NEW YORK • In Vietnam, citizens were enlisted to post pro-government messages on their Facebook pages. Guatemala's government used hacked and stolen social media accounts to silence dissenting opinions. Ethiopia's ruling party hired people to influence social media conversations in its favour.
Despite increased efforts by Internet platforms like Facebook to combat disinformation, the use of such techniques by governments around the world is growing, according to a report released yesterday by researchers at Oxford University.
Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs.
The researchers compiled information from news organisations and civil society groups as well as governments to create one of the most comprehensive inventories of disinformation practices by governments. They found that the number of countries with political disinformation campaigns had more than doubled to 70 in the last two years, with evidence of at least one political party or government entity in each of those countries engaging in social media manipulation.
In addition, Facebook remains the No. 1 social network for disinformation, the report said. Organised propaganda campaigns were found on the platform in 56 countries.
The report highlights the continuing challenge for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as they try to combat disinformation, particularly when the perpetrators are governments.
The companies have announced internal changes to reduce social media manipulation and foreign interference. But the research shows that use of the tactics, which include bots, fake social media accounts and hired "trolls", is growing. In the past two months, the platforms have suspended accounts linked to governments in China and Saudi Arabia.
Mr Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, a company that specialises in analysing social media, said the growing use of Internet disinformation is a matter of concern for the 2020 US election.
A mix of domestic and foreign groups, operating autonomously or with loose ties to a government, are building from the methods used by Russia in the last presidential election, making it difficult for the platforms to police them, he said.
China's emergence as a powerful force in global disinformation is one of the most significant developments of the past year, researchers said. The country has long used propaganda domestically, but the protests in Hong Kong proved it was expanding its efforts. Last month, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube suspended accounts linked to Beijing that were spreading disinformation about the ongoing protests.
Mr Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University and one of the authors of the report, said that such online disinformation campaigns can no longer be understood to be the work of "lone hackers, or individual activists, or teenagers in the basement doing things for clickbait". There is a new professionalism to the activity, with formal organisations that use hiring plans, performance bonuses and receptionists, he said.
The institute had worked with the US Senate Intelligence Committee to probe Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The tactics are not limited to large countries. Smaller states can now easily set up Internet influence operations. Most government-linked disinformation efforts were focused domestically, researchers said, adding, however, that at least seven countries tried to influence views outside their borders: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
