Disinformation or Debate? Finding Signal Amid Political Noise

Disinformation or Debate? Finding Signal Amid Political Noise

Olga Belogolova and Madelyn Wilson, Facebook

During an elections period, the information environment can become increasingly polarized and noisy, making it ripe for politically-motivated disinformation campaigns. Olga and Madelyn will present on their work at Facebook identifying and disrupting coordinated disinformation campaigns and the challenges discerning between highly engaged civic actors and state-sponsored trolls. For Facebook, the cost of getting it wrong is high — it's the difference between disrupting a real threat and silencing legitimate political speech, the difference between protecting the information space or polluting it. Some of the questions that will be addressed include: When discerning political chatter from coordinated inauthentic behavior, does content matter? What's the difference between a fake account and an inauthentic one? Why does coordination matter? How does attribution for information ops differ from traditional cyber operations?