Fake postal vote results: Evidence of coordinated campaigns to influence, and mislead
I was sent this image today, along with a link to a Facebook account which had shared it. The image, and what's presented in it violates Sri Lanka's election laws. These aren't official results, and it is illegal to distribute content of this nature through any media.
That being said, this realises what I feared would be influence operations that spread disinformation in order to sway voters, entirely in line with what was widely adopted as propaganda tactics in 2019's presidential election .
Superspreader of disinformation
A Facebook Page - ?????? ?????? ?- which is a pro-Ranil Wickremesinghe account, and clearly a proxy account for the incumbent president's election campaign, emerges as a superspreader of this content.
None of these polls or results are official. Fact Crescendo has already fact-checked this content (in Sinhala) and alerted the public around the falsehoods promoted by them. Despite Fact Crescendo's status as an accredited fact-checker for Meta, the ?????? ???????Facebook Page's misleading images with fake polls do not show an interstitial, save for just one. This means that aside from a single image, all the others are going viral on Facebook without any interstitial warning users of the disinformation contained in them.
Viral spread
Just the first image has been posted on several public Pages, and Groups. The actual spread of the content is more viral, and includes personal Facebook accounts which I've not included in this list. Allowing for overlap, the potential audience of by way of followers is in the tens of thousands.
Sharing is also significant. The first image of the fake poll was shared 42 times on the ?????? ??????. The second post with the collection of fake polling result images on the same Facebook account was shared over 75 times. Each share exposes the (misleading, fake) content to potentially thousands of others, if not more. This organic virality is impossible to study, and accurately map by independent researchers.
Bizarrely, there's also a cluster of pro-Sajith Premadasa/SJB Pages, and Groups which also share this poll.
Pro-Ranil Wickremesinghe Pages/Groups
Pro-Sajith Premadasa/SJB Pages/Groups
There are also public Facebook Groups that aren't - to the extent I can determine through a quick study, hyper-partisan - sharing this disinformation.
This last group is particularly interesting. Given the name, it would have been established or renamed during 2022's aragalaya time to help with finding fuel, and LPG. The Group now has well over 25,000 members.
It is now running partisan ads, and propaganda in what I also studied during 2019's presidential election, and 2020's general election as a tactic that switched very popular, and highly populated Pages, and Groups pegged to gossip, entertainment, cricket, sports or memes into accounts that supported a specific party or candidate. The readymade audience, based on the original popularity of the Page or Group, allowed for the viral, and organic dissemination of propaganda - without ever entering Facebook's Ad Library.
This is the kind of tactic I wrote about recently as that which neither the awful Election Commission's Media Guidelines for 2024's presidential election nor its farcical interpretation of the 2023 Regulation of Election Expenditure Act remotely addresses. In fact, in both cases, the Election Commission makes matters worse.
Worth noting that others on Facebook also claim that the postal vote is somehow favourable to Anura Kumara Dissanayake. This is off a public post on a personal account.
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Fake polls
I also encountered fake polls - something that the Election Commission has explicitly said violates the law, both in 2019, and again this year.
This poll, currently active, mirrors what was studied during 2019's presidential election .
The objective of these polls, spread at scale, and harvesting partisan opinion through reactions (or what academics call a platform affordance), is not just to influence voter perceptions, attitudes, and responses online. It is also gaming the Facebook algorithm, to organically spread these fake polls by engagement harvesting - making it out to be to Facebook that the post is extremely popular, thereby generating signals that presents it across more newsfeeds.
All the President's Men
Nirosh Maithree , a former News Editor at Hiru News, and the owner, and founder of News 19 published a public post on his Facebook account highlighting how Sandun Arosha Fernando, who ostensibly leads the counter disinformation unit at the President's Office, also shared the fake poll on his Facebook account.
The fake polling was shared with a note penned by Fernando suggesting it was a "News Update". It has since been deleted.
This is worrying, because it suggests that a senior member of President Ranil Wickremesinghe's staff actively promoted disinformation (despite what he's officially tasked with countering, apparently), and in this case, material that is explicitly violative of electoral laws.
A threat to electoral integrity
The existence of coordinated campaigns, spanning multiple Facebook accounts that are proxies of leading candidates, reaching (conservatively) tens of thousands, challenges campaign finance law.
As I said just a couple of days ago ,
Mirroring 2019's dark campaign finance signatures, this content is not (and never will be) in Meta's Ad Library because they are published as organic posts - i.e., not as ads or boosted posts. This is a campaign finance economy that is cash based, and now also near impossible to track, and trace comprehensively on Meta (given sunset of CrowdTangle). Given my own interactions with the account/page administrators of leading meme, and gossip pages in the country, the amount of money spent on these promotions, at scale, runs into tens of millions of rupees at a conservative minimum. 2024's figures could potentially be much higher.
The sunset of Meta's CrowdTangle, and the rudimentary nature of Facebook's Content Library tool make the study of this material by order of magnitude harder than during the campaigns of 2019, and 2020. What Meta's essentially done is to provide co-ordinated inauthentic campaigns, co-ordinated authentic behaviours, and the virality of dark campaigns - funded by hard cash - free rein.
In the past, CrowdTangle allowed researchers to search for content in text embedded in memes, geo-fence searches, and cluster similar pages. None of this is possible anymore, rendering even this brief capture of how fake polls spread on Facebook into an extremely laborious task, and with a lower fidelity than what was possible when CrowdTangle was around.
Worse, it's abundantly clear Sri Lanka's Election Commission has zero technical expertise to deal with these challenges, even in their most rudimentary form (mindful that similar campaigns would be present on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter etc). The result is, in the context of Sri Lankan elections, an unprecedented space for social media's instrumentalisation in the distribution of disinformation at scale, and the amplification of influence operations (despite best efforts by respective platforms) that help those in power stay in power, challenged only by those who can afford 2 billion rupees for their campaigns .
It is the country's electoral integrity at risk.
What's interesting a day after I penned this is that post featuring the fake poll result, fact-checked by Fact Crescendo on the pro-Ranil Wickremesinghe ?????? ???????Facebook account, has now been deleted. Screenshot of this post on the left. As I noted, only this post featured an interstitial noting it was misleading, and fake. The other fake poll results, and the post featuring them (on the right in screenshot), remains on this Facebook account. At the time of writing this comment, it has been shared over 80 times. It speaks also to the limitations of Facebook's own T&S in the Sri Lankan context to ensure that fact-checked material, flagged as fake/disinfo/misleading, is applied to all relevant material. Clearly, this isn't happening, allowing agile, strategic, and sophisticated disinformation entrepreneurs like the admins of ?????? ???????to get away with the enduring promotion of falsehoods - with total impunity.