What to do with disinformation mercenaries?

You may have seen the coverage last week about the mercenary group #TeamJorge, running influence operations and covertly interfering in elections around the world. I thought I would put together some thoughts about what to do about these types of actors, and what an All-of-Society approach to disinformation looks like. I'm also trying out the Linkedin article format, so feel free to let me know if you think it works.

Excellent investigative journalism like what we've seen from Forbidden Stories, together with a coalition of newspapers, shows in vivid detail what we’ve known about the disinformation industry for a long time. We can only hope that the exposure will neutralise some of Jorge’s capacity to act, and provide more momentum for meaningful action. However, although the temptations is great, it is important not to play whack-a-moll and chase after disinformation campaigns and mercenaries. Rather, we need to set an ambitious agenda, and shift the ground under disinformers, with coordinated action, and whole-of-society change. Here are a few steps:???

1)?You can’t manage what you can’t measure. We need a common language to share data and analysis on disinformation and to coordinate action at scale. That requires shared definitions of tactics and threats across a community of those fighting disinformation. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, the cybersecurity field has already tackled the problem. That’s why the open source DISARM Foundation framework of disinformation behaviours applies cybersecurity methods and tools. This is a crucial step, because without data sharing and coordination, we’d be doomed to just making individual observations without effective action – “admiring the problem” ( quote Pablo Breuer, Ph.D. ) instead of solving it. Once analysis sharing and coordination are possible and scalable, opportunities arise. We have had some fantastic work on this by European External Action Service , The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats & European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) . This recent reporting on #TeamJorge does usefully illustrate exactly how cyberattacks drive and combine with disinformation & influence campaigns - it is right to use the same cybersecurity approaches and tools to tackle these. Working with partners like the Alfred Landecker Foundation , Public Democracy , and MITRE has advanced this approach.

2)?When the tools for coordination are there, it’s crucial to get them out to community of democracy defenders - civil society organisations, human rights defenders, communicators, campaigners, journalists, advocates, business who take responsibility for their social impact. Strategic communications, effective campaigning in real time, and tangible measures against disinformation have a far-reach real systemic impact. For example, compare the experience of two Russian invasions of Ukraine, one in 2014, and one in 2022 – in the first, Russian government disinformation succeeded, and the international community failed to act. In the second, Ukrainians effectively countered Kremlin disinformation towards Europe and English-speaking audiences, and the outcomes are very different.

The same is true for civic tech tools for citizen participation, voter turnout, and citizen action overall. A functioning democracy that is not disinformed requires citizen action. Authoritarian lies function through fear, hate, and victimisation. Active citizenship requires hope. When you think about it, Yoda has a point.??????????

?

3)?Where immediate actions can shape and determine the long run, we also need long term investment in raising the level of the public debate overall, making sure our society can make democratic decisions through conversation about reality and not fiction. We need media literacy and citizenship education as a vaccine against authoritarianism and disinformation. As AI is on the rise, human creativity and understanding are most important – education is key in all walks of life and all stages of life, in schools and outside of them. That’s why projects like Public Editor are so crucially important. Where tactics and countermeasures are a sword against disinformation, media literacy education is the shield says Brigham Adams, Ph.D. of Public Editor (a project of Goodly Labs and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science)

?4)?Clear-cut far-reaching change to our digital eco-system is a must. That’s why we need ambitious and effective legislation that sets democratic values, human rights & well-being at the heart of how these technologies are used. That is where Europe can and often does take the lead. But this legislation is incredibly complex, full of unexpected dilemmas, trade-offs, and paradoxes. Different actors and different perspective needs to get around the table for outcomes that are both ambitious and effective, and that really do deliver the desired outcomes. And once legislation is actually adopted, it needs to be properly enforced. And well, to be able to advocate and shape legislation, you need a common understanding of the problem, and effective tools for campaigning and communications?- see point 1 & 2.

?

5)?For change to be sustainable and systemic, we need new ways of using the digital space. We need to innovate new business models, re-imagine public spaces, and generate brand new ideas of how the technology should work and what value it should deliver. But that doesn’t happen all on its own. It requires real investment from the public & private sectors, initiatives from non-profits and education for innovation, and favourable legislation. Humane and human-centred, values-based technologies needs to be scalable to be able to transform our reality for the better.

These steps are interconnected, and above all they can only come about through cooperation and joined up action across all parts of society. Disinformers are still much better resourced than those defending democracy by orders of magnitude. But when defenders come together they have an exponentially greater transformational impact. Some food for thought.??I'm grateful to the wonderful team at Alliance4Europe for driving a strategy that leverages these elements for transformative impact.