Revised Elections Guide for Investigative Reporters: Political Messaging and Disinformation

Editor’s Note: This reporting guide has been updated and revised for the 2024 election cycle. It was originally published in 2022 and the previous version of this chapter can be read here.

A useful starting point for combating election disinformation in the current global landscape is adopting a transparent and unapologetic position: that journalism does, and should, take sides on the issue of democracy, and serves as one of its guardians.

Newsrooms in at-risk democracies have chosen to pay less attention to the “antics” and divisive statements by populist candidates and to focus instead on investigating topics with a direct impact on communities.

At a minimum, experts say this basic position helps to counter claims of party-political bias, and sharpens the choices on which bad actors and what kinds of disinformation to investigate: those designed to undermine democratic rights.

One report on election disinformation by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford identified a common strategy between independent newsrooms in at-risk democracies like the Philippines (Rappler), India (The Quint), and South Africa (Daily Maverick): “a common sense of democratic mission associated with accountability journalism.”

These newsrooms have chosen to pay less attention to the “antics” and divisive statements by populist candidates and to focus instead on investigating topics with a direct impact on communities, and on the early identification of those deception campaigns with the potential to do the most damage.

Another structural strategy is for newsrooms to publicly commit to investigate the bad actors behind disinformation campaigns — both to attract sources and whistleblowers, and to put healthy pressure on reporters to dig beyond the falsehoods. For instance, for 2024 — in a model that involves AI tools, and which could be replicated in other countries — the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has launched an Influence Operations project dedicated not only to revealing efforts to dishonestly manipulate voters, but also to expose the people behind them.

One great example of a bad actors-focused election disinformation investigation was the collaborative Digital Mercenaries cross-border project, in which newsrooms from 16 countries, including Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Mexico, exposed a network of commercial consultants dedicated to deceiving voters throughout Latin America. Co-ordinated by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism — or CLIP, by its Spanish acronym — the series showed how influence “mercenaries” exploit xenophobic fears and partisan hatred to mislead, and used follow-the-money techniques to show how their strategies are often exported across borders. The project noted that these so-called dark PR professionals “like to think of themselves as strategists, but they seem more like televangelists of formulas to manipulate” — and cautioned that they sometimes have more influence on voting choices than politicians themselves.

Social media platforms have, of course, grown into powerful domains of political messaging in elections. Their impact runs from the positive, such as boosting young and disenfranchised voter engagement, to the frivolous, like passing around candidate memes, to misleading paid advertisements and coordinated disinformation campaigns, to nativist or partisan platforms that welcome hate speech. Meanwhile, several major social media platforms have gutted their already inadequate safeguards and hate speech watchdog teams.

Disinformation is funded and coordinated because it has the proven power to swing national elections, and to power new anti-democratic laws that can ensure future skewed election wins. A classic study of the US 2016 election by Ohio State University found that 4% of likely Hillary Clinton supporters — a decisive margin — were dissuaded from voting for her due to wildly false “news” stories. These included headlines like “Clinton approved weapons sales to Islamic jihadists, ‘including ISIS’” — a story believed by 20% of former Barack Obama voters.

Major New Disinformation Threats to  Monitor

A New Level of Foreign Interference