Vaccinating Against Disinformation
Like many New Zealanders this week, I watched on as the anti-mandate protests a five minute walk from my own place of work came to an end. Glued to various live streams I watched as fires went up, rubber bullets were shot and pavement tiling was torn up and then promptly thrown at police.
As the protest was in its death throes, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave a live speech in which she stated “There has been an element to this occupation that has not felt like New Zealand, and that’s because it’s not. There has been foreign influence in what we’ve seen.” (Timestamp 8:40 for the quote).
Prime Minister Ardern is right. As frustrating as the behaviour of the protesters was (I did not enjoy the experience of being yelled at for wearing a mask in the nearby area), they are also legitimate victims of a new age of disinformation in which highly funded and coordinated campaigns actively seek to stir civil unrest. For those with low digital literacy, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that they will get sucked into the disinformation abyss.
Speaking about the vaccine itself and its efficacy is something best left to medical professionals, though it’s worth noting in the U.S. over 96% of doctors surveyed demonstrated their support for the vaccine.
However, working in cybersecurity I feel somewhat more comfortable commenting on what I see across the internet landscape. While cybersecurity certainly consists of ‘hacking’, a large part of it involves combating social engineering attacks. After all, why would someone bother with a sophisticated hacking attack when they can call up and say “Hey, it’s me the district password inspector — I’m going to need to check your password”. I would argue that disinformation is a deliberate, large-scale social engineering attack.
When we talk about risks in cybersecurity it’s essential we consider ‘threat actors’. To put it as simply as possible, a threat actor is an individual, group or organisation that is the key driver behind a malicious action. Threat actors can be broken down into further categories but for today we’ll focus on what we call the ‘Nation-state threat actor’. As the name implies the threat actor in this case is a foreign nation-state.
First we ask, why would they want to do this? To be frank in this regard, that’s for them to know and for us to find out. However, even if we can’t find out for sure, we can make some reasonable guesses here. Russian Ultranationalist and neo-Fascist Aleksandr Gugin’s book Основы геополитики (Foundation of Geopolitics) outlines his perceived ideal strategy to rebuild Russia’s influence. This book is now taught in Russian military academies.
In Foundations of Geopolitics on page 367, Gugin describes a possible way to deal with the United States suggesting that Russia:
“introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements — extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S”.
We also know that lower vaccination rates in a country will reduce their economic resiliency as higher rates of people are hospitalised and out of work. I’m sure many of us have also seen how isolated victims of disinformation become, often leading them to become susceptible to further disinformation and conspiracies. To summarise:
- Civil/social unrest
- Economic harm/lower resiliency to pandemic
- Creation of a group who can be continuously fed disinformation/radicalised as needed.
While we could brainstorm further motives, these 3 already paint a pretty convincing picture of the damage a nation-state threat actor could do to another society if they so wished even outside of the Russia-US context.
I wish I could tell you that I used some Mr. Robot-esque technique to uncover a Russian anti-vaccine plot that was full of double agents, excitement and spies. But in reality, you only have to look at Russian-state owned media.
Okay, so we’ve got a few examples here. I would’ve gotten more but due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting DDoS attacks on Russian state media… it’s more difficult than you’d expect currently. However, the team at EU vs Disinfo have already done amazing work on compiling some examples.
But while the examples pictured above are somewhat concerning alone, it’s certainly not suggesting that it puts people on a ‘misleading headline to 3 week occupation of parliament’ pipeline. So, let’s follow another example posted by RT’s English-speaking YouTube channel of a woman who has claimed to suffer adverse effects from the vaccine that at the time of writing has just over a million views.
Okay… Still, compared to some of the conspiracies we’ve seen about the vaccine wanting an adverse reaction investigated isn’t the worst. Surely this couldn’t be used to push more extreme messaging right…?
A quick search engine scrape using Digital Method’s scraper shows the same video featured on an ‘alternate news’ site called BitChute. The two-minute clip appears once again unedited but in a 1 hour compilation of far, far more extreme anti-vaccination messaging. This is not an uncommon strategy, where usage of clips or articles from recognised news networks will be presented out of context to add legitimacy to other more outrageous claims. This is just one of many anti-vaccine videos on BitChute and it’s clear to see how people can be radicalised in such an environment.
For those of you who have argued about the vaccine in social media comment sections, I’m sure the link to a 1 hour anti-vaccine compilation in response to an attempt to reason with someone is all too familiar.
Interestingly, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we can see the effects and overlap of Russian influence on anti-vaccine groups. Due to primarily consuming Russian influenced media, there is a large amount of anti-vaccine believers who also support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Live streamers of the anti-mandate protest openly expressed their support for Russia and their Facebook groups were no different.
Just like computer worms, disinformation is insidious because of its ability to self-replicate and self-sustain. Once you’ve drawn people into anti-vaccine messaging they will seek out more, and even continue to produce more anti-vaccine content themselves. Additionally, when the world-view you subscribe to warns you of imminent genocide or apocalypse, you become very motivated in stopping what you perceive as a crime against humanity in the making. After all, you’re not fighting just to stop the Covid-19 vaccine, you’re fighting for ‘freedom’.
A quick scrape of the comments of an NZHerald comment section (for those curious, the article says unvaccinated people are likely at higher risk of infection of Omicron and little else)using ExportComments paints a picture of how organically disinformation can spread. Here, green denotes overtly pro-vaccine commenting. Yellow denotes unclear/neutral and red is overtly anti-vaccine commenting. If you were a bystander seeing this comment section, going off sheer quantity it’d be easy to infer that most New Zealanders are anti-vaccine.
While I remain unconvinced that anyone has ever had their mind changed on the internet, the fact is comments like that or Russian “trolls” that parrot similar points only need to push people one step in the wrong direction. The chain of disinformation continues, because people are trusted by their community, family and friendship circles.
I have consistently described these disinformation campaigns as coordinated and sophisticated. However, this may seem counter-intuitive when they heavily rely on decentralised individuals to spread their campaigns. But, the heavy usage of bots and trolls and also the tailored narratives that they create to target those on the fringes of society or those with legitimate historical grievances are all highly sophisticated. Almost all of these narratives tie back to Russian sources which have been amplified by local anti-science groups.
Similar posts using emotional language were seen in the United States. For example, one anti-vaccine narrative focused on the Tuskegee Experiment which was a racist, horrific medical experiment that has significantly and rightfully impacted the ability of black communities in the United States to trust public health systems.
In New Zealand, the racism within our healthcare system is no different, with outcomes for minority groups and particularly Māori and Pasifika being notably worse. Jordan Green and Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw wrote for RNZ “The information and narrative environment our whānau navigate, has been significantly shaped by people spreading false information and narratives about vaccination, in ways unique to our experiences as Māori.” Between this and a lack of access to resources around the vaccine, it’s understandable why we’ve seen a disparity in vaccination rates.
Seeing how these narratives can entangle disinformation with historical grievances and societal inequity, makes it clear that those behind the movements have done their research to maximise harm.
Local groups continuing to spread this information aren’t completely motivated by a genuine concern based on what they’ve been told though. The rise of anti-vaccine influencers, conspiracy groups or ‘alternate’ news websites suggest there’s a little more at play. As always the answer is simple.
Money.
Some of it is obvious, Instagram influencing, merch shops and the like pay well and only increase with your following. Alternative medicine suppliers and certain naturopaths are on board with anti-vaccine messaging as they are often direct financial beneficiaries of a rejection of conventional Western medicine. Particularly wealthy believers may even fund the movement themselves.
Then the biggest one is similar to any other website. Adverts.
As long as there’s money to be made from getting clicks, there’s motivation for individuals to push anti-vaccine messaging.
The Disinformation Vaccine
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
The line above is from the modern Hippocratic Oath. A similar approach is what I believe to be the way forward for New Zealand to combat disinformation. A gutting of public health over the years and a focus on cure over prevention led to the world’s wealthiest country getting ravaged by Covid-19. In the same way our own increasing digital divide, lack of digital literacy and a reactive rather than proactive approach to disinformation has allowed for vulnerable people in our society to be exploited and radicalised.
The deeper someone falls into the hole of vaccine disinformation the harder it is to pull them out of it. Akin to Covid-19, once they’ve got the disinformation disease it’s up to them to fight it off themselves. The sad fact is, for most people it’s a far more efficient use of time and energy to be able to patiently inform and help those who are more vaccine-hesitant than anti-vaccine.
Perhaps somewhat amusingly, in the same way a vaccine works to counter disinformation exposing people to some disinformation in a controlled manner greatly helps their ability to recognise it in future. “Go Viral!” is one example of a resource that exposes people in a controlled environment. Being able to identify common techniques used by those spreading disinformation helps protect people and those around them.
A proactive approach to dealing with disinformation involves a technique called ‘prebunking’ as opposed to ‘debunking’ where you pre-empt disinformation. Without further ado, here are the ten ingredients to one form of the disinformation vaccine.
What
- Figure out what information people need.
Anticipating people’s questions, what might be confusing and what narratives threat actors might try to use.
2. Choose your example carefully.
Focus on tactics used to help build up a more generalised resistance to disinformation.
How
3. Wrap it in truth
Prioritise the truth. Lead with facts and always clearly show how information is being manipulated.
4. Warn your audience
Warn people of the reasons and motives for attempts to manipulate us whether they be political, financial or other.
5. Add some detail
Add some reasoning behind why certain things are false to help people understand it conceptually.
6. Draw out the tactic at play
Remind people that tactics are not used once then done. There are overlaps in the tactics used between different conspiracies and disinformation campaigns.
7. Explain what you know and don’t know
Explaining how you know what you do and being honest about what you don’t know is important to building trust with people.
Sharing
8. Keep it simple
Make sure what you say is easily digestible for anyone! Plain language and removing jargon from your vocabulary is important.
9. Make it shareable
Talking points that people are easily able to fall back to if they want to help others, or digital content that is easily passed on or sent to others.
10. Publish where your audience is
Like with any social situation, you have to read the room to see if people will be receptive to what you have to say. (A club dance floor at 3am is perhaps not the time.)
So why should we all take up this mantle? Enjoy my hastily constructed diagram. Imagine green is someone who is able to spot disinformation and halt the spread while red is not able to differentiate disinformation.
Even by just protecting those around you by protecting yourself, you can help them protect those around them too. Sure, we might not individually change the world by being able to stop disinformation. But your proactive actions in ‘vaccinating’ yourself and others could have flow-on effects and save someone else’s loved one, and every bit of good we do in the world really counts.
I wrote this in part because I was heavily inspired after reading my friend CZ’s own piece on how he views misinformation on the internet. For anyone who wants a more extensive read on how to protect yourself from misinformation I can’t recommend it enough.
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or would like to discuss I’d be happy to hear from you here.