Disinformation | Misinformation

SOURCE:  Persagen.com, date
This page last modified: 2022-03-01 19:04:14 -0800 (PST)

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With democracies across the globe under assault, and as the world turns its attention to Russia's war on Ukraine  [2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine], the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and The Atlantic announced today [2022-02-28] that they will jointly host Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a three-day conference exploring the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.

Former President Barack Obama; Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa;  Christopher Krebs, a former United States Department of Homeland Security director focused on cybersecurity; and journalists, including The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum,  Ben Smith, and Kara Swisher of The New York Times, will join global experts and policy makers 2022-04-{06-08} in Chicago to discuss the growing threat disinformation poses to democracies in a highly polarized digital age.

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"Disinformation and conspiracy theories - turbocharged and micro-targeted by the new tools social media and big data provide - are a clear and present danger to democracies," said David Axelrod, director of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. "They have become weapons with which to foment mistrust in our institutions, sow division and even political violencedisinformation and conspiracy theories foment mistrust in our institutions, sow division, and even political violence. But combatting them is a complex challenge. We hope over these three days to not only shine a light on the problem but also potential solutions."

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Nearly a third of North American students think The Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated, according to a new study  [local copy], which also found that 40 per cent of students reported learning about The Holocaust through social media. "They're getting information from who knows where and it's resulting in ... them thinking, did this event in history happen?" the study's author, Alexis Lerner  [local copy], told CTV News. Alexis Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy in Maryland. "We hear about the negative, dangerous impacts of social media," Lerner said. "I think this is part of the same story."

For the study, nearly 3,600 students in Grades 6 through 12 were surveyed both before and after a two-day virtual conference focusing on The Holocaust. Almost 80 per cent of the students were in Canada, while the rest were in United States classrooms. Just over six per cent identified as Jewish.

According to the study, nearly 33 per cent of the students felt The Holocaust was fabricated or exaggerated, or they were unsure if The Holocaust even took place. Social media also wasn't their only source of information. "A lot of them talked about Marvel  [Marvel Comics  |  Marvel Entertainment  |  Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, owned by The Walt Disney Company] as the place where they had originally learned about The Holocaust," Alexis Lerner said, referring to the , which includes fictional Second World War hero Captain America. "Or 12 per cent said that they heard about it from a videogame, which is sort of the same story."

A shocking 42 per cent of the students reported unequivocally witnessing an antisemitic event, including at their own schools. Some students, Alexis Lerner noted, also believed something like The Holocaust couldn't happen again. "And yet we do have the Uyghurs in China [Uyghur genocide], and we do have the Rohingya people in Myanmar [Rohingya genocide], and we do have all these groups that are the victims of genocidal violence," Lerner, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Ontario's Western University [University of Western Ontario], said.

The study was commissioned by Ontario-based Holocaust education non-profit Liberation75  [Liberation75.org], which was created to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The date of Auschwitz' liberation - 1945-01-27 - now stands for International Holocaust Remembrance Day - which falls this Thursday [2022-01-27]. Also referred to as The Shoah,  The Holocaust genocide claimed the lives of an estimated six million Jews during World War II, and also led to the murders of five million others, including Roma people  [Romani people], ethnic Poles and Slavs, and members of the LGBTQ community. "The Holocaust isn't just a Jewish story," Liberation75.org founder Marilyn Sinclair  [local copy  |  Liberation75.org profile] told CTV News. "It's a story of what humans are capable of and what we need to do to be responsible to other people in our society."

In 2020 and 2021, Marilyn Sinclair says Liberation75.org was able to run virtual Holocaust programming for 650,000 students across North America. "Holocaust education teaches us about the dangers of what happens when hate goes unchecked and we don't stand up for each other," Sinclair, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, said. Although it may be mentioned in things like high school history textbooks, no Canadian province or territory has mandated Holocaust education as part of their secondary school curriculum. In the U.S., 22 states include Holocaust education, including Florida, which requires it from kindergarten and up. For younger kids, Alexis Lerner says lessons are focused not on the horrors of Nazi crimes, but on topics like bullying, tolerance and kindness - and they show results. "They were more likely to say that antisemitism was happening, they were more likely to say antisemitism was a problem, and they were less likely to say that The Holocaust didn't happen," Lerner said of Florida students. "Education makes a huge impact."

The study also showed that after an educational seminar, students were nine-per-cent more likely to say they'd intervene if they saw an antisemitic event, while 92 per cent of students wanted to know more about The Holocaust - proof to Marilyn Sinclair that it's time to update Canadian curriculums. "My father spoke to schools for more than 20 years and he always finished his talks this way: he said, 'We must fight hate and protect the freedoms that this country Canada provides,'" Sinclair recalled. "If you want to live in a great country, you have to protect freedom for everybody - not just yourself. And I think that's what we need to educate our students about."

A new public benefit corporation backed by billionaires Reid Hoffman,   George Soros, and others is launching Tuesday [2021-11-02] to fund new media companies and efforts that tackle disinformation. Good Information Inc. aims to fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information. As part of its mission, it plans to invest in local news companies. The group will be led by Tara McGowan, a former Democratic Party strategist who previously ran a progressive non-profit called ACRONYM.

ACRONYM invested in for-profit companies that built media and technology solutions for progressive causes. It ran one of the largest digital campaigns to defeat President Trump in the 2020 election, totaling $100 million. One of the companies it invested in, called Shadow, made headlines last year for contributing to the delayed reporting of the Iowa caucus results. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, backed ACRONYM.

Good Information Inc. is launching with a multi-million seed investment led by Reid Hoffman and joined by investors Ken Duda and Jen Duda, Incite, and George Soros.

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• [RelevantMagazine.com, 2021-09-28] In 2019, Almost All of Facebook's Top Christian Pages Were Run By Foreign Troll Farms.  |  Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691585

In May 2021, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal. A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.

But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists. Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze's script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire. Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies. They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.

"Disinfo-for-hire actors being employed by government or government-adjacent actors is growing and serious," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, calling it "a boom industry."

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• [web.Archive.org, 2021-07-27 snapshot] Fazze.com