How disinformation manipulates your beliefs
People are lazy. We like to put in as little effort as possible. This has been engrained in us for as long as we have existed. The same thing applies to the news. We like to have instant information that we can trust and rely upon to form our opinions of the world. But sadly, this is not how the world works anymore. We live in a time where wars and political campaigns are not just fought with guns and speeches, but in the media. You as an individual are just as important to an army as a rifleman on the ground. Your weapon isn’t a gun. It’s your vote.
The outcome of wars can be changed very easily by what happens in other countries, even countries that aren’t physically involved. These silent media conflicts happen between most major powers, even if there is no state of war. A well-documented example of this is the Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Russian government employed the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Russian military intelligence (GRU) to run an extensive disinformation campaign against the Democratic Party. This was not in support of Donald Trump. There was no solid evidence that the Republican Party had any knowledge of these hacking and disinformation campaigns. The reasoning was simple – President Trump had more America-centric policies that would allow Russia to have more influence in Eastern Europe. This laid the groundwork for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The combination of Donald Trump’s disregard for Russian aggression, and Biden’s slow response when it came to supporting Ukraine’s military has potentially cost Ukraine the war. This is just one example, but with the advent of artificial intelligence disinformation has become increasingly harder to spot.
This may seem terrifying, but there are easier ways to identify what is and is not disinformation. Keep in mind, misinformation is fake news that is spread unintentionally, disinformation is fake news that is spread intentionally to change your political beliefs. A quick and easy way to check is by clicking on the person, the profile or the news source that the article is from. Russia and China especially have been known to run bot farms. These are AI made to look like actual people. Oftentimes, these AIs are programmed to masquerade as active or former members of the US or other western militaries. This is an attempt to gain trust and add credibility to their claims. These bots often use bad grammar and steal stock images.
Another way of spotting disinformation in the media is to check the media source. If the source is from Russia or China, the claims made in the article should be taken with a grain of salt as these countries do not have free press. Finally, the most obvious way to spot AI or altered images is via fingers (AI has difficulty rendering small details like fingers) and background details. If the details seem off or weirdly shaped, it’s likely the image is AI, however AI images continue to become harder to identify.
I realize this is annoying. I realize that most people don’t have the time to go out of their way to figure out if what they are reading is actually true. It’s much easier to just go about your day consuming information that is designed to make you think and feel a certain way, slowly warping your political beliefs in order to support an agenda. But I implore you to take that 30 seconds out of your day and check the information that you’re reading, to allow yourself to develop your own political opinion through unbiased information.
Oscar F, Year 9
Sources and further reading:
Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election