Home>2020 Election and Disinformation
03.12.2020
2020 Election and Disinformation
The Sciences Po American Foundation welcomed alumna Camille François, in conversation with William G. Howell and alumna Delphine Halgand, to discuss disinformation and misinformation in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Camille François is the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, working to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment. She also works with the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of research entities with the objective of detecting and mitigating the impact of attempts to prevent or deter people from voting or to delegitimize election results. William Howell is a professor in American Politics at the Harris School of Public Policy and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He most recently co-authored the book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy.
François began by clarifying the difference between misinformation, information that is false but is not shared with an intent to mislead, and disinformation, which is created with an intent to believe. She also explained the ABC framework for disinformation, which considers the actors sharing information, distortive behaviors, such as those that make misinformation look like a viral campaign expressing a grassroots movement, and the false content itself. Misinformation, she said, spreads cyclically, beginning with isolated incidents, then becoming a narrative, and then leading to a movement, such as the “Stop the Steal” political mobilization following the 2020 Presidential Election.
Since 2016, François believes that disinformation detection and mitigation has come a long way. In 2016, no one was prepared to handle online disinformation, which did not match existing conceptions of a threat. Now, government agencies and platforms have clear definitions and consensus on foreign interference. The U.S. government in 2020 has been proactive in tackling disinformation, at great personal risk for agencies and their directors, yet François believes that they did an enormous amount of work to help get ahead of disinformation.
François warned the audience against a tendency to see foreign interference everywhere. Not only does this help foreign adversaries themselves in their goals of sowing chaos and undermining trust, she said, it also impacts our ability to trust real social movements that use social media. François cited the gilet jaune movement in France and the large-scale racial justice movements in the U.S., saying “this is what actual online activism looks like.” In the future, she believes more attention is needed to address disinformation at the level of the whole internet. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google have drawn intense scrutiny, many platforms who consider themselves outside of the political conversation and other alternative platforms designed to host content moderated away from the main platforms carry the risk of creating an entire alternative ecosystem where disinformation and hate can thrive. François emphasized the importance of rigorous, independent, evaluations of platform interventions in order to determine which interventions are actually working.
Delphine Halgand is the Executive Director of the Signals Network, a non-profit organization encouraging transparency, accountability, reporting, and whistleblowing. She most recently served as the lead rapporteur of the Forum on Information and Democracy’s Working Group on Infodemics. The working group recently published its report, a set of 250 recommendations for combatting misinformation and disinformation, including strong public regulation of platform transparency, the need to invent a new co-regulation model for content moderation, and ways to change the design of platforms to slow the spread of disinformation. With Halgand, François discussed the question of scale: can we expect the same level of commitment to things that are not just the U.S. Presidential Election? How do we create best practices that extend across the world? Halgand concluded the conversation by asking François what comes next for the Election Integrity Partnership. François described the continued efforts to monitor for election-related disinformation that will last until the inauguration. The EIP institutions also plan to share their notes and observations in order to empower more research on disinformation.
The next installment of the Alumni Webinar Series will take place in 2021. Stay tuned for more information at usscpo.org and don’t forget to follow the Foundation’s Instagram for more alumni content.
