Archive Event Highlight

by Chad Bouchard

With polls and political soothsayers predicting another close U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, analysts and government officials are raising alarms about the role of foreign interference, as countries ramp up disinformation campaigns to sway a sharply divided electorate.

“Russians, Chinese and Iranians have figured out how to take advantage of the open internet in ways that in retrospect are completely predictable,” said Gordon Crovitz, who was publisher of The Wall Street Journal and editor and publisher of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. “But I think that took all of us – whether we were journalists or people charged with trying to protect democracies from disinformation – by surprise.”

Crovitz made his remarks during an OPC panel on Oct. 8 to discuss risks and strategies to untangle misinformation and disinformation in newsrooms. He is co-founder and currently serves as co-CEO of NewsGuard, an organization whose journalistically trained analysts counter disinformation by rating the trustworthiness of news sources and the most significant claims spreading on the internet. The moderator was Scott Kraft, editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and OPC President.

Also participating was David Rohde, national security editor at NBC News. Rohde said the biggest misinformation risks stem from within the U.S., worsened by deep political divisions, “but what Russia and China and Iran have learned is to amplify our differences.” Rohde said his biggest current concern is a potential lack of acceptance of results of the Nov. 5 election, driven mainly by former President Donald Trump and his supporters, whose refusal to accept results of the 2020 election enflamed attacks on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“It’s clear that there’s no better way to divide Americans [than] to show the U.S. as being chaotic, and most of all to show that democracy doesn’t work,” he said, adding that China, Russia and Iran each have their own internal political reasons to divide Americans and frame democracies as disorderly and dysfunctional.

“Deep fakes with fake election results, AI videos of people stuffing ballot boxes with fake ballots – even if refuted or disproven by the press, people just won’t believe it,” Rohde warned.

Kraft asked Rohde for his advice to journalists in newsrooms in how to identify suspicious information.

“Report it out,” he recalled one editor at NBC News telling him. Rohde said editors dispatch reporters to locations to verify claims, call local and federal officials to check facts, and send teams to report on the ground to verify or challenge claims. He added that checking false claims takes time to do with care, to avoid having to reverse any findings later on.

Rohde acknowledged that there is a risk in “platforming” false claims even as newsrooms seek to debunk them. He said the decision of whether or not to report dubious information depends on what the claim is and who is making it. Over the last month, amid increasing disinformation about issues such as the U.S.-Mexico border, the war in Ukraine, or U.S. support for Israel, he said he has been more inclined to cover those stories rather than dismiss them.

“People are seeing it. Social media is driving a high percentage of Americans’ news intake. And I think we’d be foolish to ignore it,” he said.

Crovitz said NewsGuard has rated about 30,000 news sources, including websites, social media accounts and YouTube channels and also maintains what he said is “the largest database debunking provably false claims that are spreading online.”

The team uses trained journalists and analysts to review those claims. He said the organization has identified about 800 malign sources dedicated to Russian disinformation, including a range of outlets from Russia Today (RT) to YouTube channels known to be run by Russian agents. “Our team is actually able every day to review those websites and social media accounts. They understand those environments the way an overseas correspondent would. When they see a new claim, they ask is this true or is this another Russian disinformation operation.”

Crovitz said NewsGuard’s ratings of media outlets are based on key, apolitical criteria of journalistic practices such as whether they regularly publish verifiably false content, disclose ownership and clearly separate news and opinion. He said NewsGuard has rated news and information sources in nine countries around the world that account for 95 percent of engagement in each country.

“In the U.S., 40 percent of the sources we’ve rated get an untrustworthy rating,” he said. “We have to recognize that consumers are living in a world dominated by social media platforms that take next to no responsibility for the misinformation they spread. As consumers thumb through TikTok or roam around YouTube, or they’re in their Facebook feed, they have very little idea who’s feeding them the news.”

Rohde said a lack of accountability in the digital realm has exacerbated the problem, stemming from the earliest days of the internet. He said while traditional news outlets can be sued for defaming people, platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok cannot. That exemption, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content.

“I understand that exemption was adopted decades ago to help those platforms grow, but it seems like an obvious way to at least create a cost to putting up false and defamatory information that just doesn’t exist now for these platforms.”

Crovitz underscored Rohde’s point, saying that after 30 years “we can definitely see what happens when you immunize the entire digital platform industry from the basic common law duties and liabilities that apply to all other industries, including the news industry. If you immunize somebody from liability, they’re going to act as if they’re immunized from liability,” Crovitz said.

Click the window below to watch a playlist of video clips from the program.