pull pranks through their form of digital activism .
They devised a political education program , where many folks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mechanism for social protest .
Shenanigans undoubtedly make a lasting and memorable impression , but hoaxes and impersonation can backfire by giving false hope .
No one likes to feel manipulated or tricked , and the tactic received significant criticism from people who were truly victimized by corporations .
In 2007 , for example , the Yes Men impersonated Dow Chemical during an interview on the BBC where they took responsibility for the gas leak disaster in Bhopal , India , and promised $ 12 billion in reparations .
This “ news ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sadness and disappointment when victims found out that Dow actually did no such thing .
It was not only leftists creating convincing hoax sites in the 1990s .
Jessie Daniels , a sociologist , has researched the myriad ways white supremacists have used “ cloaked Web sites ” to malign Martin Luther King , Jr. , and other Black activists and groups , in ways similar to the tactics the FBI would use to plant stories about King .
Networked factions of white supremacists are keenly aware that they can not show up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they are remaining anonymous to avoid social stigma or evade hate crimes investigations , white supremacists continue to see the Web and social media as a political opportunity to convert new believers .
As a result , they have innovated on strategies to hide their identities online to maximize reputational damage to their perceived opposition .
Now the field is open to any ideologically motivated group .
Tactics include impersonating individual politicians , creating mass fake accounts , and coordinating the harassment of journalists and activists through the use of streaming platforms , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have also used automated posting to game algorithmic signals , as well as paid advertising tools to target vulnerable populations .
Others have generated denigrating deep-fakes .
They also have adopted techniques to influence trending algorithms , as well as to circumvent content moderation .
Many of these techniques , such as the use of bots , were pioneered by advertising agencies , which understood that data were money and that the creation of fake engagement data could produce real profit .
Now the generation of fake accounts and manipulated engagement are the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Unlike the artist-activists who used hoaxes to reveal deeper truths about capitalist exploitation , these imposters use cloaking and pseudoanonymity to attack journalists , politicians and average users .
My Harvard University colleague Brian Friedberg and I have written about the impact of “ pseudoanonymous influence operations , ” wherein politically motivated actors impersonate marginalized , underrepresented and vulnerable groups to malign , disrupt or exaggerate their causes .
Recently accounts run by white supremacists claiming to be antifascist activists were outed as impostors .
If and when operators of pseudoanonymous accounts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grand reveal of some larger social or political critique .
Usually their goal is to trick journalists into smearing their opponent or to simply cause chaos .
These disinformers quickly move on to the next potential media-manipulation campaign to advance their political agendas .
Eradicating these impostor tactics is possible , but it would require tech companies to admit that the design of their systems aids and abets media manipulators .
Indeed , we do not have an equal-opportunity media ecosystem .
The anguish of seeing these tactics deployed time and time again @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over the long term , they are effective only for those who want to advance short-term gains over long-term trust and safety .
Many people believe they can spot false news and propaganda , but the reality is that it is much more difficult because the very design of social media and the incentives to plant misinformation are weighted in the favor of disinformers .
In an environment where novel claims travel far and fast , the truth is at a serious disadvantage .
Because tech companies have been reticent to handle the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , society at large pays the price .
News organizations , as well as individual journalists , are investing huge amounts of resources to combat the problem .
National security experts and academic research centers across the globe are creating content moderation software to monitor social media .
Yet activists who have long endured damaging coverage by misinformed press are now called to defend their very existence from impostors—the disinformers who are deliberately stealing the moral authority and trust activists have built up over years of digital engagement .
For anyone who still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s access to it , fighting back involves dispatching with the ideology that technological platforms are democracy in action .
They have shifted from connecting people to people to connecting people to information , tilting power toward those groups that have the most resources .
They are also fundamentally businesses that have scaled without a plan for mitigating the harmful effects they have on society .
Redesigning social media for timely , local , relevant and authoritative information requires a commitment to design justice , which sees technology not as a neutral @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the worlds we want .
As communication scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock of M.I.T .
has researched , the process of design must adhere to an ethic of “ nothing about us without us.
” For example , there would be no accountability on facial-recognition technologies without the activism of groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League , the research of AI Now , the political work of the A.C.L.U.
, and ordinary advocates showing their support online and off .
Activists are visionaries in the sense that they see materials not just as they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In the early 2000s they transformed technology in new and exciting ways , but that era has passed .
We can ’ t stay swept up in “ techno-nostalgia ” for what once was or could have been .
If we are going to survive our ailing social media ecosystem , the truth needs advocates .

During the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets with banners and puppets to push back against economic globalization. They were met with a violent militarized suppression. At the same time, a small group of artist-activists called the Yes Men created a parody Web site pretending to be the WTO. Cloaked in its official logos and design, they made critical claims about the organization. This hoax was so successful it landed the Yes Men speaking engagements as the WTO at several conferences around the world. As the absurdity grew, viewers began to question what they saw—which was the point.
Realizing that they could pull off similar pranks using mimicry of official Web sites, the Yes Men made a career out of punching up, posing as the National Rifle Association, the New York Times and Shell, among many others. In an eerie foreshadowing of today’s disinformation campaigns, these activists poked fun at George W. Bush’s gaffes as a presidential candidate at GWBush.com.
Through spoofs, the Yes Men understood the power of the Internet as a new networked terrain where battles over truth could be fought. They played with the ambiguity of authenticity at a time when most Internet users were already skeptical of online content. The “culture jamming” tactic used by the Yes Men took its cue from Guy Debord and the so-called situationists of the 1960s, who advanced social and political critique. In the 1980s and 1990s culture jamming unified activists around a common cause and set of tactics, such as making minor edits of an advertisement to drastically change its meaning. This form of “artivism” was championed by Adbusters, a Canadian magazine that ran numerous anticorporate campaigns, most notably initiating the call to Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Simply modifying the slogan under a Nike swoosh to read “Just Buy It” was an effective way of reorienting consumers’ ideas about what it meant to wear corporate logos as fashion.
Crucially for activists such as the Yes Men, the big reveal was the raison d’être for the hoax. The cognitive dissonance experienced by the reader or viewer was a clever strategy that opened the way for critical thinking. Once they produced that chasm of the mind, the real work would begin: convincing new audiences that these corporations were the real enemies of democracy and justice.
The Yes Men’s tactics were a kind of media manipulation. For them and other activists, the Internet provided a means of knowledge transmission and a way to counter the credulity of the mainstream press and hold corporations to account. But the ingenuity of using the Internet as a canvas for mischief and critique worked a little too well. Just a couple of decades later technology companies have created a media ecosystem that allows governments, political operatives, marketers and other interested parties to routinely expose Internet users to dangerous misinformation and dupe them into amplifying it. There is mounting evidence of foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers using impersonation on social media as a way to make money, gain status and direct media attention. How did we end up in a situation where lies travel farther and faster than the truth?
The answer involves the promise of networked communication technology, the new data economy and the spiraling deluge of profitable strategic misinformation. We must admit that the truth is often emotionally boring and that the motivation to take action online through, say, sharing a video requires some combination of outrage, novelty and hope. But rather than proposing a set of solutions that involve tweaking social media systems, hunting down bots or insisting on verified identities, we can look to activism to understand how we got here—and how we could get out.
THESE DAYS it is difficult to remember that there was a time when what happened online was not so world-shattering. Back in the mid-1990s heyday of America Online, Internet users protected anonymity via screen names and cryptic profiles littered with song lyrics. Most would never have thought it safe to type a credit-card number into a Web site or share personal identifying information. Because bandwidth was limited and you were yoked to the telephone wire, going online meant stopping everything “in real life” and forming bonds out of shared interests or a desire to play backgammon on Yahoo Games. The Internet was a place you could go to be yourself or someone else. John Perry Barlow and other early Internet pioneers cheered that it was the “home of the mind” where neither bodies nor laws much mattered.
Because news was still expensive to create and its distribution largely remained in the hands of media moguls, the Internet was not considered a place to seek authoritative information. In the mid-1990s news organizations were contemplating “going digital,” which mostly meant putting print articles online. There was no widespread fear that local news would disappear. If anything, it seemed like networked communications would produce the opposite outcome: any person with a connection could write about their community and interests and publish it for the world to see, anonymously or not.
I often joke that the Internet died the same day someone figured out how to get users to pay online for pizza delivery. As the Internet developed into a digital economy, verifiable identity was indispensable to the flows of commerce. Of course, the first widespread online commodity was pornography, which illuminates an important point: it is often not the whizbang of disruptive innovation that drives social change but the technological adaptation of the ordinary and mundane. As technology develops, so do humans; in adopting new technologies, people become part of a recursive circuit that changes themselves and the world around them.
Whereas the printing press was the platform that gave birth to a society of readers, the Internet fashioned everyone as a publisher. Early social-networking platforms such as LiveJournal, BlackPlanet, Friendster and MySpace were like self-service telephone books; they gave people the capacity to share stories and converse. Similarly, today’s biggest Silicon Valley tech companies began from modest intentions, a desire to connect people for specific reasons.
Facebook built its base by maintaining exclusivity. It was social networking but only for the elite colleges. Its earliest version included a misogynistic feature where users could compare and rate fellow women students’ attractiveness. YouTube began as an update on video dating, where the “you” in YouTube was an invitation for users to upload short videos talking about their perfect partner in the hopes of finding true love. Twitter was meant to function like group texts among co-workers but only seemed to find its purpose when the techno-elite of SXSW used it to enhance communication across an already technologically dense network. In that context, Twitter’s character limit was celebrated as virtuous microblogging, where small strings of text were favored over the long-winded diatribes of traditional blogs. Each of these tools has evolved not just technologically but also culturally, as society passed through a phase of excitement into one of disillusionment.
Since their inception, big questions loomed about how social media companies could become financially lucrative. The search for profit drove decisions about expanding the user base, remodeling advertising and converting users into market value. Mobile technology and broadband accelerated the capabilities of tech companies to expand their services in new areas, including data harvesting. Personal data were seen as an artifact of time spent on these services, and by simply interacting, online users sloughed off enough residual data to energize a digital economy ravenous for every click, like, share and mouse movement to be aggregated and monetized.
Social-networking sites transformed into social media, where the business model was no longer just to connect people to people and litter those pages with ads but also to connect people to “content”—information, pictures, videos, articles and entertainment. The result was a digital economy built on engagement, where content farms making “click-bait” became the watchword of the Internet economy.
But not just junk news sites make money. By creating a content-rich environment, tech companies turned advertisers into customers and users into cattle to be milked. Behavioral data could be repackaged for purposes from marketing to research to political campaigning. Profit-sharing models that made average users into content producers generated a so-called influencer culture, where entrepreneurial creators cultivated networks of followers and subscribers and then monetized them through donations, subscriptions or sponsored content. As personal data became a cash cow for social media companies, user experience could be tailored to prolong their time on sites.
The consequence, as we know well today, was the development of personalized information ecosystems. No longer did Internet users see the same information. Instead algorithmic echo chambers shaped individual news feeds and time lines to the extent that two people sitting side by side may receive very different recommendations based on their past behaviors online. Scams and grifts that would have been shut down if they were taking place on city streets, like selling counterfeit merchandise or running an illegal taxi company, flourished online.
Yet technology companies shield themselves from accountability by claiming to be a humble set of rails on which information is shuttled from one place to another. Largely because of an early ideological commitment that cyberspace was no place at all, tech companies leveraged a metaphorical mirage, where jurisdiction in cyberspace is murky and accountability is elusive. While scholars of gender, race and technology, such as Lisa Nakamura of the University of Michigan, Alice E. Marwick of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and T. L. Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, routinely wrote about the dangers of divesting the Internet of a material existence, politicians and regulatory bodies failed to treat the Internet as a place where real damage could occur.
JUST PRIOR to the rollout of broadband in the 1990s, a hyperlocal model of media justice took shape through activist use of the Internet. Jeffrey Juris, an anthropologist of networked social movements, ethnographically studied how the anticorporate globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s used every technology at its disposal to organize large summits to protest meetings of the WTO and International Monetary Fund. As Juris has written, the Zapatista movement’s use of networked communication technology was the forerunner to large protest gatherings: insurgents used online networks to connect with other like-minded groups globally and to provide the international press with updates on the struggle for independence in Chiapas.
To plan the 1999 protest against the WTO in Seattle, activists relied on Web sites and e-mail lists to coordinate their tactics and to forge trust across borders. Juris wrote of this form of media activism in 2005 as he studied the development of a digital hub for citizen journalists calling itself. He wrote that “Indymedia has provided an online forum for posting audio, video, and text files, while activists have also created temporary media hubs to generate alternative information, experiment with new technologies, and exchange ideas and resources. Influenced by anarchism and peer-to-peer networking logics, anti–corporate globalization activists have not only incorporated digital technologies as concrete tools, they have also used them to express alternative political imaginaries based on an emerging network ideal.” This shared set of digital tools included Web site templates that could be quickly adapted and networked through a centralized repository. The rallying cry of Indymedia contributors became: “Don’t Hate the Media, Become the Media!”
It was this same techno-optimism that later led activists to adopt Facebook, Twitter and YouTube alongside e-mail lists, SMS text groups and livestreaming during the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and the early iterations of Black Lives Matter. These networked social movements were multiplatform in several senses of the word: they existed on computational infrastructure that referred to itself as a tech platform where activists offered an alternative political platform geared toward social justice.
Because activists were using this infrastructure to create widespread change, technology companies envisioned a new purpose for their products. To capture this momentum, companies such as Facebook and Twitter began to rebrand their products as tools for free speech. In this new marketing scheme, social media companies were likened to the digital streets or public square, and their products were framed as synonymous with democracy itself. In truth, the slipperiness of the term “platform” permitted companies such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to sidestep regulation and public-interest obligations that are typically applied to broadcast media.
Then, in 2013, the Edward Snowden scandal revealed a deep paradox to the public: The same technology used by activists to foment social change was being used by governments to spy on their citizens and for corporations and political campaigns to carry out different kinds of experiments. (Shoshana Zuboff explored this theme in her 2019 treatise on surveillance capitalism.) Activists’ participation on tech platforms was largely about using any means necessary to achieve a more just society. As the platforms’ products changed, so, too, did their usefulness to other actors, such as police, news organizations, brands and politicians. By expanding their customer base to include all these types of professionals, tech companies diluted their reputation as a place for digital democracy and took on the sinister character of a panoptic media system—one bent on making a profit at the expense of users and anyone who threatened their growth.
THROUGHOUT THE 2000s the Yes Men continued to pull pranks through their form of digital activism. They devised a political education program, where many folks contemplated the use of hoaxing as a mechanism for social protest. Shenanigans undoubtedly make a lasting and memorable impression, but hoaxes and impersonation can backfire by giving false hope. No one likes to feel manipulated or tricked, and the tactic received significant criticism from people who were truly victimized by corporations. In 2007, for example, the Yes Men impersonated Dow Chemical during an interview on the BBC where they took responsibility for the gas leak disaster in Bhopal, India, and promised $12 billion in reparations. This “news” was met with excitement that morphed into sadness and disappointment when victims found out that Dow actually did no such thing.
It was not only leftists creating convincing hoax sites in the 1990s. Jessie Daniels, a sociologist, has researched the myriad ways white supremacists have used “cloaked Web sites” to malign Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Black activists and groups, in ways similar to the tactics the FBI would use to plant stories about King. Networked factions of white supremacists are keenly aware that they cannot show up in their true form online. Whether they are remaining anonymous to avoid social stigma or evade hate crimes investigations, white supremacists continue to see the Web and social media as a political opportunity to convert new believers. As a result, they have innovated on strategies to hide their identities online to maximize reputational damage to their perceived opposition.
Now the field is open to any ideologically motivated group. Tactics include impersonating individual politicians, creating mass fake accounts, and coordinating the harassment of journalists and activists through the use of streaming platforms, chat rooms and message boards. Groups have also used automated posting to game algorithmic signals, as well as paid advertising tools to target vulnerable populations. Others have generated denigrating deep-fakes. They also have adopted techniques to influence trending algorithms, as well as to circumvent content moderation.
Many of these techniques, such as the use of bots, were pioneered by advertising agencies, which understood that data were money and that the creation of fake engagement data could produce real profit. Now the generation of fake accounts and manipulated engagement are the means by which hoaxes are carried out.
Unlike the artist-activists who used hoaxes to reveal deeper truths about capitalist exploitation, these imposters use cloaking and pseudoanonymity to attack journalists, politicians and average users. My Harvard University colleague Brian Friedberg and I have written about the impact of “pseudoanonymous influence operations,” wherein politically motivated actors impersonate marginalized, underrepresented and vulnerable groups to malign, disrupt or exaggerate their causes. Recently accounts run by white supremacists claiming to be antifascist activists were outed as impostors.
If and when operators of pseudoanonymous accounts are found out, there is no grand reveal of some larger social or political critique. Usually their goal is to trick journalists into smearing their opponent or to simply cause chaos. These disinformers quickly move on to the next potential media-manipulation campaign to advance their political agendas.
Eradicating these impostor tactics is possible, but it would require tech companies to admit that the design of their systems aids and abets media manipulators.
Indeed, we do not have an equal-opportunity media ecosystem. The anguish of seeing these tactics deployed time and time again to malign movements for justice illustrates that over the long term, they are effective only for those who want to advance short-term gains over long-term trust and safety. Many people believe they can spot false news and propaganda, but the reality is that it is much more difficult because the very design of social media and the incentives to plant misinformation are weighted in the favor of disinformers. In an environment where novel claims travel far and fast, the truth is at a serious disadvantage.
Because tech companies have been reticent to handle the information war playing out across their platforms, society at large pays the price. News organizations, as well as individual journalists, are investing huge amounts of resources to combat the problem. National security experts and academic research centers across the globe are creating content moderation software to monitor social media. Yet activists who have long endured damaging coverage by misinformed press are now called to defend their very existence from impostors—the disinformers who are deliberately stealing the moral authority and trust activists have built up over years of digital engagement.
For anyone who still cares deeply about the truth and people’s access to it, fighting back involves dispatching with the ideology that technological platforms are democracy in action. They have shifted from connecting people to people to connecting people to information, tilting power toward those groups that have the most resources. They are also fundamentally businesses that have scaled without a plan for mitigating the harmful effects they have on society.
Redesigning social media for timely, local, relevant and authoritative information requires a commitment to design justice, which sees technology not as a neutral tool but as a means for building the worlds we want. As communication scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock of M.I.T. has researched, the process of design must adhere to an ethic of “nothing about us without us.” For example, there would be no accountability on facial-recognition technologies without the activism of groups such as the Algorithmic Justice League, the research of AI Now, the political work of the A.C.L.U., and ordinary advocates showing their support online and off.
Activists are visionaries in the sense that they see materials not just as they are but for what they can become. In the early 2000s they transformed technology in new and exciting ways, but that era has passed. We can’t stay swept up in “techno-nostalgia” for what once was or could have been. If we are going to survive our ailing social media ecosystem, the truth needs advocates.