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A technocracy may be defined as an organisational structure that entwines politics and technology, and  emphasises  its proceedings using technical processes (Günzlerand and Lenk, 2015).

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To what extent can media literacy immunise us from being distorted? Where do we draw the line between learning new information and having to question its level of authenticity?

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Wrongful accusations on Bill Gates spreads on online conspiracy channels citing Gates to be the perpetuator of a global pandemic in order to gain complete control over the global health system.

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The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it.

Credit... Connor Willumsen

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

That speech has resurfaced in recent weeks with 25 million new views on YouTube - but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the conspiracy group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world's richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

The wild claims have gained traction with conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and anti-vaccinators such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Mr. Gates has emerged as a vocal counterweight to President Trump on the coronavirus. For weeks, Mr. Gates has appeared on TV, on op-ed pages and in Reddit forums calling for stay-at-home policies, expanded testing and vaccine development. And without naming Mr. Trump, he has criticized the president's policies, including this week's move to cut funding to the World Health Organization.

Misinformation about Mr. Gates is now the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods tracked by Zignal Labs, a media analysis company. The misinformation includes more than 16,000 posts on Facebook this year about Mr. Gates and the virus that were liked and commented on nearly 900,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis. On YouTube, the 10 most popular videos spreading lies about Mr. Gates posted in March and April were viewed almost five million times.

Mr. Gates, who is worth more than $100 billion, has effectively assumed the role occupied by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Democratic donor who has been a villain for the right. That makes Mr. Gates the latest individual - along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading U.S. infectious disease expert - to be ensnared in the flow of right-wing punditry that has denigrated those who appear at odds with Mr. Trump on the virus.

"Bill Gates is easily transformed into a health-related meme and figure because he's so well known," said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics. "He's able to function as kind of an abstract boogeyman."

Especially since Mr. Gates has sharpened his comments about the White House's handling of the coronavirus in recent weeks.

"There's no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus," he wrote in an opinion column in The Washington Post on March 31. "The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of Covid-19."

Mark Suzman, chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Gates's main philanthropic vehicle, said it was "distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives."

Through a representative, Mr. Gates declined to be interviewed.

The conspiracy theories about Mr. Gates may particularly damage what people think about a future coronavirus vaccine, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. She said the narratives "have the potential to kick off coordinated and sophisticated online campaigns that turn people against taking a virus vaccine."

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said they were fighting coronavirus misinformation.

Mr. Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and built it into a software behemoth, has largely devoted his time to philanthropic endeavors since he stepped back from the company in 2008. As of 2018, the Gates Foundation had a $46.8 billion endowment, making it one of the world's largest private charitable organizations.

The foundation has worked to distribute vaccines in developing countries, advocated family planning through greater use of contraceptives and funded the development of genetically modified crops. Those efforts have prompted unfounded accusations that Mr. Gates was hurting the world's poor with unnecessary drugs and harmful crops while trying to suppress the global population.

His disdain for Mr. Trump, whom he has met several times, has also become public. In 2018, footage surfaced of Mr. Gates recounting how Mr. Trump needed help distinguishing H.I.V., which refers to the human immunodeficiency virus and causes AIDS, from HPV, which is the human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection.

"Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between H.I.V. and HPV, so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other," Mr. Gates said to laughter in comments to his foundation.

In January, when the coronavirus began spreading, the Gates Foundation committed $10 million to helping medical workers in China and Africa. In February, Mr. Gates weighed in on the illness, warning in The New England Journal of Medicine that Covid-19 was behaving like a once-a-century pathogen.

In addition to writing the Washington Post op-ed, he called for more and equitable testing in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session last month. This month, Mr. Gates appeared on "The Daily Show" and said his foundation would fund factories for the seven most promising potential vaccines.

On Wednesday, the Gates Foundation said it would commit $250 million - up from an earlier pledge of $100 million - to slow the disease's spread.

By then, falsehoods about Mr. Gates had taken off. The first mention of a baseless conspiracy connecting him to the outbreak was on Jan. 21, according to the Times analysis. That was when a YouTube personality linked to QAnon suggested on Twitter that Mr. Gates had foreknowledge of the pandemic. The tweet was based on a coronavirus-related patent from the Pirbright Institute, a British group that received funding from the Gates Foundation.

The patent was not for Covid-19; it was connected to a potential vaccine for a different coronavirus that affects poultry. But two days later, the conspiracy website Infowars inaccurately said the patent was for "the deadly virus."

The idea spread. From February to April, conspiracy theories involving Mr. Gates and the virus were mentioned 1.2 million times on social media and television broadcasts, according to Zignal Labs. That was 33 percent more often, it said, than the next-largest conspiracy theory: that 5G radio waves cause people to succumb to Covid-19.

Some of the theories tapped into Mr. Gates's acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was convicted of sex trafficking and committed suicide, saying a global elite had banded together to create the coronavirus.

In other theories, internet trolls twisted comments that Mr. Gates had made. In one, trolls said Mr. Gates, who had raised the idea of "digital certificates" to confirm who had the virus, wanted to surveil the population with microchip vaccination implants.

By April, false Gates conspiracy theories peaked at 18,000 mentions a day, Zignal Labs said.

The theories were amplified by people such as Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who campaigns against vaccines as a director of the Children's Health Defense network. On his Instagram page, Mr. Kennedy has said Mr. Gates pushes vaccines to feed his other business interests.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy posted a cartoon of a smiling Mr. Gates with a syringe and a caption: "Your Body, my choice."

Mr. Kennedy, whose Instagram followers have doubled to more than 285,000 since March, said in an interview that he was telling the truth about the "terrible damage" that Mr. Gates had inflicted on the world with vaccines.

In an April 7 tweet, Ms. Ingraham, a Fox News host, shared a conspiracy theory about nefarious motives behind Mr. Gates's call to track and identify who had received a Covid-19 vaccine. "Digitally tracking Americans' every move has been a dream of the globalists for years," she wrote.

Ms. Ingraham did not respond to a request for comment.

And Roger J. Stone Jr., the Trump confidant who was sentenced this year to 40 months in prison for felonies related to the 2016 Trump campaign, said in a radio interview this week reported by The New York Post that whether Mr. Gates "played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate."

On Wednesday, after Mr. Gates said pulling funding to the World Health Organization was ill advised, the online reaction was swift. (The Gates Foundation funds the organization.)

One anti-vaccinator posted a poster of the movie "Kill Bill" on Instagram that read "Kill Bill Gates" and called for people to flood the comments on Mr. Gates's Instagram account.

That same day, when Mr. Gates posted his thanks to health care workers, it received over 14,000 comments. One read: "This virus is a big, big lie."

Michael H. Keller contributed reporting. Ben Decker contributed research.

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Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target

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The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it. In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

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Online conspiracy theories have been trying to link the novel coronavirus pandemic to the rollout of 5G technology recently. Despite there being no scientific links, multiple 5G towers have been set on fire in the UK. Theories shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and Instagram are being widely spread, leading the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to very clearly state: "5G technology does NOT cause coronavirus."

None of the conspiracy theories that try to link 5G and the coronavirus even make sense. The virus is spreading in countries without access to 5G, the frequencies from 5G can't harm your body, and COVID-19 is caused by a contagious virus that is in no way related to electromagnetic waves. Even the general correlation between 5G and COVID-19 doesn't stand up to scrutiny: they're both global phenomena happening at roughly the same time, but as soon as you look at specific countries, the correlation falls apart.

Professor Stephen Powis, a medical director for NHS England in the UK, called the links between 5G and the coronavirus "outrageous" and "absolute and utter rubbish." The UK government has also branded the claims "dangerous nonsense" and labeled conspiracy theories "crackpot."

Some of these theories suggest that the novel coronavirus can be transmitted through 5G or that 5G suppresses the immune system. Both are untrue. To understand why 5G and the virus aren't linked, you have to understand why 5G radio waves aren't powerful enough to damage the cells in your body alone or transmit a virus. Much like 4G or 3G before it, the radio waves used in 5G are low frequency and non-ionizing radiation. These are on the opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum to ionizing radiation sources like X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet rays.

These 5G radio waves simply aren't strong enough to heat your body and weaken your immune system. "The idea that 5G lowers your immune system doesn't stand up to scrutiny," explains Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, in a recent interview with the BBC.

Likewise, radio waves and viruses aren't transmitted in the same way. The novel coronavirus spreads from one person to another, typically through tiny droplets of saliva produced when a sick person coughs, sneezes, or breathes. The only types of viruses you can transmit via radio waves are ones that affect computers, not humans.

Other facts that really bring this 5G conspiracy theory crashing back to the realms of reality is that the pandemic has hit counties like Iran, India, and Japan where 5G isn't even in use yet. Iran has only just reportedly finalized its regulations on 5G, with plans to roll out the technology later this year. Iran currently has more than 66,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Japan only just started rolling out 5G services in the past week, and India's 5G launch may even be delayed because of the pandemic. At the same time, South Korea has had 5G towers in place for a year now, and it only began seeing COVID-19 cases after the Wuhan outbreak.

The broader 5G fears have largely been addressed by regulators, scientists, and independent groups. While some implementations of 5G use millimeter-wave (mmWave) band transmissions, a higher frequency of radio waves than 4G or 3G, regulators in the UK have recorded 5G electromagnetic radiation levels well below international guidelines. The International Commission on Non‐Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) also found no evidence suggesting 5G poses a risk to human health.

The ICNIRP updated its guidelines last month, following a seven-year study. "5G technologies will not be able to cause harm when these new guidelines are adhered to," said ICNIRP chair Eric van Rongen.

A lot of these coronavirus 5G conspiracy theories have originated from active disinformation campaigns. A New York Times report from last year warned that Russian campaigns were actively exploiting 5G health fears. RT America, a Russian government-funded TV network, aired a report more than a year ago in which an RT reporter claimed 5G "might kill you."

A European Union task force has also been tracking many of the disinformation campaigns, warning that "some state and state-backed actors seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests."

Many of the recent fringe theories appear to have originated from a Belgian newspaper that published a scientifically baseless claim that "5G is life-threatening" and tried to link the origins of the pandemic to the rollout of 5G technology in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus originated. The general practitioner quoted in the article admitted, "I have not done a fact check," but that didn't stop conspiracy theorists from immediately spreading it far and wide on English-speaking Facebook pages.

After the spate of cell tower attacks, UK mobile operators are calling on members of the public not to spread the false claims. "Please help us to make this stop," the top four UK mobile operators pleaded in a joint statement earlier this week. "If you witness abuse of our key workers please report it. If you see misinformation, please call it out."

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Why the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories don't make sense

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A range of 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories have been spreading on the internet recently, leading some to set 5G towers on fire in the UK. None of the theories make sense, especially when you consider that the only types of viruses you can transmit via radio waves are ones that affect computers, not humans.

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facebook has a coronavirus problem. it's whatsapp. - cnn

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Hadas Gold and Donie O'Sullivan, CNN Business

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Facebook has a coronavirus problem. It's WhatsApp.

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Governments and medical officials are scrambling to provide the public with accurate and timely information about the novel coronavirus. But those efforts are being undermined by the spread of medical misinformation and fake cures on one of the world's most popular messaging platforms.

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Scattered amid a relentless barrage of news about COVID-19 case surges, quarantine orders, and medical supply shortages on Twitter this week, some happy stories softened the blows: Swans had returned to deserted Venetian canals. Dolphins too. And a group of elephants had sauntered through a village in Yunnan, China, gotten drunk off corn wine, and passed out in a tea garden.

These reports of wildlife triumphs in countries hard-hit by the novel coronavirus got hundreds of thousands of retweets. They went viral on Instagram and Tik Tok. They made news headlines. If there's a silver lining of the pandemic, people said, this was it-animals were bouncing back, running free in a humanless world.

But it wasn't real.

The swans in the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano, a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area, where the photos were taken. The " Venetian" dolphins were filmed at a port in Sardinia, in the Mediterranean Sea, hundreds of miles away. No one has figured out where the drunken elephant photos came from, but a Chinese news report debunked the viral posts: While elephants did recently come through a village in Yunnan Province, China, their presence isn't out of the norm, they aren't the elephants in the viral photos, and they didn't get drunk and pass out in a tea field.

The phenomenon highlights how quickly eye-popping, too-good-to-be-true rumours can spread in times of crisis. People are compelled to share posts that make them emotional. When we're feeling stressed, joyous animal footage can be an irresistible salve. The spread of social phenomena is so powerful, 2016 research shows, that it can follow same models that trace the contagion of epidemics.

When untruths go viral

Kaveri Ganapathy Ahuja's controversial tweet about the swans that "returned" to Venice canals has hit a million likes.

"Here's an unexpected side effect of the pandemic," her tweet reads. "The water flowing through the canals of Venice is clear for the first time in forever. The fish are visible, the swans returned."

Ahuja, who lives in New Delhi, India, says she saw some photos on social media and decided to put them together in a tweet, unaware that the swans were already regulars in Burano before the coronavirus tore across Italy.

"The tweet was just about sharing something that brought me joy in these gloomy times," she says. She never expected it to go viral, or to cause any harm. "I wish there was an edit option on Twitter just for moments like this," Ahuja says.

Nonetheless, she hasn't deleted the tweet and doesn't plan to, arguing that it's still relevant because waters in Venice are clearer than usual-a result of decreased boat activity-and that's what matters, she says. She's tweeted about the "unprecedented" number of likes and retweets she's received on the tweet. "It's a personal record for me, and I would not like to delete it," she says.

Swans are regular visitors to the canals of Burano.

Photograph by Danita Delimont, Alamy

The pull of posting

Paulo Ordoveza is a web developer and image verification expert who runs the Twitter account @picpedant, where he debunks fake viral posts-and calls out the fakers. He sees firsthand the "greed for virality" that may drive the impulse to propagate misinformation. It's "overdosing on the euphoria that comes from seeing those like and retweet numbers rise into the thousands," he says.

Getting a lot of likes and comments "gives us an immediate social reward," says Erin Vogel, a social psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. In other words, they make us feel good. Studies have found that posting to social media gives one's self-esteem a temporary boost.

The need to seek out things that make us feel good may be exacerbated right now, as people try to come to grips with a pandemic, a collapsing economy, and sudden isolation. "In times when we're all really lonely, it's tempting to hold onto that feeling, especially if we're posting something that gives people a lot of hope," says Vogel. The idea that animals and nature could actually flourish during this crisis "could help give us a sense of meaning and purpose-that we went through this for a reason," she says.

It was the running theme of many of the viral tweets. "Nature just hit the reset button on us," read a tweet celebrating the dolphins supposedly swimming in Venetian canals.

"I think people really want to believe in the power of nature to recover," says Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. "People hope that, no matter what we've done, nature is powerful enough to rise above it." ( Read about how this incredible-and real-shark photo went viral.)

About half of Americans say they've been exposed to made-up news or information related to coronavirus, according to a new Pew Research Centre survey. While a fake happy news story about dolphins in a canal may not be all that problematic, relatively speaking, there can still be harm in spreading false hope in times of crisis.

These fake feel-good stories, Vogel says, can make people even more distrustful at a time when everyone already feels vulnerable. Finding out good news isn't real "can be even more demoralising than not hearing it at all."

Spots of hope on social media are likely to play a key role in keeping spirits up in the weeks and months ahead, as people self-quarantine in their homes and connect with each other through screens. "I'd encourage people to share positive things," says Vogel. "But it doesn't have to be anything dramatic. It just has to be true."

Editor's note: Want to verify photos online? TinEye and Google offer reverse image searches, which allow you to trace a photo's digital footprint. Bellingcat, which does open-sourced fact-checking investigations into human rights abuses and in war zones, also has a thorough guide. If a post seems too good to be true, check social media to see if anyone else has already debunked it. This detailed thread, from Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, pinpoints the swan photo to Burano.

And if you're looking for some true good-news and wonder-inducing stories, check out this story aboutthe successful reintroduction of fishers in Washington State, this story about a pink manta ray, or these amazing photos from inside a honeybee colony.

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Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life

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Scattered amid a relentless barrage of news about COVID-19 case surges, quarantine orders, and medical supply shortages on Twitter this week, some happy stories softened the blows: Swans had returned to deserted Venetian canals. Dolphins too. And a group of elephants had sauntered through a village in Yunnan, China, gotten drunk off corn wine, and passed out in a tea garden.

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Zoom has become THE platform for people to connect with, from businesses to casual chats among friends. This sudden appeal is peculiar however, the considering the immense privacy breaches it permeates.

"Rolling out technology at scale is hard, but even harder is unrolling out technology."

(Uploaded 19/04)

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How E-Commerce is benefitting the Potato sellers of Gangwon in South Korea in a period of peak social distancing.

(Media dubbing this the PTS effect (à la BTS) to discuss the surge in demand for potatoes)

(Uploaded 22/03 09:05)

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The Pandemic is witnessing a surprising mix of platforms aiding & surprising sales by independent sellers.

(Uploaded 22/03 09:00)

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He Has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them (Published 2020)

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Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks.

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Addressing pandemics in the digital age has allowed for govt bodies to facilitate high levels of tech-enabled social control. While intended as a means to attain relevant information, these efforts may be more ambiguous, especially when used in a period requiring rapid action and decision-making.

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BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested.

After around 12 days, he was bored and went out early. This time, not only did the police contact him, so did his boss. He had been spotted near Hangzhou's West Lake by a camera with facial recognition technology, and the authorities had alerted his company as a warning.

"I was a bit shocked by the ability and efficiency of the mass surveillance network. They can basically trace our movements with the AI technology and big data at any time and any place," said the man, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions.

Chinese have long been aware that they are tracked by the world's most sophisticated system of electronic surveillance. The coronavirus emergency has brought some of that technology out of the shadows, providing the authorities with a justification for sweeping methods of high tech social control.

Artificial intelligence and security camera companies boast that their systems can scan the streets for people with even low-grade fevers, recognize their faces even if they are wearing masks and report them to the authorities.

If a coronavirus patient boards a train, the railway's "real name" system can provide a list of people sitting nearby.

Mobile phone apps can tell users if they have been on a flight or a train with a known coronavirus carrier, and maps can show them locations of buildings where infected patients live.

Although there has been some anonymous grumbling on social media, for now Chinese citizens seem to be accepting the extra intrusion, or even embracing it, as a means to combat the health emergency.

"In the circumstances, individuals are likely to consider this to be reasonable even if they are not specifically informed about it," said Carolyn Bigg, partner at law firm DLA Piper in Hong Kong.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Telecoms companies have long quietly tracked the movements of their users. China Mobile promoted this as a service this week, sending text messages to Beijing residents telling them they can check where they have been over the past 30 days. It did not explain why users might need this, but it could be useful if they are questioned by the authorities or their employers about their travel.

"In the era of big data and internet, the flow of each person can be clearly seen. So we are different from the SARS time now," epidemiologist Li Lanjuan said in an interview with China's state broadcaster CCTV last week, comparing the outbreak to a virus that killed 800 people in 2003.

"With such new technologies, we should make full use of them to find the source of infection and contain the source of infection."

The industry ministry sent a notice to China's AI companies and research institutes this week calling on them to help fight the outbreak. Companies have responded with a flurry of announcements touting the capabilities of their technology.

Facial recognition firm Megvii said on Tuesday it had developed a new way to spot and identify people with fevers, with support from the industry and science ministries. Its new "AI temperature measurement system", which detects temperature with thermal cameras and uses body and facial data to identify individuals, is already being tested in a Beijing district.

SenseTime, another leading AI firm, said it has built a similar system to be used at building entrances, which can identify people wearing masks, overcoming a weakness of earlier technology. Surveillance camera firm Zhejiang Dahua says it can detect fevers with infrared cameras to an accuracy within 0.3ºC.

In an interview with state news agency Xinhua, Zhu Jiansheng of the China Academy of Railway Sciences explained how technology can help the authorities find people who might be exposed to a confirmed or suspected coronavirus case on a train.

"We will retrieve relevant information about the passenger, including the train number, carriage number and information on passengers who were close to the person, such as people sitting three rows of seats before and after the person," he said.

"We will extract the information and then provide it to relevant epidemic prevention departments."

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Coronavirus brings China's surveillance state out of the shadows

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When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested.

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The Chinese Govt has released a smartphone app that enables users to stay informed if they are in proximity to someone infected by the contagious coronavirus. This may increase accessibility, and lessen the burden of hospitals as they may be able to respond more actively to those that need help. However, this also brings concerns such as mass data gathering, or increasing the stigmatisation of even the potentially infected.

(uploaded 18/02)

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The Chinese government app that lets people check whether they've been in proximity to somebody with coronavirus could backfire by creating a false sense of security or further stigmatizing sufferers, according to experts.

The app was launched this week, and is aimed at limiting the spread of a disease that has so far infected nearly 50,000 people and killed more than 1,300. But while most criticism has focused on the fact that China's surveillance state makes the technology possible, some infectious disease specialists say that it's another example of technology being used without enough attention to social concerns.

Users sign up for the "close contact detector" app by registering using their phone number, name, and ID, and then scanning a QR code on their smartphones. The app will tell them whether they've been in proximity to someone who has been infected-which can mean family members or coworkers, as well as strangers on public transit. If a user is found to have been in close contact, and therefore could be sick or contagious themselves, the app recommends self-quarantine and an alert to local health officials. (Each person can also check the status of three other people.) It's unclear exactly how the app determines close contact, although state-run newspaper Xinhua suggests that it uses data from national transport and health authorities.

But because tests are never 100% accurate, especially for new diseases, false negatives and false positives are always an issue, says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Especially in the case of coronavirus (now called COVID-19), many factors-from the fact that Chinese officials are not counting mild cases, which can still be contagious, to the many people turned away from hospitals-suggest that infection may be more widespread than official numbers suggest. There have already been many reports of false negatives.

As a result, "not everyone who could be capable of exposing you to the disease is actually captured in the database," Schoch-Spana says. This, she claims, could lead to a false appearance of safety that might end up with people letting down their guard. Plus, she says, it's not just contact that matters, but how vulnerable someone is. The app doesn't seem to account for that.

Being marked as potentially contagious (whether accurately or not) could have a big effect, too, because of the social reaction to disease in China, says Christos Lynteris, an anthropologist and epidemic expert who has done research in the country. Though all infectious disease creates an element of a moral panic, the stigma in China is also connected with the concept of "face," which is similar to honor and moral standing. The stigma of associating with a contagious person is intense, and stigma is contagious in China in a way that's not quite the case in the West. That means the app is likely to create a situation where people preemptively avoid others to avoid being implicated in a "loss of face chain-reaction," Lynteris says. While this isolation could actually help prevent coronavirus from spreading, it's a socially punishing way to do so. Lynteris has even considered whether this is part of the app's design: "It's a strange thing which makes me think, is stigmatization simply a by-product-or is it what the application relies upon in the first place?"

The close-contact app is fundamentally a data-gathering enterprise. If someone is marked as possibly contagious, the government has that person's information down to their ID number. Whether that's a good thing depends, in part, on the trust someone has in Chinese institutions.

Residents of Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak, are already treated as pariahs in China itself. The authorities have hunted people from the city, encouraging citizens to inform on each other and offering bounties, with prejudice becoming so acute that even government officials called for people to show more understanding. An app that holds such detailed information, combined with what Lynteris calls the long history of public shaming in China-such as " struggle sessions " that publicly humiliate a target, or meetings in which citizens accuse each other of wrongdoing-could turn negative quickly. With social media now acting as China's town square, there is no more effective place to do this, he explains. Though the app is not public, he says, it reasonable to expect that the information may be gleaned to identify or expose people who are "hiding" contact histories that they may be unaware of.

However, Schoch-Spana points out that this feature also has the potential to be very helpful. "Health departments all across the globe are under-resourced, and particularly during crisis situations," she says. If the government is able to use a communications tool to reach those who are possibly infected, it would help them reach those who need help and take some burden off the hospitals. There are also steps the government could take to avoid downsides, she says. This could include making sure the anonymity of the people in the database and using the app is protected; refusing to single out specific neighborhoods or spaces as places of contagion; and developing a companion service that could teach about risk of exposure or help people organize volunteer efforts.

Ultimately, although this app may not have been possible in other countries, it is evidence of the widespread desire to use information to "get a big-data picture of what an epidemic is doing," says Darryl Stellmach, an anthropologist and epidemic expert who works with Doctors Without Borders. For example, researchers from Google tried to forecast the flu using people's searches. (The result, Google Flu Trends, overestimated the prevalence of flu in two seasons by over 50%.) China's app seems like a dream for epidemic responders-something that is comforting for people who want to think that experts using technology can manage the situation. "But epidemics at their heart are a social phenomenon, and we can't purely use technocratic means to address them," he says.

Tools like surveillance and epidemic maps need to be combined with a view of how people react under pressure, Stellmach says: "I'm very hesitant about technological solutions that are rapidly deployed, in settings where there's a great pressure to act decisively and to be seen to act decisively."

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China's coronavirus app could have unintended consequences

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The Chinese government app that lets people check whether they've been in proximity to somebody with coronavirus could backfire by creating a false sense of security or further stigmatizing sufferers, according to experts. The app was launched this week, and is aimed at limiting the spread of a disease that has so far infected nearly 50,000 people and killed more than 1,300.

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Getty Images / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / Contributor

What happens on Facebook matters. The social network connects billions of users around the world, and is for many of them their principal way of receiving news and engaging with their community. When Facebook's systems are exploited by Russia to interfere in elections, by extremists to live-stream their atrocities, or by armed gangs to carry out attacks on their rivals, we are right to ask what more could have been done to prevent this.

As an advertising business which gathers huge amounts of data about everything its users do on Facebook we are right to challenge the company about why more can't be done to prevent people sharing images of child abuse, videos that seek to recruit people into terror organisations, or content that might encourage people to self-harm.

Just two years ago, the Cambridge Analytica scandal lead to widespread concern about how users' personal Facebook data could end up in the hands of a company whose chief executive boasted in an undercover film about the effectiveness of hiring Ukrainian sex workers to entrap politicians.

At the time, Facebook said it was carrying out an audit into other developers who might also have acquired data in breach of the company's rules and without users' informed consent. We have never seen any detailed reporting on the progress of this important investigation.

All these issues merely scratch the surface of the general level of concern about the standards and ethics of companies such as Facebook, and provide the background to Mark Zuckerberg's visit to Europe this week.

Zuckerberg - who has on multiple occasions avoided open scrutiny by parliaments, instead favouring conversations with policy officials behind closed doors - has come to Europe claiming to be the advocate of greater regulation for big tech companies. It will have surprised no-one that he doesn't believe that any of these new rules need apply to Facebook.

In his article in the Financial Times on February 16, Zuckerberg called for "more oversight and accountability" on decisions around content moderation on social media. However, in Facebook's case this accountability would be guaranteed by a new "independent" Oversight Board, to be launched in the summer. This Board is being recruited by Facebook, and its remit is limited to considering whether the company has implemented its own policies correctly.

As Article 7 of the Oversight Board's charter makes clear: "The board will not purport to enforce local law" when reviewing Facebook's content-moderation decisions. What's more, the Oversight Board will not be allowed to moderate on "content on WhatsApp, Messenger, [or] Instagram Direct". This happens as Facebook is about to introduce end-to-end encryption to its messaging tools, in so doing further limiting any responsibility it might have to moderate them. This policy has been described by chief constable Simon Bailey, the UK National Police Chiefs' Council lead for child protection, as one that "will knowingly put the safety of children at risk - ignoring the warnings of police, charities and experts across the world."

From a policy paper published by Facebook to coincide with Zuckerberg's trip to Europe, entitled " Charting a way forward: online content regulation ", it's even clearer that the direction he wants to take us on is a road to nowhere. This paper argues against establishing liability on social media companies for failing to remove illegal and harmful content. It also warns against creating mandatory standards for content removal, and tougher enforcement of citizens data rights. Instead it proposes that there should be "periodic public reporting of enforcement data", based of course on self-declaration by the company, without any independent external audit.

Facebook's paper calls for global standards on internet regulation knowing of course that reaching a consensus between the USA, China and Europe on these issues will be impossible. Another clear tactic for trying to kick all of this into the long grass.

Facebook's basic pitch on regulation is that social media companies should be required to have "systems in place" to deal with illegal and harmful content, but that these policies should be written and administered by them, the social media companies. In Zuckerberg's ideal world, the only role for government regulation would be to ask Facebook about the existence of these policies without the power to fully audit them. If that's what Zuckerberg has come to sell, he might as well have stayed in California.

At the heart of Facebook's defence against the threat of regulation is the protection of freedom of speech. Yet, in his lecture at Georgetown University last year, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that "even American tradition recognises that some speech infringes on others' rights." Facebook's preferred method for dealing with content that might cause harm is to downgrade its prevalence, making it harder to find rather than removing it. This line of action seems to imply that people largely see new content because they search for it.

It's an approach that ignores the impact of co-ordinated networks of Facebook groups with millions of users pushing content through the system, or the undercover economy of Facebook Page administrators promoting other people's content at lower fees than the company itself charges through its advertising tools. Also, I don't believe that freedom of speech is the same as freedom of reach. Someone might have the right to share their opinions, but they shouldn't have the automatic right to hijack social media in order to broadcast them to millions of people, multiple times a day at the click of a button.

These issues require a more proactive response from Facebook, and it shouldn't just be left to them. It should be for governments to establish clear legal liabilities for social media companies to act against harmful and illegal content when it is being curated through their systems, by their own algorithms.

These new regulations need to be overseen by truly independent regulators with legal powers to inspect and audit the companies and ensure they are complying effectively. The UK government has set out its approach to this in the Online Harms White Paper, and other countries are now looking at similar measures. Once again, Facebook's response has been to offer too little too late.
Damian Collins is the MP for Folkestone & Hythe, and the former chair of the Commons Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, where he oversaw the "Fake News" inquiry
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Facebook must not be allowed to dictate how it gets regulated

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What happens on Facebook matters. The social network connects billions of users around the world, and is for many of them their principal way of receiving news and engaging with their community.

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Transparent Integration of Technology to Fight Pandemic

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Transparent Integration of Technology to Fight Pandemic

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Taiwan is only 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to be hard hit by the coronavirus, due to its proximity and the number of flights between the island nation and its massive neighbor to the west.

Yet it has so far managed to prevent the coronavirus from heavily impacting its 23 million citizens, despite hundreds of thousands of them working and residing in China.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map, as of Tuesday there were only 42 cases and one death in Taiwan, far behind China, with more than 80,000 cases and more than 2,900 deaths. The country also lags far behind its other Asian neighbors and ranks 17 th in the world for the number of global cases. As of this writing, South Korea was second, with 5,186 cases; followed by Iran with 2,336 and Italy with 2,036 people infected with the virus.

The United States currently stands at 107 known cases and six deaths.

The viral outbreak in China occurred just before the Lunar New Year, during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays.

So what steps did Taiwan take to protect its people? And could those steps be replicated here at home?

Stanford Health Policy's Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine who also has a PhD in policy analysis, credits his native Taiwan with using new technology and a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak.

"The Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) after SARS and it's become part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak responses and acts as the operational command point for direct communications," said Wang, a pediatrician and the director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford. The NHCC also established the Central Epidemic Command Center, which was activated in early January.

"And Taiwan rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health," Wang said. "The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn't enough."

Wang outlines the measures Taiwan took in the last six weeks in an article published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan, and the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic, may be instructive for other countries," Wang and his co-authors wrote.

Within the last five weeks, Wang said, the Taiwan epidemic command center rapidly implemented those 124 action items, including border control from the air and sea, case identification using new data and technology, quarantine of suspicious cases, educating the public while fighting misinformation, negotiating with other countries - and formulating policies for schools and businesses to follow.

The authors note that Taiwan integrated its national health insurance database with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics. That allowed them case identification by generating real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms.

Taipei also used Quick Response (QR) code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers' infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the last 14 days. People who had not traveled to high-risk areas were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS for faster immigration clearance; those who had traveled to high-risk areas were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phones to ensure that they stayed home during the incubation period.

The country also instituted a toll-free hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms in themselves or others. As the disease progressed, the government called on major cities to establish their own hotlines so that the main hotline would not become jammed.

Some might say that because Taiwan is such a small country - about 19 times smaller than Texas - it is easier to mobilize during emergencies. Yet Taiwan is particularly challenged by its proximity to China and the fact that 850,000 of its citizens reside on the mainland; another 400,000 work there. Taiwan had 2.71 million visitors from China last year.

So when the WHO was notified on Dec. 31, 2019, of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane.

As early as Jan. 5, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry. Suspected cases were screened for 26 viruses, including SARS and MERS. Passengers displaying symptoms were quarantined at home and assessed whether medical attention at a hospital was necessary.

One of Wang's co-authors, Robert H. Brook, M.D., ScD., of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Washington could learn a great deal from Taiwan's so-far successful management of the virus.

"In Taiwan, diverse political parties were willing to work together to produce an immediate response to the danger," said Brook, also of the nonprofit RAND Corporation. "Transparency was critical and frequent communication to the public from a trusted official was paramount to reducing public panic."

The other co-author of their study is Chun Y. Ng, MBA, MPH, of The New School for Leadership in Health Care, Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center, Taipei, Taiwan.

Brook said Taiwan got out ahead of the epidemic by setting up a physical command center to facilitate rapid communications. The command center set the price of masks and used government funds and military personnel to increase mask production. By Jan. 20, the Taiwan CDC announced that it had a stockpile of 44 million surgical masks, 1.9 million N95 masks and 1,100 negative pressure isolation rooms.

"In a country as complex as the United States," Brook said, "there needs to be a sharing of intelligence on a real-time basis among states and the federal government so that action is not delayed by going through formal channels."
Please contact Beth Duff-Brown for media requests.

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How Taiwan Used Big Data, Transparency and a Central Command to Protect Its People from Coronavirus

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Taiwan is only 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to be hard hit by the coronavirus, due to its proximity and the number of flights between the island nation and its massive neighbor to the west.

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This article documents the process of how linking a few Facebook pages can quickly snowball into witnessing an "alternate information ecosystem"  through micro targeting and lack of fact checking. Political leaders do not necessarily eliminate other voices, but drown them out with their own on online platforms. This novel form of censorship questions the benefits of social media's democratising nature.

(uploaded 25/02 21:17)

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How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty

Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook's algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like "In Trump We Trust." I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
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The president's reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans' understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president's conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video-served up by the Trump campaign-that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: "That's right, the whistleblower's own lawyer said, 'The coup has started ...' " Swipe. "Democrats are doing Putin's bidding ..." Swipe. "The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing ..." Swipe. "Only one man can stop this chaos ..." Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I'd assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn't that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself-about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else-felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes-jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power.
Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads?
Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year's contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view-one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

THE DEATH STAR

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected-with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower- his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as "the Death Star."

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump's 2016 campaign, Parscale didn't become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office-and his efforts will shape this year's election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple "farm boy from Kansas" (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an "Ivy League" school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds-claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his "last $500" (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice-including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. "I just made up a price," he later told The Washington Post. "I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything." The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures-a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale-a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience-was running the Republican front-runner's digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump's orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious-with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives-but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate's. "Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of," says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending-none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump's inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.
Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it
The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale's most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising-amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton's criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism-Parscale's team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. "He was a get-shit-done type of person," says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. "He was probably better at managing up," Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump's digital ignorance to flatter him. "Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn't need to listen to the polls, because he'd crunched his data and they were going to win by six points," one former campaign staffer told me. "I was like, 'Come on, man, don't bullshit a bullshitter.' " But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale's political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform's new tools. "Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who'd been around the block a few times might say, 'Oh, that will never work,' Brad's predisposition was to say, 'Yeah, let's try it.' " From June to November, Trump's campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton's ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump " got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser."

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump's surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a "genius" and the campaign's "secret weapon," and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president's 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.
Read: What Facebook did to American democracy
Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. "When I give a speech, I tell it like a story," he said. "My story is my story."

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls "P." In college, P had studied the "Little Albert experiment," in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough-about 100,000 members-he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. ( Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P's experiment was one plank in a larger "disinformation architecture"-which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers-that experts say aided Duterte's rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to "an invisible radiation" that takes effect while "the population doesn't even feel it is being acted upon.") But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.
Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality
In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology- muddy the waters; alternative facts -but they're building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign's use of micro-targeting-the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn't invent this practice-Barack Obama's campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton's followed suit. But Trump's effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump's team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, "Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators." An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of " three major voter suppression operations underway." (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources-without users' consent-Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed "psychographic profiles" for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: "Did you feel like you had to say that?"

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that "with the right kind of nudges," people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. "Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that," Wylie said. "We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States."

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual "honey traps" on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its "psychographic" targeting really had. But Wylie-who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster-said the firm's work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

"What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?" he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year's election. "There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do ... and make it much more sophisticated." These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched-and publicly accessible- "library" where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

Read: The age of reverse censorship
The campaign doesn't run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations-adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the "Donate" buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they're most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful-and Trump's advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of "illegal aliens"- a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use -and the corruption of the "swamp."

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters' phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new "peer to peer" texting apps-including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser- a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking "Send" one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren't required to disclose who's behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump's reelection strategy. The medium's ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign's texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas ("They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let's CRUSH our End of Month Goal"). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear-and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee's Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates' conservative credentials. The texts-written in a conversational style, as if they'd been sent from a friend-were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

WAR ON THE PRESS

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president's son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter's credibility.

I wasn't sure what to make of this gloating-people in Trump's circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger's "history of intense Trump hatred." The story was based on a series of Instagram posts-all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider -in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a "raging lib." Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were "not appropriate." Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, "was bizarre and unsettling."

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. ( The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it's been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years' worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair-or politically damaging-to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president's eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up-a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views-Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting-but the effort has yielded fruit.

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they're planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. "This is innovative shit," said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. "They're appropriating call-out culture."

What's notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining-with some merit-about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today's most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. "Journalistic integrity is dead," Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. "There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information."

It's a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content-no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump's assault on the press, and the more "enemies of the people" his allies can take out along the way, the better. " A culture war is a war," Steve Bannon told the Times last year. "There are casualties in war."

This attitude has permeated the president's base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media-while 91 percent turn to the president for "accurate information." This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. "Remember," he told a crowd in 2018, " what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year's election. Nor is that his goal. "It's our job to sell our narrative louder than the media," Lanza said. "They're clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we're never going to be in concert. So the war continues."

From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks
Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train "swarms of surrogates" to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. "We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers," Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. "So we're not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day."

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you'll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas-which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm-instead of paying the sites directly-candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don't fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky's gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had "just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots" in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he'd misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting "irregularities." When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse- posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: "I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.")

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky's election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America -a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren't new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Mishko

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created "sock puppet" accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. "It's almost as if there's a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West," he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, "I don't think [they] work." He may be right-it's unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump's reelection prospects. Regardless of where they're coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a "hall of mirrors." He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O'Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn't know who was behind the efforts targeting O'Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. "But you can't watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone's fucking with something," he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden's campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate's legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary-opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War-and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

As the president's reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama's special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two "false flag" operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate's account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed "Dry Alabama," was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he is unaware of the Russian bot effortand does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. "If you don't do it, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back," Osborne said. "You have a moral imperative to do this-to do whatever it takes."

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. "It's just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters," Flaherty told me. "I know there's this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they're like, 'Lie!' " Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. "I don't think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump," Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. "They can stick to things that are true."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president's campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan's plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative-and controversial-measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning "hometown news" stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they're paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the "super-predator" ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were "fair game" because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote -a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking-but said she would pursue any strategy that was "in the bounds of the law."

"We are in a radically disruptive moment right now," McGowan told me. "We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly ... I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him."

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and "deepfakes" (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party's values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.
From May 2018: The era of fake video begins
Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year's presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news-an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. "It's not going to solve the whole problem," he told me, "but it's going to help with volume."

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you're being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you're too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

POWERS OF INCUMBENCY

If there's one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it's that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility-but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn't want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren't supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans-inside the organization or out-hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "He knows he has the confidence of the family," one former colleague told me, "which gives him more swagger." When the U.K.'s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale's spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. "The president is an excellent businessman," he told the tabloid, "and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family."

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale's standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump's attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale's digital expertise, he doesn't have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump's message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? "People start to ask the question-you're building this apparatus, and that's great, but what's the overarching narrative?" said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn't have in 2016-the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he's willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming "invasion" and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe-but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the "crisis" having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?
Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news
It doesn't require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they're injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven't even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal-the one in which Joe Biden is the villain-and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to "give illegal aliens the right to vote." At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that "the governor of Virginia executed a baby"-prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, "Murderer!"

This incendiary fabrication didn't seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case-that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally "executed a baby."

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor's abortion comments to back up Trump's smear.

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After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal- if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president's accomplishments, she didn't care if he "fabricates a little bit." A man responded to my questions about Trump's dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media "ought to try telling the truth once in a while." Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. "He tells you what you want to hear," Willnow said. "And I don't know if it's true or not-but it sounds good, so fuck it."

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers "a mixture of gullibility and cynicism." When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they'd known all along-and would then "admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to "believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true."
This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline "The 2020 Disinformation War."
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election's legacy will be clear-not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

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The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President

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How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign.

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United against the coronavirus, social media companies have been actively incorporating policies and alterations to their platforms for mitigating the spread of misinformation.  Despite this, the proliferation of misinformation still grows stronger, and surges the panic in content consumers, who due to medical and fatal element of this pandemic,  believe information and conspiracies that may take a few days to be debunked.

(Updated: 09/03 21:11)

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Secret labs. Magic cures. Government plots. Despite efforts by social media companies to stop it, false information about the coronavirus is proliferating around the world.

A demonstration of hand sanitizer at a readiness training session for the coronavirus at a hospital in California last week. Credit... Alex Welsh for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO - First, there were conspiratorial whispers on social media that the coronavirus had been cooked up in a secret government lab in China. Then there were bogus medicines: gels, liquids and powders that immunized against the virus.

And then there were the false claims about governments and celebrities and racial unrest. Taiwan was covering up virus deaths, and the illness was spiraling out of control. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who now runs a philanthropic organization, was behind the spread of the virus. Italians were marching in the streets, accusing Chinese people of bringing the illness to their country. None of it was true.

As the coronavirus has spread across the world, so too has misinformation about it, despite an aggressive effort by social media companies to prevent its dissemination. Facebook, Google and Twitter said they were removing misinformation about the coronavirus as fast as they could find it, and were working with the World Health Organization and other government organizations to ensure that people got accurate information.

But a search by The New York Times found dozens of videos, photographs and written posts on each of the social media platforms that appeared to have slipped through the cracks. The posts were not limited to English. Many were originally in languages ranging from Hindi and Urdu to Hebrew and Farsi, reflecting the trajectory of the virus as it has traveled around the world.

Security researchers have even found that hackers were setting up threadbare websites that claimed to have information about the coronavirus. The sites were actually digital traps, aimed at stealing personal data or breaking into the devices of people who landed on them.

The spread of false and malicious content about the coronavirus has been a stark reminder of the uphill battle fought by researchers and internet companies. Even when the companies are determined to protect the truth, they are often outgunned and outwitted by the internet's liars and thieves.

There is so much inaccurate information about the virus, the W.H.O. has said it was confronting a " infodemic."

"I see misinformation about the coronavirus everywhere. Some people are panicking, and looking to magical cures, and other people are spreading conspiracies," said Austin Chiang, a gastroenterologist at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

In Taiwan, virus-related misinformation on social media has fed concerns that China might be using the crisis to undermine the government of the self-ruling island.

In recent weeks, there have been posts on Facebook and other sites claiming that Taiwan has concealed large numbers of coronavirus infections. There have been fake but official-looking documents promising giveaways of face masks and vaccines. A screen capture from a television news broadcast was doctored to say that President Tsai Ing-wen had contracted the disease and was in quarantine.

In a statement to The Times, Taiwan's foreign minister, Joseph Wu, blamed China's "internet armies" for the deluge of falsehoods, though his office declined to elaborate on how he came to that conclusion. China's Taiwan Affairs Office didn't respond to a faxed request for comment.

The Communist Party claims Taiwan as part of China's territory, and Taiwanese officials have long accused Beijing of manipulating both traditional news media and social platforms to turn Taiwanese citizens against President Tsai, who opposes closer ties with China.

Summer Chen, the editor in chief of Taiwan FactCheck Center, a watchdog group that debunks online rumors and hoaxes, said her team had been busier since the outbreak began than it was ahead of Taiwan's presidential election in January, when the island was on high alert for potential Chinese meddling.

"Throughout this whole epidemic, people have really liked conspiracy theories," Ms. Chen said. "Why is it that during epidemics people don't choose to believe accurate scientific information?"

Image

A briefing at the World Health Organization on Friday. The map showed the distribution of coronavirus cases worldwide. Credit... Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all said they were making efforts to point people back to reliable sources of medical information, and had direct lines of communication to the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Facebook said it bans content that could cause people harm, such as claims that discourage treatment or taking appropriate precautions against the coronavirus. Posts and videos that shared conspiracy theories were clearly marked as false, once they had been reviewed by fact checkers.

When Facebook users attempt to share them, a message pops up alerting the user that the post includes information that has been deemed false by fact checkers.

Those measures, however, have not stopped people in private Facebook groups from linking to and sharing misinformation surrounding the virus. In private Facebook groups, including one that totals over 100,000 members, conspiracy theories spread that the coronavirus was an invention of the pharmaceutical industry, intended to sell the public on more expensive drugs and more vaccines.

While many posts simply encouraged people to take vitamins and eat a balanced diet to boost their immune system, others offered promises of immunity or cures if certain combinations of powders and drinks were consumed. Some were even more dangerous. The Food and Drug Administration referred to one "miracle mineral solution" posted many times on Facebook and Twitter as " the same as drinking bleach."

Dr. Chiang, the gastroenterologist, recently helped start the Association for Healthcare Social Media, a group dedicated to encouraging more health care professionals to post on social media so that they can dispel some of the misinformation.

"People are looking for good sources of information because a lot of what they see, when they log into their social media platforms, is just scaring them," he said.

While Twitter acknowledged the presence of some of this content on its network, Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, said the company has not seen "large-scale, coordinated" efforts to misinform people about the coronavirus. After The New York Times contacted Twitter with examples of tweets containing health misinformation about coronavirus, some owners of the accounts were suspended "for spam."

Facebook said that in addition to working closely with health organizations, it was offering W.H.O. free ad space to try and point people toward accurate information on the coronavirus. The company said that it was removing posts that discouraged people from seeking treatment or suggested remedies that could cause physical harm and that it was placing warning labels on posts that were rated false by their fact checkers.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, also said it was working closely with W.H.O. to help combat misinformation. YouTube's spokesman, Farshad Shadloo, said the company had policies that prohibited videos that "promoted medically unsubstantiated methods to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment."

Dozens of YouTube videos, however, included titles that suggested the video offered a cure for the virus. In others, the comment sections below the videos included links to pages offering a range of alternative, unsubstantiated treatments.

In some cases, those links have led people to websites that lure people in with the promise of a cure, but actually steal credit card information and other personal details.

The cybersecurity firm Check Point said more than 4,000 coronavirus-related websites that include words like "corona" or "covid" have been registered since the beginning of the year. Of those, 3 percent were considered malicious and another 5 percent were suspicious.

Research by Sophos, a cybersecurity company, has shown an uptick in these so-called spear-phishing messages targeting people in Italy, where coronavirus infections have surged in recent weeks. Those messages included a link to a Microsoft Word document that claimed to list cures for the virus. When downloaded, it installed malicious malware on people's computers.

Last month, W.H.O. also put out a warning about fake emails from apparent W.H.O. representatives. The emails carried malicious code aimed at breaking into someone's computing device.

John Gregory, the deputy health editor for NewsGuard, a start-up that tries to stop false stories from spreading on the internet, said the medical element to coronavirus misinformation made it different from other conspiracies the public has dealt with.

Because the information about the virus is "playing out in real time, it's always going to be easier for someone to make a false claim," Mr. Gregory said. "Then, there's a separation of a few days before anyone with a scientific background, or journalists, are able to debunk the claim."

Sheera Frenkel reported in San Francisco and Davey Alba reported in New York. Raymond Zhong reported from Beijing. Chris Horton contributed reporting from Taipei, Taiwan.

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Surge of Virus Misinformation Stumps Facebook and Twitter

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Secret labs. Magic cures. Government plots. Despite efforts by social media companies to stop it, false information about the coronavirus is proliferating around the world. SAN FRANCISCO - First, there were conspiratorial whispers on social media that the coronavirus had been cooked up in a secret government lab in China.

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Defining the online diffusion of coronavirus misinformation as the onset of an "infodemic", the WHO has quickly rallied support from various big tech platforms.  This endeavour sees the likes of Facebook fact checking posts, and offering the WHO free ad space, and YouTube prohibiting videos with non-medically authenticated content. This proves that platforms are entirely capable of controlling and regulating content during times of rapid spreading of falsehood.

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Working with the big tech companies, the U.N. health agency has made strides in combating rumors and falsehoods on the internet about the new infection.

Medical misinformation has been driven by ideologues who distrust science and proven measures. Credit... Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - With the threat of the coronavirus growing, Aleksandra Kuzmanovic sat at her computer in Geneva on Monday and sent out an important public health email. She works for the World Health Organization and her aim was to assess and stop a global spread - not of the dangerous virus but of hazardous false information.

She wanted to halt what her colleagues at the health agency are calling an "infodemic."

She emailed a contact at Pinterest, the image-sharing social media giant based here in San Francisco, to ask if the site could help the W.H.O. combat the blazing spread of misinformation, lies and rumors about the new virus.

Offer accepted. Starting Thursday afternoon, when Pinterest users search for coronavirus, they get a link to a page of coronavirus "mythbusters" from the W.H.O.

Since the virus hit, Ms. Kuzmanovic said she and her colleagues have been in regular contact with the world's biggest and most powerful disseminators of information - including Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as social media influencers around the globe.

Next week, Andrew Pattison, manager of digital solutions at the W.H.O., will travel to Menlo Park, Calif., to visit the headquarters of Facebook, which has arranged for him to make a pitch for further assistance to a gathering of 20 big tech companies, including Uber and Airbnb. "I'd love to see Airbnb give advice to people traveling about coronavirus," he said.

He also plans to meet with Amazon in Seattle in hopes of having the e-commerce titan provide accurate health information when people buy such things as protective masks or respirators, or even books already popping up about the crisis that could contain misinformation.

The efforts of the W.H.O., the health arm of the United Nations, represent a new, far-reaching effort to reinvent what has largely been a failed fight against misinformation.

Over the last two weeks, tech companies working with the W.H.O. have been prominently posting links to W.H.O. content, making falsehoods harder to find in searches or on news streams, and sometimes removing content altogether.

The companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, would not provide interviews for this article but did confirm that the work they are doing with the W.H.O. was among their efforts to combat coronavirus misinformation. The companies also are doing work independently of the W.H.O. relationship to help eradicate coronavirus misinformation.

They are facing an array of wildly untrue claims, such as that the coronavirus was created as a bioweapon or was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to further vaccine sales, or that it can be cured by eating garlic or drinking a bleach concoction (which can itself cause liver failure). These ideas, like a virus itself, can be easily transmitted from person to person, carried by both the unwitting and the devious and spreading almost invisibly through a vast virtual world.

The reality is that the coronavirus is a rapidly spreading respiratory infection that originated in Wuhan, China. Most of the cases, and nearly all of the deaths, have so far been in China, though the germ has reached dozens of other countries in recent weeks.
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Medical misinformation on the virus has been driven by ideologues who distrust science and proven measures like vaccines, and by profiteers who scare up internet traffic with zany tales and try to capitalize on that traffic by selling "cures" or other health and wellness products.

"There are self-appointed experts, people working from anecdote, or making up wild claims to get traffic or notoriety," said Mr. Pattison of the W.H.O.

The groundwork for the coordination around the coronavirus was laid two years ago, when Mr. Pattison went to the W.H.O. general director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and suggested a full-blown effort to connect with social media titans to combat health misinformation. Now about a half-dozen W.H.O. staffers in Geneva are working on the issue, building relationships with digital and social media sites. Over time, the cooperative efforts have grown. For instance, last August, Pinterest teamed up with the W.H.O. to link to accurate information about vaccines when people search the service for that topic.

Ifeoma Ozoma, public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest, said the company "has been working with the World Health Organization over the last year," with an aim to "make sure people can find authoritative information when it really counts."

The W.H.O. seeks no money, nor pays any, in these relationships, Mr. Pattison said. Rather, he explained, it is lending its credibility and hoping to use "their reach."

The relationship has borne concrete results.

Google launched what it calls an "SOS Alert," which directs people who search for "coronavirus" to news and other information from the W.H.O., including to the organization's Twitter account; that was expanded Thursday to include information in not just English but also French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The W.H.O. has also worked with the major Chinese-owned social media site WeChat to add a news feed featuring correct information, translated into Chinese by the W.H.O.

The health agency has worked especially closely with Facebook. The company has used human fact checkers to flag misinformation, which can come to their attention through computer programs that identify suspicious keywords and trends. Such posts can then be moved down in news feeds, or, in rare cases, removed altogether.

For example, several weeks ago, Facebook removed a W.H.O. infographic that had been modified to claim people should avoid having sex with animals to prevent coronavirus. Facebook also is providing people who search for information on coronavirus on Facebook and Instagram with links to credible sources of information, including from the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some of the tech companies have issued public statements of support for the W.H.O. Kang Xing Jin, Facebook's head of health, said the social platform is providing "relevant and up-to-date information" and "working to limit the spread of misinformation and harmful content" and is doing so "based on guidance from the W.H.O."

Despite the efforts, hundreds of thousands of people have consumed dozens of documented falsehoods about the coronavirus on these platforms and others, including Reddit and the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, as well as numerous smaller websites. On TikTok, there are several videos featuring the Gates conspiracy that had been viewed over 160,000 times and have since been taken down. (The New York Times is not linking to this content to limit the spread of misinformation.)

The ground for such medical misinformation is fertile, experts said. Sarah E. Kreps, a professor of government at Cornell University, considers the people deliberately spreading distortions to be practitioners of "algorithmic capitalism," in which people scare up traffic and sell against it.

Examples abound. Infowars, the far right website that purveys conspiracy theories and fake news, and others are now banned on several leading social media sites but are still advertising pseudoscientific remedies directly through their own shops. An early distortion of the coronavirus news appeared in an Infowars video on Jan. 22 - claiming that the virus could be part of some man-made plot to thin the population.

"The globalists and the deep state have declared war on humanity," a host on the video said. "They hate human life. This is why they kill babies."

Next to the box in which the video appears is an advertisement for an immune gargle product that, the ad claims, "is designed to support your immune system like no other," and that is "scientifically proven."

However, the Mayo Clinic reports that the ingredient mentioned in the product, colloidal silver, has not been proved safe or effective in treating disease. And even the Infowars shop where the product is listed reads at the bottom: " This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."

Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she studies the spread of false narratives online, described the coronavirus distortion effort as a product of a "conspiratorial ecosystem" that draws on "die-hard anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists and people who have alternative health modalities to push and an economic incentive."

"They liken big pharma to drug pushers," she continued, "and then tell you how their mushroom or oil is their approach to healing."

Experts said the cooperation between the W.H.O. and major websites is a significant change in efforts to stop misinformation. Major internet companies have been pilloried for their role as sources of disinformation and for turning a blind eye to the spread of political lies.

The effort led by the W.H.O. "is very new," said Danny Rogers, who teaches about disinformation and narrative warfare at the New York University Center for Global Affairs and is also the chief technology officer of the Global Disinformation Index, which tracks misinformation activity online.

Mr. Rogers said dealing with the coronavirus may be easier to address than political disinformation because it doesn't have partisan or clear ideological strains.

"The coronavirus is not a voting or paying constituency," Mr. Rogers said. "We're all united against people getting sick. It's much easier for platforms to pioneer this coordinated effort around public health crisis."

At the same time, he said, the coordination around coronavirus underscores the reality that social media does have the power to take on falsehoods.

"It proves that when platforms do choose to act they can be very influential," he said. "It undercuts the throw up your hands and say we have no power or ability to control information."
Ben Decker contributed reporting.

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W.H.O. Fights a Pandemic Besides Coronavirus: an 'Infodemic'

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Working with the big tech companies, the U.N. health agency has made strides in combating rumors and falsehoods on the internet about the new infection. SAN FRANCISCO - With the threat of the coronavirus growing, Aleksandra Kuzmanovic sat at her computer in Geneva on Monday and sent out an important public health email.

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Robert Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the company that became infamous for siphoning off Facebook users' information to target political ads. The shady data firm worked for the 2016 Trump campaign and Leave.EU, a pro-Brexit group. The Trump campaign also employed Steve Bannon, the right-wing firebrand who also has ties to Mercer and claims Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage as a personal friend.

The links between the Trump campaign and the successful push for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union are just a few of the connections highlighted by an interactive project called WebOfLies that was first released in January. It's reminiscent of follow-the-money graphics released by major news organizations in recent years, and it reports a web of connections between world figures such as President Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, and Russian intelligence agencies. But it wasn't produced by a major news outlet. Instead, it was developed by a user who goes by the name MinimalGravitas on the sprawling discussion platform Reddit, where everyday commenters are increasingly seeking to strike back against those who would spread potentially harmful disinformation online.

"It seems to me if I think truth matters, then I've morally not got much choice but to try and understand and fight back against this sort of thing," writes MinimalGravitas in an email.

On Reddit, forums with names such as r/trollfare, r/ActiveMeasures, r/Against_Astroturfing, and r/DisinformationWatch, mostly pseudonymous users share links to news stories and academic research papers about online disinformation campaigns. Many promote their own research into suspicious clusters of users promoting misleading posts on Reddit and other social networks. Some swap tips on how to steer friends and family away from biased news sources. Other subreddits, as Reddit forums are known, look specifically to aid users trying to separate truth from disinformation. One example is r/SJWRabbitHole, which serves as a kind of online support network for people turning away from the alt-right.

If I think truth matters, then I've morally not got much choice but to try and understand and fight back."

MinimalGravitas
MinimalGravitas says they created WebOfLies to help people understand news stories about the sometimes-obscure figures said to be linked to election manipulation efforts around the world.

"If, for example, a Russian oligarch is mentioned in discussion of election interference, I want people to be able to 'Ctrl F' in WebOfLies and find out who that person is linked to, which companies they are involved with, which politicians they have met with, etc.," they write. MinimalGravitas, including every other Redditor interviewed for this story, declined to disclose their real names out of concern about retaliation.

The Reddit user, who recently finished postgraduate studies in physics, is also working on a project to summarize a Wiki listing of academic papers on misinformation that were collected by r/trollfare users. They hope to produce an easy-to-understand report on how to avoid falling prey to manipulative online content.

"Disinformation and intentionally making people think false things is pretty much the opposite of the scientific endeavor," they write in the email. "Trying to understand how the universe works is hard enough for humanity without some assholes trying to mislead people."

Recent years have seen a host of academics, companies, and nonprofits from the Atlantic Council to Vietnam Veterans of America looking into misinformation campaigns online and reporting their findings to big social networks and to authorities. But Reddit, which has incubated conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and QAnon, has become a perhaps unlikely home for passionate amateurs looking to fight back in the information wars. One challenge is evident on Reddit itself: While the disinformation-fighting subreddits generally have subscriber counts in the low thousands, forums such as Gamergate hub r/KotakuInAction or conspiracy theory subreddits such as r/conspiracy can have subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Unfortunately, the audience for false information is much bigger than those trying to fact-check it.

Trying to understand how the universe works is hard enough for humanity without some assholes trying to mislead people."

MinimalGravitas
Reddit has long relied on its small army of volunteer moderators to keep the site livable despite a never-ending onslaught of trolls, spammers, and, now, avid propagandists. "They're so reliant on these people who are really doing amazing work under circumstances that are terrible," says Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has researched Reddit's relationship with conspiracy theories and the alt-right.

And the task has arguably gotten even harder as the general climate of political distrust has made many users suspicious of anyone in power, including moderators and Reddit's paid employees, says abrownn, a moderator for several massive subreddits, including r/worldnews (23 million members) and r/technology (8.6 million members), who has tracked misinformation on the platform.

"As we approach the 2020 election, things are only going to get worse," he says. "There will be more blogs pushing misinformation or disinformation. There will be more people calling for the ignoring of decorum or rules."

A mixed history on misinformation

Like most major social networks, Reddit has a decidedly mixed record when it comes to misinformation. There are subreddits such as r/AskHistorians and r/AskScience where users can ask experts questions and all but academically rigorous answers are removed. There are also plenty of innocuous forums where users post everything from photos of their pets to dating advice. But the site has historically also struggled to deal with a variety of false and misleading content, which means many of the Redditors looking to combat misinformation find themselves fighting falsehoods on the site itself.

Many of the Redditors looking to combat misinformation find themselves fighting falsehoods on the site itself.

Perhaps most famously, after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, amateur sleuths on Reddit forums trying to find those responsible poked fingers at innocent bystanders. Subreddits also gave a platform to Gamergate, the movement that spread falsehoods about video game developers and journalists, leading to harassment and death threats. Reddit has also hosted adherents of conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, which alleged Democratic Party officials were involved in sex trafficking through pizzerias, and QAnon, which claims Trump is secretly fighting government corruption. (Reddit says both subreddits dedicated to Pizzagate and QAnon were banned, though the conspiracy theories still propagate elsewhere on the site).

The site, which was among the first companies backed by the now-celebrated accelerator Y Combinator, has always attracted people with a certain nerdy, contrarian bent looking to share information not easily found elsewhere. Massanari says that may have contributed to it becoming a bit of a haven for conspiracy theorists.

"I think why Reddit has become a place for this has a lot to do with the nature of the conversations that go on there," she says. "A lot of Redditors see themselves as smarter or more invested in certain topics than the general public."

A spokesperson for Reddit declined to comment for this story.

Redditors policing Reddit

Reddit management has taken steps over the years to remove accounts linked to alleged state propaganda efforts and shut down subreddits that become havens for hate speech. In its most recent transparency report, released in late February, Reddit reported 1,150 subreddits were shut down in 2019 for harassment. The site also just took action against r/The_Donald, a 791,000-user pro-Trump subreddit, The Daily Beast reported, removing some of the group's moderators and requiring that future ones be vetted by Reddit. The subreddit had already been put on what Reddit calls "quarantine," a designation for subreddits with potentially offensive content that is only available to logged-in users and doesn't show up on site searches.

The company has also sought to squash efforts to suppress or promote particular posts. That's something that can be done by bot-controlled accounts or coordinated manual voting, since the site allows people to vote content up or down and favors posts with better voting results. In the report, Reddit claimed 6,806 subreddits were shut down in 2019 for "vote or subscription cheating." But much of the work of deciding what to do about false and even deliberately misleading posts falls to the volunteer moderators of individual subreddits, who are given considerable latitude to decide what content is acceptable on their forums. Even when Reddit has taken action against manipulative behavior on the platform, it's often been thanks at least in part to reports from everyday users.

In 2018, Reddit officials gave special praise to the site's users for helping discover a suspected Iran-linked effort to manipulate sentiment toward Middle Eastern politics on popular subreddits such as r/conspiracy and r/worldnews. "Through this investigation, the incredible vigilance of the Reddit community has been brought to light, helping us pinpoint some of the suspicious account behavior," Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe wrote.

It's pretty much exactly the same, minus the Iranian stuff."

An NBC News article at the time highlighted how the Reddit user abrownn uncovered ties between accounts involved in the propaganda operation and the sites to which they linked. Speaking to Fast Company, he says that while that particular operation may have been thwarted, there are still organized groups on the site coordinating to push false narratives.

"It's pretty much exactly the same, minus the Iranian stuff," he says. "It's mostly right-wing content these days."

Today, abrownn is a moderator for r/worldnews and r/technology. He and other moderators use a variety of user-made programs that can detect when new websites are suddenly posted to a subreddit, which can sometimes be a sign of a new propaganda or fake news site. The users who share such sites may not always be aware they're fake, he says: One recent trend has been sites with fake addresses that mimic well-known news sites, such as the BBC, looking to trick readers into sharing their content. (Reddit says this practice is prohibited). Abrownn says he uses a mix of his own homemade scripts and widely circulated Reddit moderation tools, including the Reddit Enhancement Suite, which can do things such as add color-coded tags to posts by particular users, and the Moderator Toolbox for Reddit, with a built-in user history analysis feature. The tools abrownn uses can also spot suspicious patterns, such as an unusual number of newly created accounts promoting a particular post.

"I feel like I have a bit of a duty to do this because not a lot of people are very willing to sit there and look at a lot of this stuff without burning out too quickly that also know what to look for," he says.

A sometimes heavy burden

Abrownn is far from the only user looking to squash deliberate disinformation on Reddit itself: -Ph03niX-, a longtime Reddit user and a moderator of the subreddits r/Digital_Manipulation and r/AgainstHateSubreddits, which look to spot new centers of hate speech on the site, says he began looking into the problem around the 2014 midterm elections. That's when he noticed "something off" about discourse on the site.

"Something happened," he says. "The site just got bombarded with politics."

Something happened. The site just got bombarded with politics."

He began searching out people who surreptitiously maintained multiple accounts on the site to push their agendas. He often privately urged them to stop, and, if that didn't work, he exposed their hidden networks of accounts through posts on the site. In other posts, he's shared general information about online manipulation and lies, and he can speak off the cuff about decades of conspiracy-minded thinking dating back to the anti-Communist John Birch Society of the 1960s, perhaps best remembered today for its opposition to water fluoridation. But, he says, he may leave Reddit after this year.

"I've been doing this so long," he says. "I'm kind of jaded about it."

It's a sentiment that several of the site's crusaders against disinformation expressed, questioning the effectiveness of their unpaid labor in a world where fringe forums such as r/conspiracy can command orders of magnitude more subscribers than those that seek to debunk them.

"Other than my own selfish needs, I don't know if anyone else is really interacting," quips Marc1309, a doctoral student at a university in Canada who has done academic research about Reddit and is a regular contributor to anti-disinformation subreddits including r/Digital_Manipulation, r/Disinfo, and r/Foreign_Interference. He regularly shares information about propaganda and misinformation from flat Earth theories to climate change denial, trying to focus on verified sources such as well-regarded researchers and think tanks. But, he says, while he thinks the forums are useful for curating information for himself and other researchers, it's unclear how much it can change others' minds.

You're preaching to the choir a bit."

"You're preaching to the choir a bit," he says.

Even if misinformation-fighting subreddits have struggled so far to reach much of the site's users and the internet at large, there's almost certainly value in making information available for people who are themselves actively reevaluating their own political beliefs or trying to understand why loved ones believe what they do.

"So far, I can't really say if the sub has had any great effect on the [vast] amount of reactionary content creators, or more importantly the people who follow them," writes KoolKidSpec, the creator of SJWRabbitHole, in an email. "But I can say at least that some people have gotten some sort of support from posting there."

KoolKidSpec, who lives in New England, says he created the subreddit after seeing YouTube personalities discuss their own experiences moving away from far-right beliefs.

"The subreddits are still pretty small, so I try to reply to every story posted," he writes. "And I have to say that it seems that just being able to post these stories and talk about themselves, in some cases, really does help people."
This story has been updated with more information about Reddit's policies. This story is part of our "Hacking Democracy" series, which examines the ways in which technology is eroding our elections and democratic institutions-and what's been done to fix them. Read more here.

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'I have a duty to do this': Meet the Redditors fighting 2020's fake news war

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Robert Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the company that became infamous for siphoning off Facebook users' information to target political ads. The shady data firm worked for the 2016 Trump campaign and Leave.EU, a pro-Brexit group. The Trump campaign also employed Steve Bannon, the right-wing firebrand who also has ties to Mercer and claims Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage as a personal friend.

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Twitter  thread by  Jordan Wildon (@JordanWildon) shows how indexed private group chat links be discoverable outside of WhatsApp's secure service, by anyone through google searches.

https://twitter.com/JordanWildon/status/1230829082662842369

While not technically a data breach, it may still be problematic for private data to be so easily accessible outside of an encrypted messaging service.

(Uploaded 03/02 11:15)

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WhatsApp links that lead to closed groups can be found with a simple Google search - a major security flaw revealed by DW last week. Following social media outrage, the links were removed from Google's search results.

Despite the removal, however, publicly-available internet archives are still storing the information, as security researcher Lav Kumar has found out. He gathered and organized over 60,000 unique links, which can still be found on multiple websites.

Of the 1,000 randomly selected links DW tested, 427 were active chat links. Even without actively joining a group, its title, description, image and creator's phone number are available for all. However, upon entering a group, it is possible to also see the phone numbers of up to 256 participants, as well as other information, and adding these numbers to one's contacts can reveal their names in the app.

"We show all numbers in groups for people's safety that way they know who will receive their messages," WhatsApp told DW in response.
Real-life danger
Using this information, DW gained access to a group described as "Ministry of finance civil servants" in Indonesia, revealing the phone numbers of all 14 members. Several other groups appeared to be official support groups for the campaign of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Among the 427 active links DW examined, there were groups described to be for school classes, medical trainees, political campaigns, businesses, pornography and sex workers. Some groups included members with particularly sensitive identities, such as one chat with hundreds of members clearly labeled as an LGBTQ+ group in a Latin American country with high rates of homophobic murders.

In some cases, the group image looked like amateur pornography or had titles such as "ex-wives leaked videos," raising questions of consent.

An example of a private WhatsApp group indexed on Google

Also listed were potential terrorist groups and groups advertised as for sharing footage of "extreme" sexual content, including rape. A small number indicated that they were for child pornography.

WhatsApp told DW that the company has a zero-tolerance policy around child sexual abuse and bans users immediately if they are found sharing content that exploits or endangers children.

The platform also claims to ban approximately 250,000 accounts each month suspected of sharing exploitative images of children and relies on user reports and all unencrypted information to do so.
'Useful for terrorism chats'
In response to the revelations, some Twitter users pointed out that this information could be used by authorities to track down illegal content without WhatsApp offering an official "backdoor" to encrypted content.

"Of course there is a possibility that they left it open to search for problem groups," Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist and former Head of Digital Forensics at a British police force, told DW, "they aren't always too keen to help law enforcement, so might have found it beneficial to offer it out to law enforcement and not openly mention it."

On whether law enforcement would use this proactively to identify crime, Moore said: "Most police forces aren't that proactive, [but] rather reactive. However, I would imagine it would be useful for terrorism chats, yet I doubt they use WhatsApp."

However, investigations into far-right terrorism in Germany show that organizations have used Whatsapp to introduce members to each other.

Read more: German far-right extremists met on WhatsApp, planned mosque attacks

Not a priority
Reports of the flaw go as far back as 2016, when Mexican computer scientist Aurelio Cuautle found phone numbers listed in Google search results and informed WhatsApp. In emails to the company, he detailed how this information was found. After initial replies, Cuautle said he stopped receiving responses. However, the phone numbers were later removed.

A Hyderabad-based security researcher, known as HackrzVijay on Twitter, says he reported the issue to Facebook in November 2019. In the emails, Facebook admitted that "the links being accessible by anyone was an intentional product decision," adding that "the surprise here was that they're indexed by Google." In another email seen by DW from February 26, Facebook reiterated this stance.

In December 2019, the issue was reported again by an 18-year-old hacker. Facebook responded by saying that it would consider "further mitigation," adding that it cannot control what search engines index. In the response seen by DW, Facebook said that this was not considered a "high priority."

When pressed by DW as to why WhatsApp removed the listings despite saying this was intentional, Facebook said that they "don't have anything further to share on that question."
Read more: 'Leaky and bad' WhatsApp security flaw allows spying on users
Though not technically a data breach, Jane Manchun Wong, an app reverse-engineer, called the security flaw "leaky and bad, because people expected the invite links to be private [to] a certain extent."

Search engines like Google index pages listed on public sites, Google's liaison of Search, Danny Sullivan, explained to DW. But Google also "offers tools allowing sites to block content being listed in search results," he added, meaning that WhatsApp could have made sure group links are invisible to the public - but chose not to.

It is also possible that websites that seem secure can have information indexed. In 2018, The Intercept discovered that governments of the UK and Canada added private data to Trello, a project management website. Subsequently, this information was indexed by Google.

In a statement, WhatsApp said that "group admins are able to invite any WhatsApp user to join that group by sharing a link that they have generated. Like all content that is shared in searchable, public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users. Links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website."
Ignoring criticism?
A spokesperson for WhatsApp also highlighted that the app "clearly communicates a warning to people who share a group invite link," and "group admins can revoke links at any time." However, revoking a link only generates a new link, and does not turn links off altogether.

"It's great to see WhatsApp taking steps to fix the oversight," Wong said, "but it's only the first step," she warned, noting that information is still available on other search engines. It is also possible, though highly unlikely, that users could be able to enter any group by guessing the 22-character identifier in the URL.

The piece of code preventing search engines from indexing links is "more like a social contract," Wong explains. However, and despite potential criticism, some tools can choose to ignore that, casting doubts on the credibility of such a social contract.

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WhatsApp security flaw: Over 60,000 groups still accessible online | DW | 26.02.2020

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WhatsApp links that lead to closed groups can be found with a simple Google search - a major security flaw revealed by DW last week. Following social media outrage, the links were removed from Google's search results. Despite the removal, however, publicly-available internet archives are still storing the information, as security researcher Lav Kumar has found out.

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Has the Internet really returned to Kashmir?

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Has the Internet really returned to Kashmir?

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Six months following the Indian govt's revoking of Kashmir's semi-autonomous status and subsequent internet shutdown, the Supreme court has returned some accessibility to residents.  However, the availability is limited to 350~ sites, not including social media or major Indian publications. The court's ruling hence may be more nuanced, as it only questions the extent of the shutdown but not the govt's right to do so.

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The restoration of the internet, however, is not incentive enough for 28-year-old entrepreneur Abid Rashid Lone to head back to Srinagar where he once ran a flourishing IT-enabled services company. "The internet speeds are so slow. There is no way I can go back and resume my work there," he said.

When communication links were snapped in August, Rashid stayed back for some days. However, without internet, "there was no way I could work", he said. Rashid said he shifted base to New Delhi by the middle of August. "It has been tough to start it all from here," he said. Even now, internet access is limited to some 350 sites and social media apps continue to remain out of bounds for the residents of Kashmir valley.

Going offline

The gradual but limited return of internet services comes almost three weeks after the Supreme Court on 10 January ordered a review on the clampdown on communications and some other constitutional guarantees. The judgement, seen as path-breaking, considering that it upholds the right to communication and the internet as protected under Article 19 of the Constitution, was in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin, challenging the lockdown in the state that the government said was necessary to prevent terrorists sponsored by Pakistan from fuelling unrest and violence in Kashmir. The current wave of militancy in Kashmir is being fuelled by terrorist groups recruiting young Kashmiris via internet and social media, Burhan Wani, a Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist killed in 2016, being a case in point, analysts said.

The 10 January judgement also came on the back of internet blackouts in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Rajasthan, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh, after protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, which seeks to fast-track citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians and Parsis, who fled Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan because of religious persecution or for fear of religious persecution. There were also protests over the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), which seeks to create a record of bonafide Indian citizens in the country and identify illegal residents. Taken together, the CAA and the NRC were perceived by some quarters as targeted at Muslims, fanning the protests.

As many as 4,196 hours of internet blackouts in India cost the economy close to $1.3 billion in 2019, said a 7 January report by UK-based research firm Top10VPN. The report analysed every major internet shutdown around the world in 2019 that cost the global economy more than $8 billion. India, where more than 100 shutdowns were documented, was deemed the third worst-hit after Iraq and Sudan. Ironically, this comes as the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is giving a major push to link villages and towns with better internet connectivity to boost e-commerce and financial transactions online through its Digital India programme.

Against this backdrop, the 10 January Supreme Court judgement is seen as novel given news reports that it upholds the right to internet as a fundamental right. However, lawyers say the judgement is more nuanced than that.

"The judgement states that the right to use internet for freedom of speech and expression and for trade or business is constitutionally protected," said Ashok Bhan, senior advocate at the Supreme Court. "With respect to this, the judgement when talking about the 'right to use internet', is a part of the 'findings' of the case and are not 'directions'," he said. Findings were not enforceable while directions are, he said. "The findings can be used in future cases as precedent unless Parliament makes a law to that effect. There were no directions given to the government with respect to internet in this case."

"If we read the judgement cumulatively and focus on the operative part of the judgement, it implies that internet is a part of freedom of speech and expression," Bhan said. However, the judgement makes it clear that the right to internet is a constitutional right that can be altered or modified, while fundamental rights mentioned in part 3 of the Constitution cannot be changed or amended. In doing so, the judgement does not question the right of the government but the extent to which the government can shut down internet. This shows that the courts have not transgressed into the powers of the government and tried to balance the need for security with the rights of people, according to Gopal Subramanium, senior advocate at the Supreme Court.

The nuances of law, however, don't impress people such as Lone. "For me the important thing is to run my business for which a good internet connection is a must," he said.

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Supreme court does a balancing act with ruling on internet shutdown

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The restoration of the internet, however, is not incentive enough for 28-year-old entrepreneur Abid Rashid Lone to head back to Srinagar where he once ran a flourishing IT-enabled services company. "The internet speeds are so slow. There is no way I can go back and resume my work there," he said.

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Twitter thread by Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre), who breaks down his and  Rohini Lakshané's (@aldebaran14) work in analysing the websites that the Indian govt had whitelisted for Kashmiris. There are interesting finds about how many sites are unserviceable. Streaming services being included feels bizarre as they are practically unusable with the permitted 2G network. Basis of whitelisting domains unknown. Thread updated as the number of websites whitelisted grows.

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Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)

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Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)

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Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)
— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not 'practically usable'. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)