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Disinformation played an enormous role in the 2016 Brexit vote and in the U.S. presidential election held the same year. In 2019, leading up to the federal election, Canadian authorities were issuing warnings about disinformation.
Digital Fractures, by Caroline Orr Bueno, details the role disinformation campaigns played in the 2019 election and how journalists and governments worked to counter them.
The report found that although Canadian authorities did not observe major foreign efforts to disrupt the election, domestic political forces can and do use techniques from Russia’s playbook. And those methods can be used to target public conversations and opinion, even between elections.
The report also offers recommendations to journalists around the world who are attempting to tackle the same problem during elections in their own countries.
The report came out with less than a month to go until the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, which has brought a host of new problems surrounding disinformation.
You can download and read the full Digital Fractures report here.
Comments
I'd feel more confidence in this if it wasn't talking about "Russia's playbook", as if somehow even if the domestic actors referred to have nothing to do with Russia, Russia were still the major player worldwide in disinformation. Come now. It's America's playbook. The United States is and since at least WW II has continuously been the world's largest player in propaganda, both in terms of government activities such as intelligence agency disinformation, and in terms of privately funded lies and spin. From the world's biggest PR companies to ExxonMobil's propaganda groups trying to rubbish climate change, from the "National Endowment for Democracy" to corporate-funded "Tea Party" pseudo-grassroots, the US stands alone in the scale of its creation of false information.
Nobody else comes close and the couple of Russian clickbait farms everyone complains about are a drop in the bucket which is only rather lamely trying to follow the example of the masters. Talking as if Russia were the main source of distortions is itself a pretty blatant distortion.
Very important point you're making, Rufus. The U.S. and the White House itself is a disastrous disinformation machine. But in terms of the 2019 federal election, the disinformation largely came from within Canada. Are you responding to the report itself or to the article?
I noticed that the same wording is in the report itself. How you frame the story is also part of the story.