The threat of interference by Russia and other autocracies in the US election will be at its highest during the final 48 hours before election day, according to Microsoft experts. Targeted disinformation campaigns indeed appear as one of the major threats to democracy today. However, the surge in fake news cannot be explained solely by the conspiracies of autocracies. Politicians in democratic countries actively use mechanisms for creating ‘alternative facts’.
‘Alternative facts’ have become so popular because they appeal to fundamental beliefs and biases, creating a sense of threat for certain social groups. Studies show that false news spreads faster than true news, largely due to cognitive biases that engage people in sharing emotionally charged content. Meanwhile, corrections and logical arguments never achieve the same level of virality and popularity as false news.
Information revolutions lead to the democratisation of access to information and greater citizen engagement in politics. But their downside is society’s vulnerability to populism and propaganda. In the early 20th century, first mass newspapers, and later radio, became powerful tools for the popularity of totalitarian ideologies.
Today, the Internet has finally become humanity’s main information infrastructure, eliminating many ‘vertical’ tools and channels of news dissemination, while social networks have radically transformed the public sphere, involving much broader social groups. Both contain enormous potential for democratisation, as well as a significant potential for threats to democracy. Humanity still has to adapt to this new reality and find tools to mitigate these threats.
Microsoft President Brad Smith has warned that the danger of foreign interference in the US elections will increase ‘in the last 48 hours before the election’. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, he referenced Slovakia's experience, where a fake audio recording of one of the candidates was circulated right before Election Day, Bloomberg reports. A report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC), released just before the hearings, revealed fake videos: one showing Kamala Harris supporters attacking a Trump supporter, and another telling a fabricated story about Harris allegedly hitting a girl with her car and fleeing the scene 10 years ago. Additionally, Iran, China, and Russia were found to be spreading false information about both US presidential candidates, according to the report.
Election interference through organised disinformation campaigns – where fake news created with the help of artificial intelligence plays a key role, further blurring the line between fact and fabrication – now appears to be a global challenge for democracies. However, the current boom in fake news and disinformation, despite the seemingly transparent information age, cannot be attributed solely to autocratic conspiracies.
The specificity of the new networked propaganda and the new model of disseminating information and disinformation lies in its ability to engage people in interacting with news and creating entire communities around it. These communities consist of individuals who like, comment on, and share the content (→ Gregory Asmolov: Propaganda in the Networked Environment). In addition to the resources of autocracies, the residents of the target countries must also be involved in spreading fake news. In other words, autocracies need to tap into a real demand for fake news – only then can such a campaign succeed. How is this demand created?
Just a couple of weeks before the Senate hearings, US presidential candidate Donald Trump publicly repeated a fabricated story several times, claiming that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. Journalists from the fact-checking outlet NewsGuard discovered that this all started with a Facebook post from a Springfield resident in a closed group. She wrote that a neighbour told her that her daughter's friend’s cat had disappeared and was later found skinned in the yard of a house where Haitian immigrants lived. This was essentially a third-hand retelling of a rumour (which may have been connected to a widespread US urban legend that Asian immigrants catch and eat pets). Nevertheless, the post was quickly debunked and deleted.
The post was read by only a few dozen people, but one of them reposted a screenshot of the story on the X network. More reposts followed, and eventually, J.D. Vance, the US vice-presidential candidate, noticed the story and mentioned it on platform X as an example of the harmful effects of Democratic immigration policies. The next day, Trump retold the fake story during his debate with Harris, creatively adding dogs to the cats. In just a few days, the false message, debunked from the very beginning, reached an audience of 67 million people. During the broadcast, the hosts once again refuted the rumour, citing the mayor of Springfield. Later, The Wall Street Journal reporters found the cat's owner, spoke to her, and confirmed that the cat had been found unharmed in the basement of her home.
Despite this, neither Trump nor Vance retracted their statements. The exact size of the audience that heard the story about the dogs and cats (later geese were added) is impossible to determine, but the clip of Trump's remarks spread across networks worldwide. Vance also did not delete his post (which now has 11 million views), telling CNN: ‘If I have to make up stories to get the American media to pay attention to the suffering of the American people, I’ll keep doing it’. This is no longer a lie or fiction but an ‘alternative fact’ (as former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway put it) or, in other terminology, a viral meme that irritates some and inspires others to be creative.
As we can see, autocracies are not weaving their conspiracies alone. Their messages fall on fertile ground, which is eagerly cultivated by Western politicians themselves. The issue is not so much which authoritarian countries are spreading certain disinformation, but rather the phenomenon that ensures its maximum virality and creates vast communities of consumers engaged in its rapid dissemination. Of course, autocracies assist in this process with their resources, and the algorithms of social networks and search engines often contribute to it (→ Lev Gershenzon: Algorithms – Reputation – Karma). However, in the Vance-Trump case, the main role was played by American politicians and those Americans who, sharing the candidates' views on Democratic immigration policies, like them, needed ‘alternative facts’ to support their opinions.
The willingness of American politicians to insist on ‘making up stories’, even when their falsehoods are inevitably exposed, is remarkable. The effectiveness of falsehoods can only be partially diminished by their debunking. In most cases, the debunking does not spread as widely as the original false message. The Wall Street Journal's report – published by a reputable conservative outlet – about the found cat should have put an end to this saga, but it got lost in the information stream.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have studied the spread of true and false messages on Twitter using a dataset from 2006 to 2017, indexing 126,000 tweets as ‘true’ or ‘false’ based on assessments from several fact-checking services. They found that falsehoods spread significantly further, faster, and wider than truth across all categories of information. ‘On average, a truthful message rarely reaches more than 1000 users, but the top 1% of cascades (i.e., chains of reposts) of false news consistently reach audiences between 1000 and 100,000 people’, the study states.
This effect was more pronounced in the case of false political news than in false news about natural disasters, science, or finance, and the amount of false political messages increased during election campaigns. The research showed that algorithms spread both true and false news at the same speed, meaning that the accuracy of the messages was a neutral factor for them. ‘This suggests that false news spreads faster than true news because people are more inclined to share it’, the authors write.
False messages win the competition for attention not because people enjoy spreading lies, but because ‘sensational’ stories resonate emotionally, aligning with the ‘expectations’ of the audience. ‘Truth and evidence – no matter how logically consistent or factually accurate – do not influence public opinion or support for a politician as much as appeals to basic cognitive biases that affirm deep-seated beliefs and core cultural values’, states the article Effective Messaging in Social Media, which analyses factors contributing to the virality of the content.
Its authors also used Twitter data — specifically discussions about ‘Brexit’ from 2015–2019, when the term ‘post-truth’ became part of popular vocabulary, and about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in fall 2019. Among the biases or cognitive distortions that help messages go viral, the authors highlight the ‘negativity effect’ (the tendency to respond more to negative news) and ‘threats to the core personal or societal values of the target audience’ (events or news perceived as threats to societal norms). Another study reveals that messages appealing to fear influence political behaviour about 30% more effectively than neutral ones (→ Re: Russia: Demand for Fear).
The problem faced by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and humanity as a whole, is not the first of its kind for the information community. The emergence of the press in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by the spread of radio, created the phenomenon of mass audiences. Just as politicians and activists today seek ways to create viral messages, newspaper editors and mass media creators aimed to expand their audiences as much as possible. The rise of what came to be known as ‘yellow’ or ‘tabloid’ journalism was a technological step forward, but many saw it as a degradation and a ‘moral decline’.
Mass journalism also gave rise to radical political activism. Benito Mussolini was a journalist and, according to his contemporaries, a talented editor. In just two years working for the socialist newspaper Avanti (1912-1914), he increased its circulation fivefold. When his views shifted, he founded the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, which later became the official fascist mouthpiece and lasted until 1943. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who would later found the Spanish Falange, was also the editor of a far-right publication. Leon Trotsky was a talented publicist and editor, as was another publicist and editor, Vladimir Lenin.
The most important tool for consolidating mass society in the 20th century was radio. The Nazis' first steps after coming to power included establishing control over radio stations, centralising management, and distributing cheap ‘people's receivers’. The rapid expansion of access to this new technology fueled a sense of a new quality of consumption for millions. People who had never been media consumers before became part of the mass audience, perceiving Bolshevik and fascist propaganda as an inevitable, unavoidable component of adopting new technologies and the ‘new order’. As Joseph Goebbels said: ‘We could not have seized power or used it as we did without radio’.
It took decades and a lost war by the fascists for propaganda and mobilisation to be discredited as the primary functions of the media. Sociologist and journalism researcher Herbert Gans writes that in the second half of the 20th century, responsible journalism came to be understood as critically important for the economy, financial and commodity markets, healthcare, and democratic politics. The growing demand for quality, including paid, information and the self-regulation of the media environment led to the development of institutions capable of certifying information as truthful: editorial standards, fact-checking, publishing traditions, and the institution of reputation.
Today, the Internet has finally become humanity’s primary information infrastructure, eliminating many ‘vertical’ tools and channels for its dissemination. Social networks have radically transformed the public sphere, engaging much broader social groups who find their voice through their contributions to the virality of news and ‘alternative facts’, which take on the status of political statements. Both the diversification of information sources and channels and new models of people's involvement in the process of creating and spreading information contain enormous potential for democratisation and, simultaneously, immense new threats to it. Humanity is yet to adapt to this new reality and find tools to mitigate these threats. This is a much more significant challenge than the one discussed by the Intelligence Committee of the US Senate.