Welcome to Memetic Warfare.
We’ll start this week with some contrarian opinions on Meta’s sudden decision to stop fact-checking.
Firstly, my general perspective on things Meta is a private company and as far as I’m concerned they can do whatever they want, even if I don’t like it, and I in turn am welcome to not use their platforms. As a caveat - I’m not referring to changes in hate speech or other potentially actually illegal speech policies here, which in my opinion should be a separate issue.
Regardless of my personal thoughts and ethics/civil society concerns, I also think that fact-checking is just a bad solution, even if implemented ethically and at a large scale.
Firstly, let’s dispense with the myth of fact-checking being some sort of panacea for the ills of a given platform.
Fact-checking is always going to be implemented in some form of biased fashion, as there is simply no other way to exist in the world, let alone fact-check online discourse. Inherent bias aside, almost anything can be presented in a factually-accurate but biased or misleading fashion, and frankly many of the issues that people have with quote unquote disinformation are actually concerns about bias and potential misrepresentation, and less factual accuracy.
Hard facts more often than not aren’t the issue, at least in the IO space. Facts aren’t even the issue in IO most of the time when it comes to actually false information, for example - no one is really concerned about the use of Meta platforms to amplify forgeries, though that happens as well and can and should be taken down via other legal methods, such as foreign interference laws, libel/defamation, and so on. More often than not though, the concern is some off-kilter, or in extreme cases borderline insane, politically oriented post about some topic.
Secondly, fact-checking as a solution is just ineffectual, bias-aside. Fact-checking is as reactive as it gets - responding to content and claims posted online with significant latency, in many cases being viewed by only the smallest fraction of those who saw the original content. Fact-checking, even if Meta were to multiply its budget tenfold, would still be highly reactive and only capable of responding to an infinitesimal percent of online discourse.
Thirdly, fact-checking is a black box in many cases. Human moderators make a decision, right or wrong, in an non-transparent fashion - leading to confusion, and algorithmic attempts are even worse at this. Transparency is critical for any actual fact-checking effort (and I’m not opposed to fact-checking being done by those who wish to torture themselves in a Sisyphean fashion) to ensure that people see on what basis a given claim is made. A community-notes style version is more effective in this regard, to be honest, but I also don’t think that that is critical per se.
Let’s also perceive “disinformation” and “misinformation” in the context of influence operations and interference. For about as long as the space has existed, researchers have conflated disinformation with influence operations.
The two fields, in fact, are quite different. People focusing on domestic disinformation often do so from a political stance, and additionally focus on the confluence of disinformation and extremism.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any overlap with IO and extremism or overtly false information, as there certainly is, but it isn’t the biggest part of the story.
Counter-foreign interference/IO can and should be largely apolitical, focused less on what’s said but rather who’s saying it and in what context. In fact, most good IO and propaganda content isn’t actually factually incorrect, but rather biased, tilted, slanted or whatever adjective you like, based on a large kernel of truth, or alternatively the exposure of previously secret or privileged information in cyber-enabled IO.
Most quality influence operations would effectively bypass fact-checking mechanisms with little effort. I’ll state this again because it’s important: this is because most influence operations rely on inauthentic identities and biased content alongside false information (which isn’t technically a requirement).
So, with fact-checking, what do we really get?
We get a highly reactive, high-latency black box mechanism that doesn’t reach many people covering a huge swathe of speech with no effective transparency or support system.
The real question, as far as I’m concerned, is what Meta does to their counter-IO teams, and that remains to be seen.
Now that my diatribe is over, let’s discuss some memetic warfare.
The first order of business is the Taiwanese National Security Bureau’s latest statement on Chinese influence and interference activity, available here. See a translated version below:
What stood out to me were the statistics regarding social media activity, the role of Chinese social media platforms and additionally the added information on Shenzhen Haimaiyunxiang, a previously-known Chinese PR firm exposed as active in IO. Also interesting to see some specific accounts called out - good starting points for investigation for those curious.
I imagine we’ll see more from Taiwan in the counter-IO space in the coming years. The Global Taiwan Institute also put out an interesting look at some specific influencers and cooption attempts online, check it out of you’re interested in the Taiwanese influencer media space, there are some interesting specific cases.
A Chinese PR firm setting up a political party in Taiwan, trying to “recruit Taiwanese entertainers and celebrities to be founding members” stood out to me for sure:
From there, we’ll move on to the Gnida Project’s coverage of John Mark Dougan and the Russia-Cuba friendship society which apparently plays a role:
I won’t steal their thunder, and I recommend reading it in its entirety, but I will add - Cuba is an underrated IO actor, and one that I hope to more research on in the future.
The next order of business is the Center for Information Resilience’s look at the Croatian elections, available here. Those interested in Croatia should take a look, and I’m glad to see the CIR dip their toes into new fields of investigation.
That’s it for this week!