Disinformation, History, and Technology

The following information is extracted from

A Short Guide to the History of ’Fake News’ and Disinformation created by Julie Posetti and Alice Matthews in collaboration with the International Center for Journalists under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Links to an external site..
Journalism, ‘Fake News’ & Disinformation Handbook for Journalism Education and Training handbook created by Cherilyn Ireton and Julie Posetti in collaboration with UNESCO under the the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO) license.

History and Technology

Misinformation, disinformation and propaganda have been features of human communication since at least the Roman times when Antony met Cleopatra. Octavian waged a propaganda campaign against Antony that was designed to smear his reputation. This took the form of “short, sharp slogans written upon coins in the style of archaic Tweets.”

These slogans painted Antony as a womaniser and a drunk, implying he had become Cleopatra’s puppet, having been corrupted by his affair with her. Octavian became Augustus, the first Roman Emperor and “fake news had allowed Octavian to hack the republican system once and for all.”¹

The invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1493 dramatically amplified the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation, and it ultimately delivered the first-large scale news hoax – ‘The Great Moon Hoax’ of 1835. The New York Sun published six articles about the discovery of life on the moon, complete with illustrations of humanoid bat-creatures and bearded blue unicorns.

Conflicts, regime change, and catastrophes then became markers for the dissemination of disinformation. As one-to-many communications developed in the 20th century, especially with the advent of radio and television, satirical news evolved, sometimes being mistaken as the real thing in news consumers’ minds.

Finally, the arrival of the internet in the late 20th century, followed by social media in the 21st century, dramatically multiplied the risks of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and hoaxes. Both errors and fraudulent content now go viral through peer-to-peer distribution (many-to-many communication), while news satire is regularly misunderstood and reshared as straight news by unwitting social media users.

We now inhabit a world with computational propaganda, state-sponsored ‘sock-puppet networks’, troll armies, and technology that can mimic legitimate news websites and seamlessly manipulate audio and video to create synthetic representations of any number of sources. In this environment, where trust becomes polarised around what “news” aligns with their views, many news consumers feel entitled to choose or create their own ‘facts’.

Disinformation

History also teaches us that the forces behind disinformation do not necessarily expect to persuade journalists or broader audiences about the truth of false claims, as much as cast doubt on the status of verifiable information produced by professional news producers. This confusion means that many news consumers feel increasingly entitled to choose or create their own ‘facts’, sometimes aided by politicians seeking to shield themselves from legitimate critique.

Fast forward to 2018 and the proliferation of powerful new technological tools. These, along with the character of social media and messaging platforms that have limited quality control standards for determining what constitutes news, make it easy to counterfeit and mimic legitimate news brands to make frauds look like the real thing. Increasingly, it is also possible to engineer audio and video in ways that go beyond legitimate news editing in order to make it appear that a particular individual said or did something in some place, and to pass this off as an authentic record25, sending it viral in the social communications environment.

Today, social media is fuelled by many kinds of content, ranging from the personal to the political. There are many instances produced overtly or covertly by governments, and/or an industry of public relations companies under contract to political or commercial actors. As a result, countless bloggers, Instagram ‘influencers’ and YouTube stars promote products and politicians without disclosing that they are paid to do so. Covert payments are also made to commentators (often with false identities) who seek to affirm, discredit or intimidate in online fora. In the midst of this, journalism loses ground, and itself becomes a subject not just of fair criticism, but also existential attack.

Now, the danger is the development of an ‘arms race’ of national and international disinformation spread through partisan ‘news’ organisations and social media channels, polluting the information environment for all sides in a way that can come back to haunt the initiators themselves. Where disinformation campaigns have been exposed, the result has been major damage to the actors involved – both the implementing agencies and their political clients (see the recent cases of Bell-Pottinger and Cambridge Analytica).

1. Kaminska, I. (2017). A module in fake news from the info-wars of ancient Rome. Financial Times. Accessed 28/03/18: https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6.