STANFORD INTERNET OBSERVATORY HOW TO
STANFORD INTERNET OBSERVATORY FREE

Political parties and campaigns use information manipulation to discredit the opposition, use false amplification to reach a wider audience or suggest that they have more public support than they do, or manipulate political discourse in a way that serves their campaign agenda.

Though this list is not exhaustive, it provides a starting point for thinking about the relevant actors in your own country’s context.

Here, we have outlined common threat actors involved in information manipulation campaigns. A political campaign will focus on winning an election the influence industry and commercial public relations firms want to make money a foreign adversary might try to influence the election outcome, advance national interests, or sow chaos or an extremist group might focus on advancing their political cause. Different actors have different goals for engaging in information manipulation. To make things more complicated, while some of those actors may operate independently, others may operate in coordination, be at crosspurposes, or benefit from the general chaos and lack of trust in the information environment. In most election environments, a number of different actors will likely engage in information manipulation. Here, we explore how information manipulation campaigns co-opt different digital vectors, are led by different actors, and use a variety of tactics to distribute different kinds of content. While information manipulation can co-opt traditional information channels-such as television broadcasting, print or radio-we focus on the digital aspects of information manipulation. Information manipulation is a set of tactics involving the collection and dissemination of information in order to influence or disrupt democratic decision-making. This section lays out the components of information manipulation and defines commonly used terms. Background: Understanding Information Manipulation The playbook’s three-part strategy can help you develop rapid and real-time responses, as well as establish long-term and sustainable approaches to building resilience in order to maintain the integrity of elections and strengthen democratic processes. Planning timelines will vary based on context, but-if at all possible-we encourage proactive rather than reactive planning to effectively counter electoral information manipulation. While we outline three distinct steps in this playbook, the process for combating information manipulation is circular, with each step overlapping and reinforcing the others.

STANFORD INTERNET OBSERVATORY HOW TO

The playbook approach consists of how to (1) identify ongoing information manipulation campaigns (2) develop real-time and short-term responses and (3) build long-term resilience to information manipulation. Since information manipulation is an ongoing challenge, this playbook will also be useful outside of an election cycle.

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We hope this playbook will enable you and everyone dedicated to defending democracy to push back against efforts that undermine free and fair political competition. The playbook lays out the basics of the problem and the core elements of a response, and points to trusted resources for those looking to do a deeper dive into a particular type of intervention or threat. To address this challenge, IRI, NDI and SIO have joined forces to create this playbook, intended to help leapfrog the first six months of the electoral preparation process. Civil society actors, journalists, governments, election management bodies and other democratic actors often end up scrambling to respond in the lead-up to an election. Without concerted efforts to identify, respond to, and build long-term resilience to election-related information manipulation, attacks on information integrity threaten to delegitimize elections globally, reduce faith in elected governments, polarize societies and weaken democracies writ large.ĭealing with information manipulation around an election is a new and unfamiliar phenomenon for many countries. Over the past few years, the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) have observed efforts to undermine election-related information integrity in every corner of the world.

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