Online Disinformation: It's Getting Dark, Too Dark To See

In these northern parts of the world, Hallowe’en used to mark the moment when summer ended and winter began. Light faded and darkness grew. Spirits walked.
But nowadays, it’s largely vampires, ghouls and gore.

As if there aren’t enough horrors in Ukraine, Gaza and the Lebanon. And famine, disease and climate change.

It’s not exactly a world war but the world is certainly at war.

The territorial conflicts are terrible in their brutality. The asymmetric warfare developed by Russia, and applied anywhere that doesn’t suck Putin’s toes, is certainly new in its shocking unscrupulousness.
Its shamless combination of vicious targeting of ordinary civilians, cyberwarfare, conspiracy theories, disinformation, hacking and sinister assassinations are intended to create confusion and chaos.

These are also, increasingly, the modus operandi of the far right and political extremists in general.

It helps the latter that Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet, the owner of X – and increasingly, extremely power-hungry.

ONLINE DISINFORMATION

In early October, Musk appeared onstage with Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the non-place where a gunman bloodied Trump’s ear.

There, Musk treated the faithful to some peculiar hoofing and weird grovelling. He and Trump were like two characters from a bad Marvel comic. It was all extremely gross.

But this isn’t about a two-gargoyle bro love in. Huge power is in play – and they are going after it brazenly.

Writing in The Guardian in August, investigative journalist Carole Cadwallader pointed to the “singularly dangerous moment” that America, and by extension the rest of the world, faces.

Musk challenged the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, during the summer, suggesting on X that “civil war is inevitable” following violent unrest in the UK.

Cadwallader describes this as “something new and unprecedented… the billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence.”

Those riots, and others in Northern Ireland and in Dublin, were fuelled, very deliberately, by online misinformation, largely from far-right and anti-immigration networks, but likely with the investment and support of both US far-right and religious extremists and Russian cyber-disruptors – all facilitated by the tech bros, including Musk himself. Some of the bizarre alliances you couldn’t make up. But the threat is very real.

At this stage, any hope that we could counter online misinformation or disinformation is almost certainly gone, given that the owner of one of the biggest platforms sees himself as a political player on the global stage. And he’s not alone in that.

SEED-BED OF CONPSIRACY THEORIES

In 2024 you can fashion your own version of the truth and put it out there on dozens of “platforms”.

Technology has facilitated a world in which any old shit has traction – or worse still is amplified more than anything sensible ever could be by the algorithms in search of engagement and clicks. No falsehood is too false to fly.

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, bubbling up through the lungs of public discourse like an oedema. AI magnifies all.

Look at what happened to meteorologists in the US, who were tracking and reporting on Hurricane Milton. They were swamped by a tsunami of conspiracy theorist allegations that they were controlling the weather.

That’s right: they were controlling the fucking weather!

There was much personal abuse. There were exhortations on TikTok, Facebook and X that workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should be beaten, arrested or shot or hung on sight.

Unsurprisingly, Trump was a major factor. He alleged that FEMA had run out of cash because its funds were diverted to illegal immigrants – confirming that the man is both a fool and, more pressingly, a monster.

Michael Flynn, once a national security advisor to Trump, claimed in a video that “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation.”

Michael Flynn

And guess what? Polls seem to suggest Trump actually got an electoral bounce from the hurricanes.

Derogatory and deranged posts got hundreds of millions of hits. It’s madness.

There were many fake videos on TikTok of cities in Florida being flooded… BEFORE THE STORM HAD HIT!

And even when the claims are debunked, their authors keep them alive because they don’t give a shit. They have constructed an alternative reality and it’s seeping into every orifice going.

Marianna Spring’s Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland is a deep dive into the cesspit.

She examines how conspiracy theories develop and spread and who gains, and also the damage they cause, to individuals, communities, countries and to processes that have evolved over millennia – most explicitly, deliberative democracy.

Spring describes Covid as a seedbed of conspiracy theories that became “a gateway to more sinister theories.”

CHILDREN CONVICTED OF TERRORISM

But there’s a difference between the lumpen trolls seduced by conspiracy theories and the grandmasters of autocracy and their self-centred and profit-focused sidekicks in Big Tech.

The latter groups aren’t necessarily against democratic processes, if these can be undermined and co-opted to leave the autocrats and alternative rulers in place to plunder and roost.

On the other hand, Spring found that the believers are likely to be people who feel excluded, devalued, patronised and undermined.

The idea that exclusion should be challenged through investment in education and social inclusion still has traction in countries with a strong social democratic tradition.

But it’s been completely undermined where neo-liberalism has colonised politics, where inequality is part and parcel of what is expected and condoned, for example in Anglophone countries like the UK and the US.

Because English (of a sort) is the lingua franca of the online world, and especially social media, ideas that root in these countries are increasingly influential. Herding algorithms make hay.

Malign actors are facilitated by Big Tech under the banner of freedom of speech. The erosion of truth and faith in reason and democracy is mere collateral damage to them.

State actors are among the hostile players, including Russia, North Korea, Iran and Israel. No doubt they’d similarly cite others from the West.

The hostiles also include very well organised and funded far right agitators, as well as religious and political extremists.

Indoctrination starts early. UK researchers tracked 49 children convicted of terrorist offences since 2016.

All but one are boys. They had been exposed to “a horrible, hateful soup” full of terrorist narratives, on extreme right-wing networks and, to a lesser degree, radical Islamic sites.
The main vectors are the Terrorgram network and white supremacist channels on Telegram.

ANARCHY AND DYSTOPIA

In her recent book Autocracy, Inc., Anne Applebaum writes of information-laundering “typosquatters” that present as real and dependable sources, such as Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com.

They churn out vast amounts of pro-Russian stuff that masquerades as truth. And it’s effective even when proven false because the internet never forgets.

And so, here we are, as the light fades and ghosts, ghouls, hackers and racist thugs go bump in the night.

But forget the Lord Of The Flies. We should worry more about the Lords Of The Lies.

What can be done?

Well, inspiration helps, like Barack Obama’s speech in Pittsburgh, where he rallied the Democratic campaign and sliced into Trump’s vanities and vulnerabilities.

But money really matters too. That’s why Elon Musk donated $75m to support Trump’s campaign.

In response, Kamala Harris has raised over $1bn in campaign donations.

Her team is outspending Trump on social media to reach the 16 million young people who have joined the US electorate since 2020.

So, Harris has spent almost $60m with Meta, ten times as much as Trump, and over $31.5m on Google (and therefore YouTube) against $10m by Trump.

Yet the seed bed of anarchy and dystopia has been well dug, composted and watered, especially in the USA. Its gardeners are waiting.

Musk’s goal, says Cadwallader, is chaos. And, she says, “It’s coming.”

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.