• Serious damage has been done to democracy and the USA’s standing in the world by the behaviour of Donald Trump. He is said to have been responsible for more than 20,000 lies and misstatements during his Presidency (see also Anne Applebaum).
• According to a survey by the Pew Research Centre (in Apr 2018) one third (32%) of experts consulted felt that people’s well-being was being "more harmed than helped by the Internet.”[a]
• There has been much discussion about interference by Russia in US elections. Here's an example of apparent Chinese interference in Taiwan's electoral processes. On 10 Jan, the day before Taiwan's 2020 election a rumor started circulating online that a new type of SARS had reached Taiwan and that it would be unsafe for citizens to vote in person. There were also rumours that Taiwan’s Central Election Commission would be using a new form of ink that does not dry easily, which would invalidate votes for one of the candidates, Han Kuo-yu. There is no secret about China's concern that the DPP, a party hostile to Beijing, looked likely to win. And it did.[b]
a] The survey found that “a sizable majority of online adults (70%) continue to believe the internet has been a good thing for society. Yet the share of online adults saying this has declined by a modest but still significant 6 percentage points since early 2014, when the Center first asked the question. Interestingly, this worsening perspective on the social benefits of the Internet contrasts with the view that these same respondents believed that the Internet continued to be a good thing for them individually...
b] The President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP ran on a ticket that that "her people would never relinquish their democratic freedoms" to China.
• In July 2020 the United Nations condemned claims shared hundreds of times in multiple Facebook posts purporting to list a series of ‘mission goals’, supposedly part of a ‘new world order’. It said they were "completely false" and "part of a long-standing far-right misinformation campaign.”
• Around the same time, a study claimed that hackers — said to be aligned with Russian security interests — had been engaged in a sustained campaign to compromise selected news websites in Poland and Lithuania to plant false stories aimed at "discrediting NATO and delegitimising the transatlantic alliance." In one example, a false article was inserted into the archive of a Lithuanian publisher claiming that German soldiers serving with NATO had desecrated a Jewish cemetery. (More than a dozen other incidents are referenced in the report.)
• The World Health Organisation is regularly accused by conspiracy theorists of being “the lackeys of Big Pharma”. Whether this leads to serious reputation damage seems unlikely. However, it is a concern. In the summer of 2020 the WHO did report hackers and cyber scammers taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to send fraudulent email and WhatsApp messages mimicking its websites and news releases and designed to trick people into clicking on malicious links or opening corrupted attachments. [Newsguard has produced a series of reports for the WHO dealing with Covid-19 disinformation.]
• The Kremlin and its proxies are accused of promulgating an average of around 5 fake claims or stories a day. Russia is also accused of reacting to accusations by obfuscation and denial, for example in response to the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine, and the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals and dissident Alexei Navalny. There have also been multiple accusations of state-sponsored doping in international sporting competitions which have led to lengthy bans on Russia competing.
• China’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy[a] has done much to undermine / damage the Chinese Communist Party’s soft power, and especially during the coronavirus pandemic when China has been accused of putting out disinformation about Covid-19. Other examples of skulduggery include: claims that some 80 French lawmakers had co-signed a disparaging statement about the WHO — France was incensed; and the circulation of a doctored image of an Australian soldier holding a blooded knife to the throat of an Afghan child.
• The UK’s reputation was seriously damaged by the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ incident in 2003, when the Blair Government issued a highly suspect briefing document as ‘proof’ that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
a] Wolf Warrior Diplomacy describes an aggressive style of diplomacy which Chinese diplomats have adopted under President Xi Jinping. The term was coined from a Rambo-style Chinese action film, Wolf Warrior 2.
• In 2016 shares in €35 billion French construction firm Vinci briefly crashed by almost 20% after a fake press release claimed that the company had sacked its chief financial officer and mis-stated its results.
• In June 2017, Ethereum (an open-source blockchain cryptocurrency) was targeted by someone on 4chan who put about a rumour that its founder, Vitalik Buterin, had been killed in a car crash. After the news was posted online the market value of Ethereum fell by around $4 billion.
• In Jan 2019, a video surfaced purportedly showing a Tesla self-driving vehicle knock over a robot prototype at CES, one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics shows. “The video went viral and media outlets ran sensational headlines declaring that the robot was either ‘killed’ or ‘mowed down’ by a driverless car that failed to spot what could have been a pedestrian. However, Tesla did not have a self-driving model at the time, and the robot that was ‘killed’ was actually part of an elaborate publicity stunt by Promobot, the Russian firm that developed it. Despite subsequent debunking of the hoax, many people still believe it happened.”
• In May 2019 a WhatsApp message shared by Metro Bank customers on Twitter, linked to a BBC story about Metro’s falling share price, urged anyone with a Metro Bank account or safety deposit box to “empty [them] as soon as possible”, claiming the lender was facing financial difficulties and may be “shut down … or going bankrupt.” A spokesperson for Metro said there was no truth to these rumours. But the damage had been done...
• In Aug 2020 it was revealed that over 300,000 malicious links advertising fake get-rich-quick schemes designed to trick people into handing their money to cyber criminals had been taken down in a crackdown by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre.
• In Nov 2019, Facebook revealed that it had shut down 5.4 billion fake accounts on its main platform during the year -- that compares with about 3.3 billion fake accounts removed in 2018. Facebook has acknowledged that as much as 5% of its monthly user base of nearly 2.5 billion consists of fake accounts.
[You can find a long list of Twitter accounts suspended or closed down on Wikipedia, and watch a short video on how to report fake accounts on YouTube, viewed more than 1 m times since it was posted in 2013.]
• In May 2020, Facebook agreed to pay $52m to content moderators in the US as compensation for mental health issues they developed — some 11,250 moderators are eligible.
• Since the term 'depfake' was coined (in 2017), the amount of detected deepfakes on the internet has been increasing exponentially. In July 2020 the number was estimated to have reached almost 50,000.
• At the end of 2020 there were ~300 fact-checking organisations operating in 80+ countries. Over 60 of these groups are verified signatories of the International Fact Checking Network.
[Politics isn’t the only driver for fact-checkers. Many are concentrating their efforts on viral hoaxes and other forms of bad information online — often in coordination with the big digital platforms on which it spreads. The goal of factcheckers is ultimately “to increase the cost of lying.”]
Here are a couple of illustrative examples from the 'Faking It' report [there are many more...]:
• "The Red Cross in the US came under attack from a raft of fake news stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Texas. In one video posted on Facebook which subsequently went viral, it was alleged that the charity had stolen donated items from churches in Houston and then sold some and burned others. The claim was found to be “mostly false” by online fact checking organisation Snopes. Snopes also investigated claims that the Red Cross was charging victims of the hurricane for its services. The fact checker concluded that this was a false claim rooted in the fact that the Red Cross did, at one time, charge WWII soldiers for off-base food and lodging."
• Individuals working in the aid sector can be the targets of fake news stories and online abuse. "Girish Menon, Chief Executive of ActionAid, gave an interview to Sky News in the early part of 2017. In it he expressed the charity’s concerns about the planned state visit of President Trump in the light of his views towards women and marginalised communities. At midnight I got a message from my son to say something had popped up on LinkedIn about me being an ISIS agent. I was tired and laughed it off at that stage, but the next morning I had received many messages as had the Chair of ActionAid. We discovered that the message originated from a fake news site hosted in the US."
LinkedIn removed the post, but the reputational risk for ActionAid was very clear...
• An FBI review of internet cybercrime (published in Feb 2020) found that the UK was top of the list for victims, and by some margin, with almost 94,000 victims in 2019. [Canada was second, with 'just' 3,721...]
• A study estimates that around 5,800 people were admitted to hospital as a result of false information about Covid-19 on social media in the first three months of 2020, and that at least 800 may have died.
• Research by Gallup (in 2019) reported that one in three French people believed all vaccines to be dangerous — the highest percentage of the 144 countries surveyed. An Ipsos survey (Nov 2020) suggested that 46% of French adults will refuse — or say they will refuse — the Pfizer jab or any other kind of anti-Covid jab. This compares with 36% in the United States, 30% in Germany, 21% in Britain and 16% in India.) [Examples cited in Unherd]
[More examples to be added...]