NATO GUIDELINES FOR DEALING WITH FALSE NEWS

Authoritarian regimes – a source of false news

The international coverage of “false news” during the US presidential election in 2016 has dramatically drawn the world’s attention to the role of digital disinformation in the elections, and then in all areas of politics, economics, life, and relations between countries.

While the focus was on the influence of the Russian propaganda in the United States and Europe, the problem has proved to be much greater. Digital disinformation is a global challenge that requires the creation of new coalitions, new responses, tools and strategies to tackle the world with them.

Authoritarian regimes around the world work on long-term and financially well-established strategies for narrowing the democratic rights of citizens online, polluting political debates, disinformation discussions and attacks focused on the demolition of democracy and democratic principles and freedoms.

Non-democratic governments have already begun to develop more advanced technologies and types of computerized propaganda using a variety of algorithms, artificial intelligence that can write and distribute false news at a very high, alarming level.

Moscow, for example, is still promoting the myth that Washington is making all decisions in NATO. It is pushing the myth that the Alliance’s enlargement is not a process led by sovereign states; it is not the wish of the aspirant countries, but a desire of the United States to threaten Russia and the world’s peace.

Even in countries with strong support for the US and the EU like Romania, Moscow is trying to use any division in the society to spread false news and anti-Western propaganda.

The real information in the sea of false news

Thus, the more the role of social media and the Internet in the formation and distribution of news and information increases, the sooner the political debates and campaigns move online. But in many countries, the possibility of getting involved or receiving some free and genuine information is under serious threat. In a situation where authoritarian governments are confronted with the pressure of the Internet audience on their policies, they are beginning to take on new repressive tactics in order to undermine the democratic dialogue and reduce the democratic support from abroad.

Influencing news and various ways of manipulating a healthy democratic audience on social media have imposed an urgent need to handle false news. Disinformation is spreading faster than assumptions, so false news has entered into international relations, domestic politics, economy. The great alliances, especially those that in one way were symbolic of the Western world, began to fight the false news, especially after the power of the manipulative word became evident.

NATO: video game for fighting false news

The game is a kind of training to identify disinformation. It is set up on Facebook and is open to all FB users.

Players are placed in a virtual role as responsible for a publishing company where they can virtually make money by gathering as many audiences as possible by publishing news and information. It has three levels, each giving the players the opportunity to think and recognize the possibilities of being deceived.

This NATO game aims to encourage readers and social factors to use social media more conscientiously and to read more carefully.

NATO’s language – tactics of recognition and dealing

• Strategic communication are the work of every member country of NATO, not just certain sectors or elements. In everyday work and communication, especially in certain operations, NATO constantly communicates with the outside world. In order to reduce opportunities for production of disinformation from hostile actors, the language that NATO is using should also be adapted to social media and mass media as well as to other international organizations. In this direction, a series of workshops and lectures were organized by the NATO Strategic Communications Alliance.

• Rinsing the news – Technique of downloading news from the original source and then “rinsing” the news through “media intermediaries” in order to hide the origin of the news. In this rinsing process, the news experiences a deliberate misinterpretation. The right content and message are being removed, and the key messages are altered or otherwise deliberately translated.

• By placing the news in a different context and agenda, individual cases of disinformation are put into service to influence a public debate in the country or on issues of national security. It is therefore necessary, from a strategic point of view, to keep all these news and information in a wider context, in order not to forget them and to keep an eye on how they would influence and how they will develop in the long run.

• In this regard, it is necessary to get acquainted with and to know the following: in the context of systematic activities of spreading disinformation, any content is susceptible to hostile actions. Even minimal changes to certain statements are enough to give them a completely different meaning. This emphasizes the need for trainings to improve knowledge and understanding of the media and their functioning, as well as the threats based on spreading (dis)information.

• Wrong citation is widespread in the media. Sometimes it happens unwillingly, when editing the news by the editor in order to put emphasis on a particular thought, statement and content. That’s when it happens unintentionally. But in cases of spreading disinformation, it is a deliberate and systematic attempt to commit fraud with obvious consequences.