Building Digital Resilience Ahead of Elections and Beyond

Abstract

Donara Barojan explores the impact of emerging soft threats, such as disinformation and digital manipulation, on election vulnerability. She argues that researchers, policymakers, and journalists reporting on elections tend to focusing solely on technological vulnerabilities, while overlooking individuals’ cognitive shortcomings and societal vulnerabilities. Barojan examines these vulnerabilities in great detail by describing the “toxic information environment” created when they interact, which in turn facilitates the spread of disinformation and fake news. Barojan also describes some of the tactics that the DFR Lab has observed while monitoring elections around the world “to make sure that disinformation and nefarious influence campaigns did not have an effect on the outcome of these elections or the post-electoral discourse”. Case studies from elections in Moldova, Malaysia, Mexico, and the United States illustrate the use of doctored videos, commercial and political bots (automated social media), and sock puppet (inauthentic social media) accounts. Barojan then lists a number of approaches to counter online hostile actors, which include participating in open source and digital forensic training events, following the research published by the DFR Lab to “inform the public of the challenge of disinformation”, maintaining transparent communication with the public, and harnessing the “power of technology” to track disinformation campaigns and digital manipulation in multiple languages.