Beware: Digital Disinformation

Luisa Haynes appeared to be a “woke” Black woman. She claimed to have a political science major and live in New York. Her Twitter handle @WokeLuisa attracted over 55,000 followers in a year. Like her picture, her 2,000 posts radiated attitude and swag.

On September 23, 2017, she wrote: “Trying to figure out how #TakeAKnee is un-American but letting people die because of lack of health insurance is patriotic.”

After that on March 11, she tweeted: “If you’re a Trump supporter, please don’t forget to turn your clock back 150 years…oh wait… you did it back in 2016! #DaylightSavings

A few days later, she posted: “Just a reminder: Colin Kaepernick still doesn’t have a job, because in this country fighting for justice will make you unemployable.”

Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States, testified about @WokeLuisa and noted that the message about Colin Kaepernick was retweeted 37,000 times. 

There is humor and snark in Luisa’s tweets. The messages cover a wide range of current events from elections to the NFL national anthem debate and President Trump.

Every post has an us-versus-them racial undercurrent. Every tweet is divisive, designed to amplify and polarize people in the United States.

Yet Luisa’s posts are quotable and viral.

The Woke Luisa account applied the science of viral outrage to make messages shareable. “For every moral, emotional word that people use in a tweet, we found that it increased the rate of retweeting from other people who saw it by 15-20 percent,” according to Jay Van Bavel, a social neuroscience professor and director of NYU’s Social Perception and Evaluation Lab. Van Bavel and his colleagues published a new paper based on an analysis of nearly 50,000 political tweets. Shankar Vedantam, in a recent podcast of Hidden Brain on this research, points out that the outrage over a post spurs more outrage in response, creating a spiral that leads to exhaustion and disengagement.

The new Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election documents that @WokeLuisa is a Russian troll. This persona is one of as many as 50,258 fake Twitter accounts created by a Russian troll farm.

The purpose of trolls is stated in the very first paragraph of the bipartisan Senate report:

In 2016, Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States…Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government’s covert support of Russia’s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election.

One of the many disturbing findings is that Black voters were targeted more than any other group.

Evidence of the IRA’s overwhelming operational emphasis on race is evident in the IRA’s Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Facebook pages (one of the IRA’s top performing pages, “Blacktivist,” generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook ‘ users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hot button issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests), and its YouTube activity (96 percent of the IRA’s YouTube content was targeted at racial issues and police· brutality).

Now we know. We should all have serious concerns about digital disinformation.

In fact, during a July 24 congressional hearing former special counsel Robert Mueller answered a question by stating that the Russian troll farm was expanding and continuing its digital disinformation warfare “as we sit here.” He added that other countries were expected to copy these tactics in our upcoming election cycles. This nightmare is not over. It is the new normal, so in the absence of action by the federal government and social media companies we better get ready to resist it. 

Our democratic system of government with its checks and balances depends on lively debates. To help voters make decisions about their elected officials and top priorities, the exchange of ideas needs to be more truthful and less toxic than posts by Russian trolls.

Influencers, such as Luisa Haynes, are widely quoted in the news. The Senate report notes that “Content produced under the guise of this persona would eventually appear ‘in more than two dozen news stories from outlets such as BBC, USA Today, Time, Wired, Huffington Post, and BET.’”

The most popular people and topics on social media platforms shape coverage. Trending lists influence what we call news, what we think about our leaders and elected officials and our attitudes about whether voting matters.

The evidence is mounting that our political discourse is subject to foreign manipulation. Social media platforms appear unwilling or just unprepared to deal with these threats.

In the 2020 election cycle, the onus is on voters to protect ourselves against disinformation. There are two easy steps that we can take: first gather news from balanced and diverse points of view; and second, stay skeptical of sources. If the news is too sensational, don’t share it. Together let’s keep ourselves, our families and our communities safe and informed.

Holli L. Holliday is president of Sisters Lead Sisters Vote, a nonprofit c4 organization for, by and of black women.