Online Supplement to Working Paper 2018.1 Challenging Truth and Trust: a Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation
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Working paper no. 2018.3 Online Supplement to Working Paper 2018.1 Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation Samantha Bradshaw, University of Oxford Philip N. Howard, University of Oxford Contents METHODOLOGY NOTES ........................................................................................................... 3 ARGENTINA ............................................................................................................................... 3 AUSTRALIA ................................................................................................................................ 5 AUSTRIA .................................................................................................................................... 7 AZERBAIJAN .............................................................................................................................. 7 BRAZIL ....................................................................................................................................... 8 CAMBODIA .............................................................................................................................. 12 COLOMBIA ............................................................................................................................... 19 CUBA ........................................................................................................................................ 21 ECUADOR ................................................................................................................................ 23 EGYPT ...................................................................................................................................... 25 GERMANY ................................................................................................................................ 27 HUNGARY ................................................................................................................................ 28 INDIA ........................................................................................................................................29 IRAN ......................................................................................................................................... 31 ISRAEL ..................................................................................................................................... 34 ITALY ........................................................................................................................................ 35 KENYA...................................................................................................................................... 37 MALAYSIA................................................................................................................................ 39 MEXICO .................................................................................................................................... 42 MYANMAR ...............................................................................................................................46 NETHERLANDS ........................................................................................................................ 48 NIGERIA ...................................................................................................................................49 PAKISTAN ................................................................................................................................ 50 SERBIA ..................................................................................................................................... 53 SOUTH AFRICA ........................................................................................................................ 54 SOUTH KOREA ........................................................................................................................ 57 SYRIA ....................................................................................................................................... 57 RUSSIA ..................................................................................................................................... 59 THAILAND ................................................................................................................................ 61 TURKEY .................................................................................................................................... 63 UKRAINE .................................................................................................................................. 65 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES ....................................................................................................... 66 UNITED KINGDOM ..................................................................................................................68 UNITED STATES ...................................................................................................................... 70 VENEZUELA ............................................................................................................................. 73 VIETNAM .................................................................................................................................. 76 ZIMBABWE .............................................................................................................................. 77 SERIES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. 80 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES........................................................................................................... 81 2 METHODOLOGY NOTES These are the background case notes complied for MEMO 2018.1: Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. For details on the methods behind this content analysis please see the methodology section of the report. This document contains data from over 500 sources organized by country. The sources include high quality news articles, academic papers, white papers, and a range of other grey literature. As an annotated bibliography, the country cases here make use of significant passages from these secondary sources, and every effort has been made to preserve full citation details for future researchers. The full list of references can be found in our public Zotero folder, with each reference tagged with a country name. ARGENTINA Fake news frequently circulates on both social networks and the mainstream media in Argentina, and often includes political propaganda. For example, in 2017, a former member of Cristina Kirchner’s cabinet tweeted a photograph of an injured woman, saying she was a teacher who had been hurt by the police while protesting in the Plaza de Congresos (National Congress Square), amid demonstrations related to the “Escuela Itinerante” (Itinerant School) conflict. The politician later apologized and deleted the tweet (Chequeado, 2017). The website Chequeado—a digital non-profit fact-check agency—has a partnership with Facebook to address issues such as these and uses the hashtag #Falsoenlasredes (“Fakes on the Internet”) to highlight fake news. This is part of a larger Argentinian initiative of “news literacy” which plans to give people the tools to be more informed about the news they are consuming (Jenner, 2018; Rost, 2017). Fake profiles in social networks are also used by politicians and political parties. In 2012, a journalistic investigation conducted by the Argentine TV show Periodismo Para Todos (“News for everyone”) revealed that 400 fake Twitter accounts were being used to post and disseminate messages in favor of Cristina Kirchner (The Observer, 2012). The election campaign that, in 2015, elected Mauricio Macri (the current president of Argentina), also made ostensive use of social networks, mainly with segmented advertising. It was also reported that Macri had 35 to 40 social media specialists working for his party to create trends and parrot government messages through fake accounts (Telesur, 2016). According to data from the Argentine Electoral Chamber, Macri spent 14 million pesos in segmented advertising in Facebook, Google and Yahoo! in the 3 presidency electoral campaign of 2015. In the same period, the Frente para la Victoria, an opposition party, spent 11 million pesos (Recalt, 2016). A report produced by the consultancy Solo Comunicación has ranked Argentinian politicians by the number of fake followers on Twitter. The fake accounts were created to increase the number of followers and to share political propaganda in a disguised way. According to the report, the cost of the scheme was 1 dollar per 100 followers (Paladini, 2018). Many of these followers of political accounts are part of groups that seek to influence the process of public opinion formation. The accounts are used to increase the number of followers, praise or question government actions, show popularity, and generate interactions and false realities (Schurman & Romeo, 2018). The first reported case was in 2012, when the investigative journalist Jorge Lanata denounced Kirchner's aides as having created at least 400 Twitter accounts that were disguised as the accounts of regular citizens. According to Lanata, these bots simultaneously posted hundreds of messages in favor of Kirchner's decisions, and also launched aggressive attacks against journalists