In this 2018 study published in the European Journal of Communication, W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston trace the roots of online political disinformation affecting democratic nations. They argue that declining confidence in democratic institutions makes citizens more inclined to believe false information and narratives, and spread them more broadly on social media. They identify the radical right, enabled and supported by Russia, as the predominant source of disinformation, and cite examples in the UK Brexit campaign, disruptions affecting democracies in Europe, and the U.S. election of Donald Trump.
Many articles on social media and political communications provide differing definitions of disinformation, misinformation, and fake news. Bennett and Livingston offer their own provisional definition: “intentional falsehoods spread as news stories or simulated documentary formats to advance political goals” (Bennett & Livingston, p.124). In addition to those who share disinformation originating on the Internet, they identify legacy media as an important factor in spreading it further. They say that when news organizations report on false claims and narratives, the effect is to amplify the disinformation. Even fact-checking can strengthen this amplifier effect, because the message is exposed and repeated to more people. As traditional news institutions are attacked as “fake news,” journalistic attempts to correct the record can be cited by propagandists and their supporters as proof of an elite conspiracy to hide the truth. The authors refer to this dynamic as the “disinformation-amplification-reverberation (DAR) cycle.”
It’s interesting that both the political left and right increasingly share contempt for neoliberal policies that benefit elites. But instead of coming together to address political and economic problems, they are being driven further apart by “strategic disinformation.” This hollowing out of the center produces a growing legitimacy crisis, and political processes that are increasingly superficial. The authors term this post-democracy: “(t)he breakdown of core processes of political representation, along with declining authority of institutions and public officials” (p.127).
The authors identify Russia as the primary source of disinformation and disruptive hacking in an increasing number of western democratic and semi-democratic nations: Germany, the UK, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and most of the Balkans. They say Russia has learned to coordinate a variety of hybrid warfare tactics that reinforce their impact, such as troll factories, hackers, bots, and the seeding of false information and narratives by state-owned media channels. As other researchers have argued, Bennett and Livingston say Russia’s disinformation activities are geostrategic, aimed at undermining NATO and the cohesiveness of democratic nations who oppose the expansion of Russia’s power.
In response to the scale of disinformation and disruptions in democratic institutions, Bennett and Livingston suggest comparative research on the characteristics of disinformation in different societies, so as to identify similarities and differences, and the identification of contextual factors that provide either fertile ground for or resistance to disinformation. They also recommend that the current operations of trolls, hackers, and bots should be more central to political communications studies.
Reference
Bennett, W. Lance, and Steven Livingston. 2018. “The Disinformation Order: Disruptive Communication and the Decline of Democratic Institutions.” European Journal of Communication 33 (2): 122–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267232118760317.