Civic Information Handbook

May 11, 2023 • Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein for The Bulletin of Technology & Public Life

In our current online world, civic information—important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.

Often, this is not an accident. Carefully orchestrated social media campaigns exploit social media tools, like algorithmic amplification and micro-targeting, to manipulate users and the information environment. These campaigns leverage the inherent platform product design to promote narratives, sell products, persuade users, and even provoke users to act for political, economic, or social purposes.

As a result, today’s civic leaders must play a more active role in the amplification of fact-based information. As Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “we've gotta be out there — scientists and the general public and those who understand the facts — talking about true and correct information.”[1]

To be sure, the playing field is not even. Social media platform tools are better suited for campaigns seeking to manipulate and agitate users than to empower and inform. Platforms and regulators must get involved to fix the design flaws that allow false and misleading information to flourish in the first place.[2] Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.

…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.

…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.

This handbook will function as a media literacy tool, giving readers the skills and opportunity to consider who is behind networked information campaigns and how they spread their messages.

Its focus is limited to how information spreads on social media, but modern networked information campaigns work across an entire ecosystem of on- and offline tactics. Information campaigns use radio, mail, email, print media, television, and face-to-face communication.[3]

An array of terms are applied to viral falsehoods, including fake news, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, propaganda, and, in the national security context, information operations, hybrid threats, and hack and leak. Mis-, dis- and malinformation, as defined by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, are three of the most prevalent and important terms today: