The five segments of the chain and Russian influence on the 2016 US elections
Disinformation can - as irritating as it may sound - be described as a value chain. For some actors, this generates value: power, influence, money.
In a collaborative project with Vince&Vert and codetekt (building on the work of legacies.now), the betterplace lab developed an interactive map to illustrate and make the process of creation and dissemination of disinformation more tangible. There we start by looking at disinformation as information and describe the process from its creation to its impact in five interlocking phases: Initiating - Creating - Placing - Disseminating - Influencing. In each of these phases, we first ask who the actors are and what their motivation is for being part of this phase. In the second step, we analyse which methods are used.
This value chain can be well described using the example of the Kremlin's influence on the 2016 US presidential election. In a nutshell, the whole thing went like this:
Initiating: Going back a couple of years further, remember Putin's speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference in 2007, in which he said: “I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today’s – and precisely in today’s – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation.” His words strongly signal that he recognises an imbalance of power in the world that he explicitly does not like. The superpower addressed here is the USA in its combination with its allies in Europe. So what could be more obvious than to destabilise this centre of power? To achieve this geopolitical aim, Russia is still trying to gain influence in the countries of "the West", such as in the case of the 2016 US elections, in which Russia used disinformation. The former KGB agent Putin well knows what enormous impact state-organised disinformation campaigns can have and how strong their effect is on public perception in a country. The Russian state uses enormous financial and human resources in its operations.
Creating: The Russian media agency Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St Petersburg and with links to Russian intelligence, conducted a large-scale disinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, primarily on social media, to radicalise supporters of Donald Trump and unsettle his opponents. According to US security information, this campaign was directly ordered by Putin. [The Guardian, Spiegel].
Placing: Over 1,000 IRA operatives created (long before) sets of fake accounts and used them on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram to engage in political discussions with US citizens and to post content as often as possible. This generated the impression that the topics being brought up were being heavily discussed. Bots and targeted microtargeting were used to effectively reach Trump supporters in particular.
Distribution: Many of the IRA's posts were re-shared thousands of times by Trump supporters, which gave them a wider reach. The IRA was even able to provoke real demonstrations by the Trump camp through targeted calls on Facebook. We can still remember that even outside the Trump camp, every provocative post by the presidential candidate was echoed and all of the polarising content related to the presidential election received a lot of attention. Media, organisations, politicians and citizens around the world have taken every bait.
Influence: The campaigns were successful and helped to influence the opinion of voters in the USA. There was a strong polarisation in society. Donald Trump won the election - also because he was the dominant topic of conversation on social media. This resulted in destablisation of US democracy.
This example illustrates the impact that could be achieved through each phase of the value chain. It can be demonstrated just as well by disinformation in the context of the war against Ukraine. Fact checker Oleksandr Zamkovoi talked about the systematic influencing of society inside and outside Russia. This disinformation can also be mapped in the value chain framework. The talk was held at a content call of the REALIES programme. Some of the mechanisms that Oleksandr Zamkovoi described can be read in our notes.
Macro and meso trends
Looking only at the value chain is not enough to fully grasp the "disinformation system". In addition, we look at macro and meso trends that provide us with explanations about the existence of disinformation in this world. It is important to place disinformation in the context of societal and (geo-)political developments in order to understand why disinformation is so effective in each case and then to take action in the right places. Only such a holistic view can counter the phenomenon of disinformation with solutions that have a sustainable effect.
The term trend in this context does not mean a phenomenon of the present time. Rather, it stands for social structures and cultural patterns that influence our world over a longer period of time and reach into wide areas of society. The basic dynamic we emphasise is the fragmentation of the world into different social groups, each with different subjective world views and values, behaviour patterns and ways of life.
In a fragmented world, groups are often unrelated or even inimical to each other. Inside each group, people exclude certain aspects of reality and learn to reject them as other, possibly dangerous and often inferior.
Fragmented realities are a good base for disinformation. In our understanding, disinformation is both the expression and cause of bigger social, epistemic and ideological divides. It occurs along fault lines and reinforces them. Our limited capacity to deal with the complexity of the present and to find solutions to challenges such as the climate crisis and surveillance capitalism is reduced by polarisation in the wake of technologically enhanced disinformation.
We describe the tendencies of fragmentation on two different levels, as macro and meso trends:
Macro trends are large and long-term historical development patterns that contribute to division and polarisation within the society. They have a wide impact on our entire world system. Their dimension and their level of abstraction make it difficult to demonstrate concrete correlations to current disinformation activities or to make them feasible for measures against disinformation.
Meso trends describe developments that are concrete manifestations of the macro-trends but at a lower level of abstraction. We can identify a concrete correlation between them and the ongoing expansion of disinformation. Identifying meso-trends is useful because they build the current breeding ground of social divide and polarisation. If we do not include meso-trends, we risk to only develop measures against the symptom of disinformation without tackling the root level.
Find more examples of the value chain on the interactive info map "Disinformation" and read more about Macro and Meso Trends in the publication “Desinformation und das Ende der Wahrheit? Ein umfassender Blick auf Desinformation – Neue Ansätze der Kollaboration.” - co-created as part of the project "Komptenznetzwerk gegen Hass im Netz". (in German language)
REALIES - Strong civil society for a healthy information ecology. is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.
Quotations do not automatically represent the view of the German Federal Foreign Office and the betterplace lab.