Michigan again a target of election
disinformation
Detroit Free Press
0:30
0:37
Disinformation
tactics used to mislead voters are continuing and evolving just days before the
presidential election.
What
role disinformation may play on Election Day in Michigan isn’t yet
clear, but, in the four years since the last presidential
election, questions still linger about how social media changes what
happens in the voting booth. Some strategies from 2016 seem to be continuing,
including targeting minority groups with messages meant to discourage them from
casting a ballot.
After
the 2016 presidential election in Michigan, proof of Russia’s deliberate
attempt to mislead U.S. voters through a coordinated disinformation campaign on
social media began to emerge. Michigan was one of nine states that two
Russian agents visited in June 2014 as part of an intelligence-gathering
mission, according to a Senate
Intelligence Committee report on
Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Misinformation
and disinformation are terms used to describe false information, but
misinformation is false information shared without the intent to cause harm.
Disinformation is when someone deliberately creates or shares information that
is incorrect to inflict damage, such as telling people the wrong date of the
election.
Young
Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and
continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts during the 2020 presidential
election cycle. Kim is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
where she is part of a research project called Project DATA, or
Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. The project focuses on the 2020 election and
tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates
target and speak to potential voters.
One
example her team captured was an Instagram account called
"Michigan_Black_Community." It posed as an African American
group in Michigan focused on racial issues. The group included
anti-Kamala Harris posts, and Kim's group captured it in
September 2019, just before the primaries. Instagram removed the
account in mid-October in a sweep to rid the platform of false accounts created
by Russian actors.
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However,
despite teams such as Kim's trying to archive accounts and track the actions of
foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns, it is difficult to get a clear
picture of what is happening in the 2020 election, said Josh Tucker,
a New York University professor of politics and co-director of NYU's Center for
Social Media and Politics. That type of data isn’t being released in real time,
Tucker said.
In the
case of Facebook, data about what users saw in 2016 was never released,
according to multiple sources the Free Press talked to.
There
is more archived data about how human beings interact with politics than ever
in the history of scholarship because of all this digital tracing, Tucker said.
But it isn’t public.
“All
this data that we need to try to understand how the political world is being
transformed by social media is actually owned by the companies whose impact
we’re trying to understand,” Tucker said. “And they have a say on who gets
access to this and how you get access to this.”
Testimony
before Congress from these tech company executives has given the
public some insight into how their news feeds are formed.
During
a Senate hearing on Oct. 28, U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., asked
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg what his company was doing to prevent extremist
groups from growing on the platform.
“We’ve
taken a number of steps here including disqualifying groups from being included
in our recommendation system at all if they routinely are being used to share
misinformation or if they have content violations or a number of other
criteria,” Zuckerberg said.
Michigan
on Russia’s radar
In Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election, President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign
chairman, Paul Manafort, told a Russian intelligence officer about his plans to
win the election, including naming four key “battleground” states, according to
testimony from Rick Gates, Manafort’s former business partner.
That
list included Michigan, as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Detroit was mentioned once on page 34 of the report, from a Nov. 7,
2016, tweet when a troll referred to the city, tweeting:
"Detroit residents speak out against the failed policies of Obama, Hillary
& democrats."
Facebook told
the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 that in the two years leading up to
the 2016 election, ads bought by the Kremlin-linked Russian operative, the
Internet Research Agency, reached as many as 126 million users. In January
2018, Twitter announced approximately 1.4 million users had some type of
interaction with an IRA-controlled account.
This
doesn't tell the whole story, though, said Kim, the professor who found the
"Michigan_black_community" Instagram account. Once an IRA ad was
shared by another user, Facebook considered that share to be
"organic." Facebook did not release data about where the IRA content
went after it stopped being a paid advertisement and became something
shared by other Facebook users.
When
U.S. intelligence officials warned the House Intelligence Committee that Russia
was again ramping up efforts to poke around in the 2020 election, Kim wrote a
piece for the Brennen Center for Justice about how much more brazen
Russia accounts became after 2016.
In
addition to emphasizing wedge issues, such as race and gun control, Kim found
the accounts run by the IRA appeared to be targeting battleground states,
including Michigan, by putting the state directly into the account's user name.
These
accounts also no longer appear to be buying ads; rather, they're now
sharing domestic content. This blurs the line between foreign and domestic
actors enough to sometimes evade the safety protocols Facebook and other
platforms put into place.
Last
week, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe announced Iran was
behind emails sent to people in Pennsylvania and Ohio
threatening they would be attacked if they went to the polls. The people behind
the intimidationattack used a domain that made it appear the emails came from
the far-right authoritarian group Proud Boys. No officials have announced
any Michigan voters getting similar emails.
A new
election playbook
It
isn’t just foreign actors who are trying to confuse or mislead
voters. Earlier this month, Jacob Wohl, a 22-year-old Los Angeles
resident, and Jack Burkman, a 54-year-old resident of Arlington,
Virginia, were
charged with several felonies related to voter intimidation and election fraud.
The pair, who pleaded not guilty, are accused of orchestrating a
series of inaccurate robocalls to Michigan voters, telling them that law
enforcement and debt collectors would use the information provided by
those who cast an absentee ballot.
Partisan
news sites have also sprung up, all with innocuous names that
an unwitting reader could mistake for just a normal local newspaper. There are
at least 34 of these sites with names linked to Michigan areas.
Sites
not always mentioned when talking about social media have also come under
scrutiny, such as Spotify, which on Oct. 19 removed four QAnon conspiracy
podcasts after Media Matters for America noted the group was being left to
thrive on its platform, according
to Business Insider.
The
legacy of the 2016 Russian interference in U.S. elections is not that
Russia created a blueprint for foreign interference, Tucker said. Rather it
is a toolkit for anyone to do these coordinated campaigns online.
“Who's
got the biggest stake in the outcome of elections?” Tucker asked. “It's the
domestic actors in those countries."
Platforms
on guard
After
2016, it seemed like the platforms were caught unaware both of the rapid rise
of political disinformation and the foreign influence campaigns, Tucker said.
They’ve
had four years to prepare for this and have made some changes, Tucker said,
including monitoring for fake accounts and deplatforming (removing) pages
that spread false information. Both Twitter and Facebook have added voting
information links to content related to the U.S. elections. Facebook restricted
new political or social justice advertising starting Oct. 27. Ad campaigns
submitted before the deadline continue to run, but changes to the content
of those ads is limited and new campaigns are not allowed until Nov. 5, after
the election. The platform will host no political advertising on Nov. 4.
Twitter added a new prompt that
pops up when users try to retweet a link they haven't recently opened. The
prompt tells the user, "Headlines don't tell the full story,"
and gives them the option to read the story on Twitter before retweeting. The
new feature was meant to "give you better context and to reduce the
unintentional spread of misleading information on Twitter."
“Now,
in the aftermath of these elections, will we see if they were more effective, I
don’t know,” Tucker said. “And I don’t know about both of those things. I
don’t know how much we’ll be able to see at the end of the day, and
I’m also not sure what we’ll learn.”
Facebook
also announced in August it would partner with independent researchers to study
whether the platform changed the outcome of the 2020 election. Dartmouth
government professor Brendan Nyhah is one of the researchers who will
participate in that effort.
When
Nyhah, who previously taught at the University of Michigan, studied how
people's beliefs changed after exposure to misleading and false information, he
found articles didn't change people's minds, but did appear to increase
partisanship. More studies need to be done, he said, but he said he
believes people should be more thoughtful about how they talk about
disinformation.
"It
doesn't mean this stuff doesn't matter, but we need to be more specific in
thinking about how it might matter and for whom," Nyhah said.
Fadi
Quran is the disinformation lead for Avaaz, an online activist organization
group with more than 65 million members worldwide that focuses on issues
such as climate change and disinformation. Social media platforms are the
ones that can tell who has interacted with disinformation and how their
behavior changed, and they don't do that, Quran said. He was skeptical the
research being done by Nyhah and others would yield the type of transparency
needed to answer questions about the effects of disinformation.
"In
many cases, Facebook promises, gets all the positive PR and then pulls
back," Quran said. "We saw that with NYU recently."
Quran
was referring to Facebook
demanding an end to the collection of data by New
York University researchers whose tool, AdObserver,
shows who is being micro-targeted by political ads on the platform. Users
install the AdObserver browser extension and allow it to capture the ads they
are served on Facebook.
The
AdObservatory is part of NYU's Online Political Transparency Project. In
a Medium
post about the features of the AdObserver tool, NYU explained
how political campaigns can upload to Facebook a spreadsheet of people’s
names, phone numbers or email addresses to target them with advertising.
For
instance, the AdObservatory shows that in
Michigan, Sen. Peters uploaded an email list from Anne Lewis
Consulting LLC, a media strategy firm used by Political Action Committees
such as the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Treasury Fund. Peters also
targeted people in Ann Arbor and Marysville.
Peters'
opponent, Republican businessman John James, uploaded his own list to
Facebook. He also targeted people with homes in Michigan and who liked Ben
Shapiro, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and/or Tucker Carlson.
In
total, Peters and his associated pages so far have spent about $1.4 million on
Facebook advertising, compared with James, who has spent about $165,000,
according to AdObserver's data.
In
2016, foreign actors had access to the same tools Peters and James
use now.
Quran
pointed to the billions spent on Facebook advertisements as part of why he
doubts the idea the platform doesn't have the power to change elections.
"The
truth is if you're a marketer and you've used Facebook to sell your products,
you do know how much influence the platform can have in terms of its reach on
people," Quran said.
The
truth is, even if disinformation campaigns are 5% effective or 3% effective,
that could sway a swing state, Quran said.
Country
divides
As
acting assistant secretary of defense from 2015 to 2017, U.S. Rep. Elissa
Slotkin, a Democrat from Holly, said she saw what an effective tool
disinformation can be in dividing countries. She watched Russia use
disinformation campaigns in former Soviet states in Eastern Europe.
Russia’s
strategy was to turn people within a country against one another, Slotkin
said. Part of the reason disinformation is so effective is that it
capitalizes on real issues, such as what to do about a global pandemic and how
to address racial divides, she said.
“What
they’re doing is taking those differences and amplifying them and making people
feel like they have to take sides,” Slotkin said.
While
speaking to a group of about 40 Michigan voters recently, Slotkin asked
how many had lost a friend or family member over politics this year. Almost
everyone in the group raised their hand, she said. People can’t stand the
tension and they just want this election to be done, she said.
A
limited, but dangerous threat
While
disinformation undermines some of the fundamental tenets of democracy, such as
informed voting, Tucker did emphasize what a small percentage of overall media
Russian trolls took up in 2016.
“We
always want to be careful about overstating the influence of a small number of
tweets during the course of the election,” Tucker said.
It
might have affected some individuals in 2016, but the idea that it affected a
large number of people seems highly doubtful, Tucker said. Overstating how much
false information was circulating in 2016 can lead people to feel helpless,
when researchers know the problem wasn’t so large that disinformation drowned
out legitimate news in 2016, he said.
Three
of Facebook's own security researchers wrote a
report in April 2017 about information operations on the
platform and
said, "The reach of the content shared by false amplifiers was marginal
compared to the overall volume of civic content shared during the US
election."
When
looking at all the content created during the run up to 2016, Kim said the idea
that other content drowned out the disinformation campaigns makes sense.
However, the strategy appeared to focus on minority groups in certain states —
meaning they might have been inundated with disinformation.
To
report misinformation
In
anticipation of another year of deceptive advertising in Michigan, Secretary of
State Jocelyn Benson created an email address where voters can report
misinformation to the Secretary of State's Office. Depending on the reach and
content of the information, it can be corrected on the Secretary of
State's fact
check page or escalated to the Attorney General's
office. Attempts to misinform the public in 2016 included claims that
mailing in a ballot wouldn’t count, that certain polling places would be closed
and that there were long lines to vote, Benson said.
“A lot
of the nefarious things would say, ‘Election Day’s been moved,’” Benson
said.
Minority
groups in swing states are often the primary targets of this sort of messaging,
Kim said. Those voters, especially, should be wary as Election Day approaches,
she said
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