Digital Disinformation

The research project 'Digital Disinformation' was connected to the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

Online disinformation and cyber warfare are among the top 10 global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (2016). Disinformation is distinct from misinformation in being not only false, but false as part of a ‘purposeful effort to mislead, deceive, or confuse’. With greater penetration of information technology worldwide, disinformation spreads rapidly and is sometimes consumed as factual news with dramatic consequences. Digital disinformation is employed strategically by states and non-state actors across the world.

This project provides novel insights into what makes digital disinformation successful in propagating into news media, how professional trolls and nonhumans (bots) are implicated, and how receptive different countries and media platforms are to disinformation. The project findings provide much-needed insight on information wars, the quality of public debate and how to respond to digital disinformation in the 21st century.

Sub projekt 1: Identify and classify current disinformation networks on mainstream and social media

The task of tracking digital disinformation across a range of different platforms and in different languages requires robust, cross-lingual document similarity estimation, extraction of propositions and, potentially, fraud detection. All three are known problems in natural language processing (NLP), but we believed that bringing all three together, exploiting the synergies between them, will not only push computational social science research forward but also expand research horizons in the social sciences. After networks were identified, we mapped the network of professional disinformers (trolls) and investigated the use of nonhuman actors (bots) in disinformation.

Sub projekt 2: Identify cases of targeted disinformation campaigns and evaluate their successfulness in spreading into news coverage

Having analysed disinformation networks quantitatively, in-depth qualitative discourse and text analysis of targeted disinformation campaigns was possible. This was done on a variety of cases. Moreover, in-depth interviews were carried out with key protagonists: (a) journalists and editors in the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and Scandinavia about their use of sources in the specific cases b) NATO, EU and country specialists dealing with digital warfare.

Sub projekt 3: Identify and classify current disinformation networks on mainstream and social media

To analyse the effects of disinformation and the possibilities of countering it, the project team conducted observational and experimental studies evaluating if and how disinformation and counter-disinformation affected citizens’ perceptions and attitudes. The studies relied on observational data and experimental subjects recruited directly from the pool of active social media users. The findings provide insights that can be used to guide journalists, social media platforms and citizens and inform counter-disinformation strategies.

Yevgeniy Golovchenko, (2021). 'Fighting Propaganda with Censorship: A Study of the Ukrainian Ban on Russian Social Media'. Journal of Politics, 38(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/716949

Mareike Hartmann, Yevgeniy Golovchenko & Isabelle Augenstein (2019). "Mapping (Dis-)Information Flow about the MH17 Plane Crash". Conference paper, Workshop on NLP4IF: censorship, disinformation, and propaganda. EMNLP, August 2019.

Frederik Georg Hjorth & Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2019)."Ideological Asymmetry in the Reach of Pro-Russian Digital Disinformation to United States Audiences". Journal of Communication, Volume 69, Issue 2, April 2019, pages 168-192.

• A complete list of publications can be viewed here