Election Resource Library - Disinformation Tactics

Explore the strategic utilization of psychological manipulation, information voids, and social media strategies to disseminate disinformation.

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Identity Propaganda/ Racial Narratives and Disinformation

Madhavi Reddi, Rachel Kuo, Daniel Kreiss
This article elaborates on narratives designed to exploit identity-based disparities within existing power dynamics. It concentrates on three types of identity propaganda: “othering” narratives, essentializing narratives, and authenticating narratives.

Overconfidence in news judgements is associated with false news susceptibility

Benjamin A. Lyons, Jacob M. Montgomery, Andrew M. Guess, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler
Americans regularly overestimate their ability to perceive disinformation. In this article, the discrepancy between Americans’ perception of the prevalence of false news and their actual exposure to it is examined.

Deep Fakes and the New Disinformation War: The coming age post-truth geopolitics

Robert Chesney, Danielle Citron
This journal focuses on summarizing the effect of deep fakes on the geopolitical landscape.

AI call quiz: see if you can spot the sham audio of Trump and Biden

The Guardian
This is a Deep Fake quiz, complete with audio. Can you get a perfect score? (This author cannot!)

Digital Media and Misinformation- An outlook on multidisciplinary strategies against manipulation

Danielle Called, Mário J Silva
The academic journal discusses how misinformation spreads, how it can be corrected, and strategies for coping with misinformation.

Combating Fake News: Stakeholder Interventions and Potential Solutions

Ankur Gupta, Neeraj Kumar, Purnendu Prabhat, Rajesh Gupta, Sudeep Tanwar, Gulshan Sharma, Pitshou N Bokoro, Ravi Sharma
This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the challenges associated with detecting disinformation. They also explore various tech-based solutions to combat disinformation.

All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation

Sara Kreps, R. Miles McCain, Miles Brundage
This study carried out three experiments to study whether AI-generated text was capable of influencing foreign policy.

Camouflage Survives: CCP-aligned Disinformation Campaign Spreads on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

Nick Monaco
This is a in-depth look at alleged Chinese computational propaganda techniques (primarily camouflage) and networks. The eleven-month campaign they examined seemed to seek to spread pro-CCP narratives.

The Current: The Disinformation Issue

Google’s Jigsaw
Amazing interactive article by Google’s famed disinformation bounty hunter team, Jigsaw. Complete with interactive content, graphs, and detailed information. Get lost in a rabbithole of content as you explore campaigns across time and country.

Disinformation by Design: The Use of Evidence Collages and Platform Filtering in a Media Manipulation Campaign

P.M. Krafft, Joan Donovan
This piece explores a common disinformation campaign strategy to convert skeptics. The adversaries first test their stories on rarely moderated message boards first and then adjusting them before jumping to more trusted and mainstream platforms. Eventually, after several iterations, the stories might be picked up by national news sources.

Countering Disinformation in the United States

Cyberspace Solarium Commission
The paper discusses the researched recommendations by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission staff. These recommendations can be applied to disinformation. There is also a set of comprehensive policy recommendations intended to protect democratic institutions.

Fake news as a two-dimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda

Jana Laura Egelhofer & Sophie Lecheler
The journal suggest there are two dimensions to fake news: “fake news genre” and “fake news label”. The authors suggest that scholars need to shift to the “fake news label”

Master Narratives of Disinformation Campaigns

Matthew Levinger
The paper explains how “master narratives” contribute to the believity of fake news, even to the extent of making some seem more correct than the truth.

Resilience Series: Bug Bytes

Clint Watts, Farid Haque, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency
An exciting comic book from the U.S. government agency CISA. The main character, Ava, and her allies race to uncover a fictional disinformation campaign targeted critical infrastructure based off of real-life targeted critical infrastructure campaigns.