ABSTRACT
The digital communication ecosystem—and social media in particular—creates new opportunities for foreign actors to attack democracies and their public spheres, particularly during elections. This chapter discusses how foreign actors seek to interfere in elections by injecting digital disinformation into social media ecosystems, particularly through the use of troll armies and bots. Importantly, these tactics must be understood in tandem with the use of mal-information and attempts to exploit existing flows of communication, including the relationship between social media and news. The chapter also describes the goals of digital disinformation campaigns, which include both short-term attempts to shape an election outcome and long-term aspirations to build electoral distrust among citizens within a democracy. To highlight these goals, tactics and their potential successes, the author illustrates the point with the case of Russian disinformation in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, noting that these digital disinformation tactics build upon Russia’s historic use of active measures. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for how democracies can proceed, knowing that digital disinformation will be an ever-present danger to democracies around the world.
