Content area
Full Text
In 2016, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the organization responsible for much of the Russian state-sponsored social media campaign documented in the Mueller report, created a Facebook group called "Being Patriotic." In September of that year, the group posted an image of a weathered veteran prompting readers to "Like & share if you think our veterans must get benefits before refugees." The caption claimed that "liberals" wanted to invite 620,000 refugees across the US/Mexico border while over 50,000 homeless veterans were "dying in the streets."
The claim about refugees came from one of then presidential candidate Donald Trump's stump speeches; it has since been refuted by Politifact. Nonetheless, the meme was shared by more than 640,000 Facebook users. This is just one example of how the IRA worked to undermine democratic functioning in the United States and throughout Europe. Its campaign targeted social media users on both the right and the left by producing and sharing misleading and intentionally divisive images and other content-up to and including manufacturing and selling "Black Matters" (sic) T-shirts and "LGBTpositive" sex toys.
The scope and audacity of the Russian influence campaign, both in the lead-up to the 2016 election and since, have revealed startling and unanticipated ways in which new technology, particularly social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and apps such as Whatsapp that permit peer-to-peer dissemination of content, have made society more vulnerable to disinformation. These emerging vulnerabilities demand a policy response. But their distinctive character also creates new challenges. Social media propaganda is different from other forms of propaganda, and this matters for how it should be regulated.
As both scholars and policy wonks are keen to emphasize, there is a distinction between disinformation (content purposefully shaped to mislead, usually for political or economic purposes) and misinformation (false or misleading material that is shared without deceitful purpose). That we should seek effective policy responses to disinformation, particularly when generated as part of an influence campaign waged by a hostile foreign power, seems obvious. But regulating misinformation is another matter. The right to be wrong is a central tenet of the liberal tradition, without which society could not have freedom of thought or freedom of speech. That some political agendas happen to be served by widespread...