Authors:
(1) Filipo Sharevski, DePaul University;
(2) Benjamin Kessell, DePaul University.
Table of Links
2 Internet Activism and Social Media
3 Internet Activism and Misinformation
3.1 Grassroots Misinformation Operations
3.2 Mainstream Misinformation Operations
4 Hacktivism and Misinformation
4.1 Research Questions and 4.2 Sample
4.3 Methods and Instrumentation
5 Misinformation Conceptualization and 5.1 Antecedents to Misinformation
5.2 Mental Models of Misinformation
6 Active Countering of Misinformation and 6.1 Leaking, Doxing, and Deplatforming
7 Misinformation Evolution and 7.1 Counter-Misinformation Tactics
8 Discussion
8.3 Limitations and 8.4 Future Work
4 Hacktivism and Misinformation
In a radical state of ravaging misinformation campaigns on social media with no end in sight, one could wonder what the original activists on the Internet have to say in response. The unravelling of falsehoods clearly is a serious threat to the democratic vision of the Internet [97], as misinformation facilitated the rise of non-democratic communities contesting even factual knowledge and science (e.g. anti-vaxers, climate change deniers, etc. [127]). Hacktivists, as we have seen in Section 2, have fiercely opposed early misinformation campaigns in the past, but their means to do so were the “hijacked” for the mass produced misinformation of later. One could attribute the paucity of hacktivists’ involvement in the passing of the techno liberal order of the Internet as the rise of partisan-divided trust in facts and the politicization of science were already underway [35], but that alone is not a sufficient showstopper for action.
Regardless of any new Internet order, there is a reasonable expectation that one should still act upon the Levy’s sacrosanct postulates [65], even if that is within an ecosystem polluted with misinformation. In addition to the public good arguments, misinformation is in conflict with the all information should be free postulate as it creates “information disorder” that, by the token of catalyzing polarization and emotionally-charged participation online, gives even more power to the neoliberal elites for perpetuating the economic and social (media) disarray [25]. Misinformation also conflicts with the authority should be mistrusted, and decentralization promoted postulates as it stands in the way of independent truth discovery and dissemination online [67]. Should the new brand of reprehensible misinformation, therefore, be on the top of the hacktivists’ agenda already?
4.1 Research Questions
To explore the gap in hacktivism in regards mass misinformation, we invited prominent members of the hactivist community to answer the following research questions:
• RQ1: How contemporary hacktivists conceptualize the social media misinformation ecosystem?
• RQ2: What action hacktivists deem appropriate in responding to misinformation on social media?
• RQ3: In what directions do the hacktivists see the misinformation ecosystem evolve in the future?
4.2 Sample
Our study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of our institution before we invited, through personal contacts, and snowballing sampling the hacktivists for a virtual interview session with open-ended questions, listed in the Appendix. We sampled a population who were 18 years or older, from the United States, that is an active contributor in the hacktivist community, and has a history of such an involvement that we could reasonably verify. We used zoom interviews where we offered the possibility for the participants to choose if they want to use a video feed or not. Every interview was recorded, stored in a secure server, and manually transcribed and communicated with the interviewee to obtain an approval before we started the qualitative analysis.
Overall, we ended with a sample of total of 22 participants, all of which agreed to participate voluntarily. The demographics are given in Table 1. We made a deliberate attempt to produce a sample that is not a male-only or male-dominated, as previous studies indicate that the hacktivist community is imbalanced in regards gender [121]. The participation in the study was not anonymous to us as researchers, but we deliberately avoid using definitive numbers and potentially identifiable information in reporting of our results to preserve their anonymity to the general population, as a condition for their participation. In some cases, we used a direct censoring of names in citing participants’ responses. We allowed the participants to skip any question they were uncomfortable answering. The interviews took around an hour to complete.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
