Nina Jankowicz and Cindy Otis write:

The Covid-19 “infodemic” has laid bare how vulnerable the United States is to disinformation. The country is less than five months away from the 2020 presidential election, and Americans by the thousands are buying into conspiracy theories about vaccines containing microchips and wondering about the healing powers of hair dryers. Where does all this come from? Let’s not be too distracted by a fear of rumormonger bots on the rampage or divisive ads purchased with Russian rubles. As two of the leading researchers in this field, we’re much more worried about Facebook groups pumping out vast amounts of false information to like-minded members.

For the past several years, Facebook users have been seeing more content from “friends and family” and less from brands and media outlets. As part of the platform’s “pivot to privacy” after the 2016 election, groups have been promoted as trusted spaces that create communities around shared interests. “Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends,” explained Mark Zuckerberg in a 2019 blog post. “People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared.”

But as our research shows, those same features—privacy and community—are often exploited by bad actors, foreign and domestic, to spread false information and conspiracies. Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms.

This was already evident in 2018, when associates of Shiva Ayyadurai, an independent candidate for US Senate, used groups as part of their astroturfing campaign to boost his online support. Today, Ayyadurai is one of the most dangerous vectors of health disinformation, racking up millions of engagements on posts that rail against vaccinations, claim Anthony Fauci is a member of the “deep state,” and instruct followers to point blow dryers down their throats to kill coronavirus. [Continue reading…]