{"id":19056,"date":"2019-12-24T06:13:43","date_gmt":"2019-12-24T06:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=19056"},"modified":"2019-12-25T14:53:46","modified_gmt":"2019-12-25T14:53:46","slug":"dont-let-your-vote-get-stolen-5-essential-reads-about-disinformation-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/dont-let-your-vote-get-stolen-5-essential-reads-about-disinformation-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t let your vote get stolen \u2013 5 essential reads about disinformation in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Inglis<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

As the 2020 election season heats up, there will be a massive number of people competing for your vote. Only some of them will be legitimate candidates.<\/p>\n

The vast majority will be information warriors, people who seek to confuse you about what is truth and what is fiction \u2013 the better to influence your thinking.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re confused or misinformed, you may well vote in ways that serve their masters\u2019 interests \u2013 or that simply sow further chaos and division in the U.S.<\/p>\n

How do I know this? Because it happened in the U.S. in 2016, and again in 2018 \u2013 and has been happening around the world.<\/p>\n

Here are a few examples that authors for The Conversation have highlighted over just the past year \u2013 plus a couple of ideas about ways you might help protect yourself and your fellow Americans from information warfare.<\/p>\n

1. Seeking influence in the Middle East<\/h2>\n

A propaganda arm of the Russian government publishes articles that appear on a leading Egyptian news site, reveals Nathaniel Greenberg<\/a>, a scholar of Arabic at George Mason University.<\/p>\n

The propagandists\u2019 goal, Greenberg explains, is to make it more difficult for readers to tell the difference between propaganda and legitimate news reporting.<\/p>\n

The effort \u201cis part of a long-running Russian campaign<\/a> to build influence in Egyptian media and elsewhere around the world \u2013 including in the U.S.,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

2. Looking to the neighbors<\/h2>\n

Russia is also trying to influence European politics, writes Liisa Past<\/a> of Arizona State University. She is a former Estonian government cybersecurity official who worked with her counterparts across the European Union to protect national and EU-wide elections.<\/p>\n

As the 2019 EU Parliament elections approached, \u201chackers backed or controlled by Russia<\/a> targeted EU government, media and political or nonprofit organizations,\u201d she writes, including trying to hijack online accounts of \u201cforeign and defense ministers across the continent.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Learning from history<\/h2>\n

The people of the Baltic nations \u2013 Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia \u2013 have what may be the most experience fighting against disinformation campaigns. They\u2019ve faced Russian propaganda efforts dating back to the 1940s, says cybersecurity scholar Terry Thompson<\/a> from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.<\/p>\n

For decades, \u201cthe Baltic countries were subjected to systematic Russian gaslighting<\/a>\u201d \u2013 intentional misrepresentation of facts<\/a> \u2013 \u201cdesigned to make people doubt their national history, culture and economic development,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

Those countries\u2019 solutions offer ideas for the U.S., Thompson suggests, \u201cincluding publicizing disinformation efforts<\/a> and evidence tying them to Russia. \u2026 The U.S. could also mobilize volunteers to boost citizens\u2019 and businesses\u2019 cyberdefenses and teach people to identify and combat disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. It\u2019s not just Russia<\/h2>\n

Lots of other groups are trying to manipulate voters\u2019 minds in new ways. In the recent United Kingdom parliamentary elections, several political parties used what are being gently called \u201cdirty tricks\u201d to gain an advantage over their opponents, writes Cardiff University journalism professor Richard Sambrook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For example, the \u201cConservatives rebranded their Twitter account<\/a> to look like an independent fact checking account \u2026[and] tried to \u2018Google-jack\u2019 the Labour Party\u2019s manifesto launch with a fake news site.\u201d They also doctored video to call a political opponent\u2019s competence into question.<\/p>\n

Other parties too \u2013 the Liberal Democrats and Labour \u2013 tried to misrepresent various facts to their advantages.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

5. Fight bots, whatever their source<\/h2>\n

Regardless of where the information is coming from, remain on your guard against efforts to mislead you or confuse your thinking. Pik-Mai Hui<\/a> and Christopher Torres-Lugo<\/a>, computer science and information scholars at Indiana University\u2019s Observatory on Social Media, offer some hope that people can protect themselves from misinformation and disinformation.<\/p>\n

They and others in their research group have developed several different pieces of software that can help analyze automated propaganda efforts on Twitter. Lots of people have asked them to help identify Twitter bots acting in concert with each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is why, as a public service<\/a>, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n

With a little computer know-how, you can spot new places where disinformation efforts are appearing \u2013 and steer yourself and others clear of their efforts to change your mind and steal your vote.<\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation\u2019s archives.<\/em>\"The<\/p>\n

Jeff Inglis<\/a>, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Inglis, The Conversation As the 2020 election season heats up, there will be a massive number of people competing for your vote. Only some of them will be legitimate candidates. The vast majority will be information warriors, people who seek to confuse you about what is truth and what is fiction \u2013 the better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":19057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[6901,720,5682,3386,2275,2048,715,5400,1553,2002,1827,551],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19056"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19060,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056\/revisions\/19060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}