To say that a lot has happened in 2022 is an understatement. The event that hangs over it all, like a dark cloud, is Russia's unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine. To give meaning to the year, many media outlets have compiled year-end summaries of the best.
EUvsDisinformation has compiled a list of key research on disinformation during 2022.
This list is neither a comprehensive overview nor representative of all the research conducted. Rather, it is a curation of some of the findings we considered most interesting and useful.
Does information manipulation work?
To be fair, disinformation became very loud at one point. Journalists, think tanks, analysts, policymakers, politicians – everyone wanted in on it. Focusing attention on problems is a good thing. Building surface noise around them, not so much. But despite the peak noise, disinformation as an issue is here to stay.
Yet, after all this discussion, analysis, articles, and keynote speeches, not everyone believes that disinformation has a negative impact on the real world. Looking at the academic research on this specific aspect of disinformation, there is surprisingly little of it. While it is difficult to put a finger on the exact effect that information manipulation has on our societies and on us as individuals, it is not impossible.
Even if the research on the impact of information is far from conclusive, certain features may make the success of an information manipulation operation more likely. In a review of the literature (here) for the Swedish Defense University, Claes Wallenius described four of them. First, the sender's manipulative intent is hidden. Second, the sender's antagonistic intent is hidden. Third, the message is not too far removed from the recipient's current perspective. And finally, the message is constructed emotionally rather than rationally. If this sounds familiar, it's because Russia has been doing this for years. luan most of these letters.
A topic that comes up very often in discussions about foreign information manipulation is election interference. A group of scientists from Italian, Finnish and American universities studied (here) the impact of misleading information on votes for populist parties in the 2018 Italian elections. They found that exposure to misleading information favors populist parties regardless of prior support for them, but that this fact alone cannot explain most of the rise in populism.
Everything is in our heads.
The absorption of misinformation and disinformation is intertwined with the way our minds work.
In an article for Nature Review Psychology, Ullrich KH Ecker et al looked at (here) cognitive, social, and affective factors that lead people to form or even adopt misinformed views. Ironically, false beliefs generally arise through the same mechanisms that create accurate beliefs. It is a mixture of cognitive drivers such as intuitive thinking and socio-affective drivers. When deciding what is true, people are often biased to believe in the validity of information and trust their intuition rather than reason. Also, repetition increases belief in misleading information and facts.
Going a step further, Álex Escolà-Gascón et al investigated (here) psychopathological profiles that characterize people prone to consuming misleading information. After conducting a number of tests on more than 1,400 volunteers, they concluded that people with high scores on schizotypy (a condition not very different from (here) from schizophrenia), paranoia and histrionics (most well-known (here) such as dramatic personality disorder) are more vulnerable to the negative effects of misleading information. People who do not disclose misleading information also tend to be more anxious, suggestible, and vulnerable to strong emotions.
Unfortunately, even when people recognize misleading information online, many tend to remain inactive rather than challenge it. Selin Gurgun et al (here) to understand why. In short, many possible reasons could justify online silence on misleading information, but they fall into one of the following six categories: self-oriented, relationship-oriented, other-oriented, content-oriented, individual characteristics, and technical factors.
Even worse, some people seem to not only believe misleading information, but also accept misleading information that they don't believe. In one section (here) for Current Opinion in Psychology, Daniel A. Effron and Beth A. Helgason reviewed research on three psychological factors that encourage people to accept misinformation: bias, imagination, and repetition. In summary, bias can lower moral standards, imagination and bias can make the broader meaning of a lie seem true, and repetition can dampen people’s negative reactions to lies.
In search of solutions – from debunking to prebunking
Fortunately, not everything is bad and dark. While misinformation is no laughing matter, humor can actually be an effective response to it. Mark Boukes and Michael Hameleers conducted (here) conducted an experiment to compare the effects of regular and satirical fact checks. They found that both formats of fact checking – factual and satirical – were equally effective in reducing agreement and perceived credibility of false information. Regular fact checking was particularly effective among people who agreed with the fact-checked information, while satirical fact checking was equally effective across the board.
Despite their usefulness, fact-checking and debunking have some fundamental limitations. One is that debunking is a reaction to something that has already happened. In other words, we are always one step behind our adversary. Another limitation is the difficulty that fact-checkers face in trying to reach the same audiences targeted by malicious actors in the first place. In response, researchers are now looking for ways to reach people before they hit with misleading information.
One such approach is prebunking, or psychological vaccination. 'Academic heavyweights' as Jon Roozenbeek, Sander van der Linden et al put it (here) theory to the test. Drawing on the results of seven studies with nearly 30,000 participants, the authors concluded that vaccination videos can help build psychological resilience against common manipulation techniques, including the use of overly emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, blame games, and ad hominem attacks. Furthermore, they found that these videos are effective not only in a laboratory setting but also on a real-world video-sharing platform and can therefore be easily implemented at scale.
(Article borrowed from EU vs Disinfo)