Disinformation networks target elections, crises and critics, research shows

More than 85% of people worldwide worry about the impact of online disinformation, and 87% say it has already harmed their country's politics. The figures come from a Unesco-commissioned Ipsos survey of 8,000 people in 16 countries, published in November 2023. The poll covered countries due to hold national elections in 2024, with a combined 2.5 billion voters.

The survey found 56% of internet users got their news mainly from social media, compared with 44% for television and 29% for media sites. Trust in social media lagged traditional outlets: 50% against 66% for television, 63% for radio and 57% for media websites and apps. Across the 16 countries, 68% named social media as the place where fake news is most widespread.

Southport: how a false name spread

Three girls were killed in Southport in July 2024. Within hours, false claims about the attacker's name, religion and migration status were circulating. Far-right groups organised anti-migrant and anti-Islam protests that escalated into days of riots across the UK, including attacks on mosques, immigration centres and hotels housing asylum seekers.

Hannah Rose, a hate and extremism analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told CNBC via email that a post on X falsely named the perpetrator as "Ali al-Shakati", rumoured to be a migrant of Muslim faith. By 3pm the following day the false name had over 30,000 mentions on X alone. Other false claims said the attacker was on an intelligence services watchlist, arrived by small boat in 2023, or was known to local mental health services. Police debunked the claims the day after they emerged, saying the suspect was born in Britain. By then the narrative had already gained traction.

Joe Ondrak, research and tech lead for the UK at Logically, told CNBC the false reports acted as a way to rationalise and reinforce pre-existing prejudice and bias before any established truth could get out. ISD's Rose said accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, including paid-for blue ticks, shared the false information, which platform algorithms then pushed to other users. She added that when users searched Southport on TikTok, the false name was promoted in the platform's recommendations section for eight hours after police confirmed it was incorrect.

State-linked operations

Other networks are not grassroots. CNN reported in November 2023, based on court documents and public disclosures by social media companies, that the Chinese government had built the world's largest known online disinformation operation and was using it to harass US residents, politicians and businesses, at times threatening targets with violence. Victims described barrages of tens of thousands of posts. Meta said in August 2023 it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to the group in the second quarter of that year. Google told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years, while X had blocked hundreds of thousands of China state-backed or state-linked accounts, according to company blogs.

Research published in September 2023 by the Union of Concerned Scientists cited figures from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found X continued to host nearly 86% of a set of 300 hateful posts a week after they were reported. The same post cited researcher Abbie Richards, who found climate denial tweets averaged about 30,000 per week between December 2021 and July 2022, then nearly tripled to 110,000 per week after July 2022.

Rules are arriving piecemeal. The UK's Online Safety Act, intended to fight hate speech, only comes into effect early next year, CNBC reported in August 2024, and the media regulator Ofcom wrote to platforms saying they should not wait for it. Unesco, which published a seven-principle governance blueprint in November 2023, said more than 50 countries were already regulating social media, often outside international free speech and human rights norms, and plans a World Conference of Regulators in 2024.