The whole world held its breath looking at the 2020 US elections unfold. At times, it felt like a game where rules are scarce, and the truth is of least concern. Of course, it ended with a shocking storming of the United States Capitol and a bitter aftertaste after months of chaos, misinformation, and manipulation.
Lisa Witter, CEO of Apolitical, talked about democracy at the Reflect Festival right before the elections. Back then, he mentioned that she’s not sure if fair, free elections could even happen. “I think the bigger question is related to what I think is perhaps the biggest issue of our time: the role of social media and whether or not we can have free elections anymore,” she said.
Witter claimed that if we don’t figure out how to properly regulate social media, not only will the democracy be in decay or even go away, but “our children’s lives and even our own sense of whatever self-determination we have may go away.”
From elections to vaccines
Looking back at the 2016 elections, social media did indeed play a significant role. Besides the candidates’ own social media tactics, foreign influences came to play. Including the Russian internet troll factories. A study showed that every 25,000 retweets of Russian accounts correlated to a 1% increase in Donald Trump’s poll numbers one week later. That’s still not definitive proof of them technically winning the elections for Trump. But no one can blame them for not trying. For five weeks in September and October 2016, about 400,000 bots were responsible for 19% of all tweets about the presidential election.
Undoubtedly, the trolls have become even more sophisticated since then, although we may never quite know how far-reaching their influence is. One of their efforts may have been just uncovered: a suspicious PR agency with links to Russia tried to pay influencers to spread false rumors. This time, the internet trolls seem to be interested in vaccines.
The vaccine game of internet trolls
Several French and German influencers admitted that a suspicious public relations agency called Fazze approached them with a strange request. The agency wanted them to spread the word about the dangers of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine and hint at conspiracies. Their website doesn’t have any contact info, all LinkedIn profiles were deleted, and their Instagram was set to private. “Unbelievable. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus,” wrote one of the influencers, Léo Grasset. “All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles … which have been missing since this morning. Everyone has worked in Russia before,” he added.
Interestingly, the person who contacted Grasset asked him to claim that the Pfizer vaccine is 3x more deadly than AstraZeneca. He also provided sources (full of misinformation) and stressed that the outcome should not look like a paid collaboration. With the public leaning towards mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer due to AstraZeneca’s blood clot suspicions, another made-up rumor is the last thing the governments racing to achieve herd immunity need. Even before, Brussels has already criticized Russia and China for their campaigns against “Western” vaccines.
Playing with fire
Chaos is the daily agenda of thousands of trolls. If people no longer can tell the truth, they choose to reinforce what they already believe. They’d rather stay safely in their confirmation-biased bubbles since the world around them is too complicated and confusing. And so the conflict between such bubbles grows, which is precisely what you can see all around the world, perhaps most visibly in the bitterly divided US society.
That’s one of the reasons why critical thinking is a must-have skill to thrive in the future. The good news is, it’s something one can learn. “Multiple studies show that similarly to learning how to drive, you can also improve your critical thinking. For example, you could learn to verify photos through Google and double-check if it wasn’t misused for a different context. There are skills related to critical thinking that can be trained, and I believe it could be a subject at schools. It’s the age of fake news. Manipulation was always here, but now it’s on steroids due to social media & the internet. Noticing this will be extremely important,” explains Petr Ludwig, bestselling author of The End of Procrastination: How to Stop Postponing and Live a Fulfilled Life.
In this case, you’d think that Covid vaccines are a health-related topic, but there’s a reason internet trolls care so much. It’s also political. The current situation is a brilliant example of how internet trolls operate and why we always need to be on high alert. Unfortunately, this is not “just” about an election winner. The consequence is quite literally death.
Makes you wonder how far is propaganda willing to go – and that could be any propaganda. Time to sharpen those critical thinking skills.
