The war in the age of social networks can be difficult to understand. When si accede a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram o TikTok, you are faced with a continuous flow of images, information and news. These are contents that come from different sources, not always in chronological order, which we are often unable to verify.
The conflict in Ukraine has returned the role of disinformation on social networks: on the one hand, there is propaganda, whereby the information is adapted according to the party in question that one decides to support; on the other hand there is perhaps even more subtle misinformation, with different objectives.
AND the case of the story, told on Input Mag, by the US journalist Taylor Lorenz, of a page dedicated to memes who, since the beginning of the conflict, changed their focus to focus on the war in Ukraine, posing as a group of people physically engaged in the battlefield. Or what happens on TikTok, where they are more and more widespread fake direct from the territories involved in the conflictwith an invitation to donate through the internal system of the social network to support the Ukrainian population.
He postpones
Less Facebook, more TikTok and YouTube: this is how the way we read news has changed
by Emanuele Capone
How the disinformation machine works
“It is important to frame what is happening within known dynamics, which have been repeated for some years – he explained Fabio Giglietto, Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Urbino and coordinator of the research project on disinformation Mapping Italian News – Whenever there is scarce news around an issue that is close to us, or which we care about, the space of disinformation opens up. At the base there are two great reasons: the ideological one, which has to do with propaganda, and the economic one ”.
In other words, there are those who exploit conflict (or other topics of general interest) to obtain an easy income: “There are sites and accounts that sense that around a topic there is attention and try to take advantage of that specific topic. It is a dynamic that we are partly used to seeing on social networks – Giglietto told us again – we know that if we publish a post on a specific topic at the center of the discussion, we can get a piece of the attention reserved for that topic “.
Those who publish disinformation are well aware of the way in which information spreads online: for this reason, it exploits the characteristics of social networks to reach a large number of people and to obtain an economic advantage. “A strategy that the producers of fake news use – Giglietto told us – is the coordinated behavior for sharing links: a set of pages and groups that repeatedly and after a short time share the same links. This is because the platforms’ algorithms tend to amplify the content they are having many interactions in the first moments of life. In other words, if I can get the algorithm to believe that that content is working, I can try to trigger more uptake. In short, I can reach many people in flesh and blood, who perhaps end up amplifying my message even more ”.
This is an important step. Often, we think of misinformation as something amateur, information or memes that flow naturally in groups on WhatsApp or Facebook. However, as demonstrated by the latest report of the Mapping Italian News projectcoordinated by Professor Giglietto, fake news are often the offspring of coordinated actions, of disinformation networks that act together, with the aim of spreading the contents as much as possible.
In the last two years, these same networks have found a new, unprecedented field of action that is still little investigated by scientific research: TikTok. On which “we have no data: the platform’s algorithm, thus evolved, represents, among other things, a problem for researchers, because it makes it very difficult to obtain clear and unambiguous information. However, it is a space that must be investigated, if only because it has the ability to reach a very sensitive audience, made up above all of people under 30 ”.
What platforms can do
In this context, the big social networks are moving especially with economic sanctions, which aim to hit the monetization possibilities of those who spread propaganda. However, it remains complex to stem disinformation in a broader sense: “The fundamental point – Giglietto explained to us – is that some platforms have long since reached a scale for which the control of what is published is extremely difficult. The problem, in other words, is that social networks do not have the ability to verify and moderate content all over the world ”.
Again: “The only possibility that platforms have is to open up to external scrutiny of independent researchers and journalists. And this is the path that we are slowly starting to take. Only in this way can we ensure that the decisions made by politics on the platforms can be supported by data and not dictated by the emergency “.
War in Ukraine
From Facebook to Twitter: the economic sanctions of social networks against Russia
by Simone Cosimi
What can we do as we sail
In the absence of the platforms’ ability to adequately moderate all information, the task of paying attention within the digital space, however, also falls to the user. In this sense, Professor Giglietto has a very simple advice in content, but not always easy to follow: “Whenever we share news, we need to reflect on the consequences, especially if we feel emotionally involved. Faced with contents that arouse emotions, a sort of automatism is triggered that makes us bypass some control logics: this often leads to the circulation of false or problematic contents “.