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We are less than a week away from the European parliament election. While in the UK this is likely to involve a muddled, proxy referendum on Brexit, hundreds of millions of EU voters will be casting their vote on the union’s direction for the next five years. As campaigns across the continent enter this final straight, election monitors, charities and tech companies are keeping a worried eye on social media, searching for signs of malicious tampering by states – like Russia – who have a direct interest in the outcome of this process. Much of this work will deal with countering and correcting misinformation. Today, research from Demos shows that focusing on this part of the problem risks missing the vast majority of it: information operations go far beyond ‘fake news’.

Last year, Twitter released a dataset of activity by accounts they believed to be operating on behalf of the Russian state to carry out information operations – strategic, coordinated attempts to tamper with public arenas of discussion and information-sharing, with specific political or social aims in mind. These accounts were run by the now-infamous Saint Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, or IRA.


Digging through this data, we identified the most popular news stories shared by the accounts since 2012. The news sources that appeared at the top of the lists weren’t rogue websites set up by Macedonian teenagers to dupe advertisers. They were some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world.

This is perhaps the key warning from the new Demos report, Warring Songs: Information Operations in the Digital Age. As part of the research, we reviewed examples of online information operations from around the world: by states, by militaries, and by a spectrum of extremist groups. Time and again we saw the false amplification of a certain type of news, designed to artificially push these stories into the #trending bars and “most read” sections that highlight the day’s key moments.

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Some of this activity happens in a day. Information operations can surge erratically, suddenly boosting a story to the surface of a platform in a matter of minutes. But we also saw discussion being drip-fed: steady, selective messaging, produced over weeks and months, based on sharing true stories from reputable sources.

Take, for instance, the tactics of a far-Right Twitter account pushing a narrative about crimes by ethnic minorities in the UK. If we were looking for “fake news”, we might have assumed this account would share a load of made-up stories about crimes committed by Muslims, published on short lived “news” sites, easily detected and refutable. What the IRA did, instead, is far subtler: the rhythmic, regular sharing of true stories that, taken together, present a startlingly one-sided narrative. One account shared stories from Reuters, from the Financial Times, the Metro, the BBC, from Sky News, with every single story focusing on immigration and knife crime. Taken together, it’s a Bayeux Tapestry of far-right talking points, pieced together from a patchwork of factually-accurate stories from reputable outlets.


Fact-checking, then, is not enough to defend us from manipulation or harassment. Indeed, of the cases we reviewed, nearly half did not even make factual statements. The same is true for doxxing, online abuse, spam, algorithmic manipulation and poisoning of communication channels. Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts.

As we head into the EU election, this fact should be at the forefront of our minds. Media monitoring is vital, and the work of fact-checking organisations to identify, correct and call out false information is a necessary and valuable part of this. But it is crucial that we look beyond the accuracy of the news, and zero in on how the media ecosystem as a whole is being manipulated. Inflammatory trending stories, harassment of journalists, feverish online debates – the public discourse behind all of these is being pushed and prodded by those who want to see us angry, divided, and mistrustful of each other.

It is now clear: the past decade has seen democracies around the world become the target of a new kind of war, a war that governments have frequently failed to prepare for, recognise or respond to effectively. This war has required new definitions, descriptions and labels that we often didn’t have. Information operations are an incredibly complex subject, that defy clear-cut description. They involve a dizzying array of actors, participants and targets, they tests the boundaries of governmental responsibility, and they mutate and transform at a breakneck pace. Meeting this challenge is going to be a daunting task: avoiding a myopic focus on “fake news” is a key first step.

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Alex Krasodomski is the director of Demos' Centre for the Analysis of Social Media and Josh Smith is a software developer and researcher

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