Elves vs. Trolls

Harassment, provocation and propaganda has a deeply chilling effect on online freedom of expression by reducing the willingness of the public to make its voices heard and participate in online communities.

This is particularly harmful when taking into account that trolls frequently target women and minorities. And it is not a harm limited to the individual targets of trolling tactics. The world over, social media have become a means of election interference.

Through the combined use of trolling, automated accounts (“bots”) and the spread of false information, domestic and foreign actors increasingly attempt to covertly influence election results around the world.

Disinformation campaigns around the globe

Russian interference in the 2016 and 2018 US elections and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in relation to both the US elections and the Brexit referendum in the UK have made headlines around the world. Other cases of digital election interference have had relatively little international attention:

• Ahead of their 2018 elections, millions of Brazillians were flooded with misleading messages and photos over WhatsApp.
• Online disinformation was rampant in the run-up to the 2014 Indian parliamentary elections.
• The 2018 Mexican elections were subject to widespread online disinformation.

In their 2018 Computational Propaganda Research Project report, Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, researchers from Oxford Internet Institute, examine the current global state of disinformation online.

The researchers found evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries around the world by states or political parties. This number is up from 28 in the researchers’ equivalent report from 2017.

Generally, these “cyber troops”, as the researchers refer to them, use social media as political propaganda tools. They typically make use of automated accounts to boost engagement metrics, teams of trolls flooding comment sections, as well as paid advertising and search engine optimization to target and distribute their messaging.

In a fifth of the examined countries, these campaigns took advantage of chat groups on apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat, mostly in the Global South where this form of online communication is more prevalent, than Facebook and Twitter.

And the economics of online disinformation are staggering: “Since 2010, political parties and governments have spent more than half a billion dollars on the research, development, and implementation of psychological operations and public opinion manipulation over social media,” writes the researchers.

In their report, they conclude that, “Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control …”

Fighting trolls with elves

In addition to general cyber security precautions aimed at limiting hacks and leaks in elections, there are ways to counter online disinformation as it happens.

Armies of online bots and trolls can be fought by human beings, sometimes referred to as social media elves, that is people organized to counter troll comments and harrassment and provide digital social care for their targets:

Trolls do a number of dangerous things, they spread misinformation, they sap the energy and will of the genuinely interested people, and they amplify opinion suggesting it is the majority or consensus view. They must be thwarted by a professional team of paid social media elves, who work to counter the misinformation, to act as a tar pit keeping the trolls away from civilians, and to prevent the trolls’ orchestrated actions from appearing organic.

However, organizing social media elves in practice requires training. Elves must learn to report and counter the harassment of trolls and expose the inauthenticity of bots. They must also be able to provide care for the targets of trolls.

A good example of such an effort in action is Sweden’s #Jagärhär (#Iamhere), an online elf army upwards of 75.000 people fighting trolls online with sister groups sprouting up across Europe.

Another example are the cyber elves of Lithuania countering active measures tactics from neighboring Russia. Here, what began as a grassroots initiative was quickly recognized as strategically important by the armed forces:

… Lithuanian soldiers began explaining the elf phenomenon to their Latvian counterparts as a new breed of partisan resistance fighters for the 21st century. Reports of this discussion leaked to the Baltic media, ironically making it a subject rife for meta-trolling and, one imagines, meta-elfing.

Whether working at the scale and scope of civil society like the Swedish elves or geopolitical strategy like their Baltic counterparts, systematizing the tactics of elfing, facilitating trainings and organizing elf contingents should be high on the agenda of any democracy preparing to defend itself.

Originally published on Medium.