Social media empowers disinformation operations. What can the EU do about it?

Brussels: Brussels has started to recognise that social media platforms are not just digital town squares, but the profit-driven allies of the enemies of democracy. It is high time to act accordingly, Domonkos D Kovacs writes.

On 26 January, news broke that digital forensic experts had unearthed a major Russian disinformation operation targeted at the German government.

The operation leveraged 50,000 fake accounts and bots on X (formerly Twitter). They sent more than 1 million posts over one month from 10 December, pushing tried and tested disinformation narratives.

The German foreign ministry, which commissioned the investigation, concluded that governments need to counter the proliferating disinformation campaigns and be mindful of their ramifications for elections.

Whilst governments certainly need to step up their defences against foreign disinformation and election interference, the German foreign ministry seems to miss a key point.

It is not by mere coincidence that social media, and specifically X, became a vector of foreign disinformation.

Social media companies, driven by their vested financial interest in propagating disinformation, have formed an unholy alliance with authoritarian states and malign actors seeking to interfere in democratic countries’ internal processes.

Whilst the European Union has started to reckon with this, it must ensure that its first salvo does not fall short.

Humans’ natural struggle for recognition has always incentivised oddity — the further away an expression is from the median, the more reactive engagement it receives.

However, the emergence of digital socialisation has done away with the restraints keeping the discourse from gravitating towards the extremes.

Social media encourages rapid interaction, anonymity and lack of accountability. It has a low barrier to content creation and trends towards information overload.

Collectively, these have given rise to a context, in which incendiary and sensational content proliferates in an unprecedented manner.

Since disinformation tends to be partisan, provocative, and divisive, it thrives in this environment. Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted that lies get more engagement than factually accurate content.

However, there is more to social media’s nature as fertile soil for disinformation, than the inherent conditions of digital interaction.

Corporate social media’s business model rewards and profits from disinformation. Since social media companies make money by keeping users engaged, they have a vested interest in gearing algorithms towards promoting content which elicits virulent support and deep outrage, validates users’ biases, and locks people into echo chambers where inflammatory posts are more likely to go viral.

Nothing achieves this better than disinformation. Indeed, studies have shown that the algorithms of every social media company give preference to disinformation over factual content.

This mechanism, engendered by a profit motive, is responsible for empowering, amongst many similar instances, Russia’s recent disinformation campaign against the German government.

It isn’t only recommender algorithms driving users towards particular content based on past online activity and inferences drawn from big data with which social media empowers the purveyors of disinformation to turn a profit.

Their surveillance advertising model — the practice of targeting advertising based on huge amounts of information gathered about individuals from their online activities and personal data — allows authoritarian governments to reach highly specific audiences.

Fighting disinformation is fundamentally incompatible with social media’s business model. Social media’s failure to address disinformation is not merely a reflection of the technological challenge.

For instance, Meta made more than $100,000 from permitting Russian state-linked actors to target, amongst others, African-American populations with disinformation advertisements in the leadup to the 2016 US elections.