Chris Tenove

This article originally appeared on the website of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, February 1, 2024.

BY CHRIS TENOVE & HEIDI TWOREK

Half the world’s population goes to the polls in 2024. This series of commentaries, in partnership with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC, explores the intersection of technology with the most pivotal among these elections.

This will be an unprecedented year for democracy. More than half the world’s adults will have the chance to vote in major elections. These include citizens of most of the largest democracies, including India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and the United States, not to mention those governed by the European Parliament. The United Kingdom and even Canada might also have elections this year.

While it’s exciting that so many people will exercise their voting rights, there are widespread fears that elections in 2024 will contribute to democracy’s global decline. Autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin will surely “win” elections, and so could weak-on-democracy politicians such as Donald Trump. Why is there so much pessimism about democracy’s health? While there are many factors, the polluted online information environment is often mentioned. As Nobel Prize-winner Maria Ressa puts it, provocatively, a “tech-enabled Armageddon” is undermining democracy everywhere.

Election campaigns are increasingly contested online, whether on platforms such as Facebook, mass messaging services such as Telegram or search engines such as Google, not to mention the backend ad markets and data repositories that shape so much campaign messaging. And that’s even before we factor in the potentially disruptive role of generative artificial intelligence (AI). The World Economic Forum recently identified AI-enhanced misinformation and disinformation as the top source of catastrophic risk globally in the next two years.

The online component of this year’s elections deserves scrutiny. Yet there is a danger that this attention will fall into the traps of hot takes, overblown assertions about the power of tech to affect election outcomes, and US-centrism.

To counter these shortcomings, we are collaborating with CIGI to produce a series of essays on key countries facing elections this year. The series will enable us to underscore three broader points about the global collision of technology and politics in 2024.

It’s a real treat, as a researcher, to get funding to work for several years on an important project with excellent colleagues. So, I’m delighted that our team at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions has launched a new, multi-year investigation of the policies that governments and social media platforms have introduced to protect the integrity of democratic elections.

This issue leapt onto the global stage, and my own research agenda, in the aftermath of the 2016 elections in the UK and US. Not only did these give us Brexit and President Donald Trump, they felt like the first elections in which social media played a decisively negative role, from Russian interference to Cambridge Analytica’s data theft and opinion manipulation to industrial volumes of “fake news.” Since 2016, it’s become clear that bad actors were indeed leveraging platforms to promote false information, widen social cleavages, and drown out legitimate and productive democratic discourse (as Spencer McKay and I wrote about in Political Research Quarterly). However, subsequent research revealed that the election outcomes themselves – and broader issues of social polarization – were driven by a wide set of forces. The platforms were both a mirror and an accelerant of those trends.

Democratic governments reacted with inquiries and heated criticism of the tech industry, but actual legislation to address platforms’ roles in harming democratic processes and discourse has come in fits and starts. Heidi Tworek, Fenwick McKelvey and I had a front row seat for those developments in Canada. After publishing the Poisoning Democracy report with the Public Policy Forum, we and other experts convened and were consulted by government officials as they developed security policies and updated Canada’s elections laws in advance of the 2019 federal elections. It was interesting to see how academic and civil society voices contribute to this flurry of discussion, while the federal government was testing ideas and drafting new policies. I was also watching policy developments beyond Canada’s borders, and I tracked some of these in a 2020 article in The International Journal of Press/Politics, Protecting Democracy from Disinformation: Normative Threats and Policy Responses.

However, 2023 feels like a new era for social media platform regulation, with Europe’s Digital Services Act, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and potential new online harms legislation in Canada.

What impact will those and other developments have on how social media platforms are used and misused in elections? How do these developments in North Atlantic countries compare to or shape policy trajectories elsewhere, as countries try to wrest control of their digital public spheres from US-based corporations, often doing so with measures that simultaneously increase sovereign control and threaten rights to freedom of expression.

There’s a daunting range of issues to contemplate as we begin this project on social media regulation and democratic elections. Thankfully, I’ll be coordinating a fine group of people.

Heidi Tworek is the PI of a new SSHRC Insight Grant that is providing the core funding for the project, A Global Comparative Study of Policies to Protect Democratic Participation on Social Media Platforms. Our key collaborators are:

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University
• Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa
• Ivar Hartmann, Insper Institute of Education and Research, Brazil
• Christian Katzenbach, University of Bremen, Germany
• Molly S. Laas, Social Science Research Council, USA
• Emily Laidlaw, University of Calgary
• temi lasade-anderson, King’s College London, UK
• Jonathan Corpus Ong, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• Taylor Owen, McGill University
• Yves E. Tiberghien, University of British Columbia

Onward!

It’s been a long time since my last post, but this is a good occasion to get back to it!

Today, the Global Reporting Centre and UBC’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media published Not Just Words: How Reputational Attacks Harm Journalists and Undermine Press Freedom. Here’s the website summarizing its findings with text and data visualization.

This report has been a real team effort. I’m very grateful Juan Merchan, Mani Sharma, and Gus Villela, for their research and co-authorship, and to Ahmed Al-Rawi and Peter Klein for their insights and encouragement. Andrew Munroe, Michelle Meiklejohn, Christine Brandt, Rithika Shenoy and others at the Global Reporting Centre have been great to work with. Tremendous thanks for support from PEN Canada and the Committee to Protect Journalists–including coordination by Andrés Fernandez Carrasco and the report Foreword written by CPJ president Jodie Ginsberg. And that’s just some of the people who deserve to be acknowledged! Please see the report for the full list.

What’s the report about, you ask?

Executive Summary (abridged):

Journalists’ reputations are under assault around the world. Among journalists we surveyed, 63% reported at least monthly attacks on their individual reputations — and 19% reported facing them daily. Rates were even higher for attacks on the reputations of their news outlets or the broader news media sector.

These are concerning findings because reputations are critical in journalism. A journalist’s reputation affects whether they are heard and believed, trusted by potential sources, and often whether they can survive economically. So journalists’ reputations are often attacked by those who want to hide the truth or evade accountability.

We define “reputational attacks” as public messages intended to discredit, delegitimize, or dehumanize journalists. These attacks are frequently online, but can also be mounted in politicians’ speeches, news broadcasts, and courtrooms. They can range from epithets in Twitter comments, to groundless claims in legal suits, to sophisticated disinformation campaigns using manipulated videos. An Iranian-American journalist shared a video with us created to misrepresent her reporting.“See! They put scary music in the background and zoom in on my face,” she said. “It’s a psy-op.”

Today, these reputational attacks appear to be increasing due to changes in the information environment (including the rise of social media platforms) and political landscapes (such as the global trend of democratic backsliding). At the same time, press freedom and trust in journalism appear to be in decline globally, and threats to journalists’ safety are on the rise. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 67 journalists and media workers were killed in 2022, the highest since 2018, and a record 363 were in jail as of December 1, 2022.

To investigate how reputational attacks contribute to the risks and challenges that journalists face, we conducted a global survey in 2022. It was completed by 645 journalists, who resided in countries spanning a wide range of press freedom levels. The survey was available in six languages (English, Arabic, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish). 42% of survey respondents identified as women and 25% identified as belonging to a marginalized racial, ethnic or religious group in their respective countries. We then conducted in-depth follow-up interviews with 54 journalists.

We have eight key findings:

Originally published on November 18, 2021, by PEN Canada

Chris Tenove is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia. Together with Peter Klein (Professor of Journalism and Executive Director of the Global Reporting Centre at UBC) and Ahmed Al-Rawi (Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University), Dr. Tenove leads “Shooting the Messenger: Credibility Attacks Against Journalists,” a research project funded by Mitacs and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

PEN Canada: Why is the Global Reporting Centre studying journalists who are targeted by campaigns of disinformation and harassment? 

Chris Tenove: Our project is called “Shooting the Messenger,” and we are looking at efforts to threaten, discredit, harass, and otherwise undermine journalists globally when they are trying to do their jobs. We are working on this project with PEN Canada and with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). For years, CPJ has been tracking murders, disappearances, and jailings of journalists. Those blunt tactics continue, but they are now complemented by information campaigns against journalists. These might include spreading false claims about journalists or news outlets, making anonymous threats, or exposing private information about journalists and their family members, and these tactics are often paired with surveillance. Prominent journalists targeted in this way include Rana Ayyub in India, Ronan Farrow in the US, and Maria Ressa in the Philippines.. 

We might think of these organized efforts to undermine journalists as “top-down” campaigns. Journalists globally also seem to be facing rising levels of “bottom-up” hostility and harassment from the public. Top-down and bottom-up attacks are often related. For instance, President Trump in the US and President Bolsonaro in Brazil are clear cases of political elites stoking anti-press sentiment and encouraging supporters to lash out at individual journalists. For journalists on the receiving end, a threat, a false accusation, or a series of sexually explicit messages can have negative impacts on their mental health, security, and ability to report, regardless of who it comes from.

PC: How are you going to study these problems?

CT: We will soon launch a global survey to investigate patterns in the harassment and credibility attacks journalists face, the likely sources of those attacks, and their impacts. We will compare the experiences of journalists in more or less democratic countries, and examine how journalists’ gender, ethnicity, religion, and other factors may shape their experiences. We are also doing some social media investigations, working with partner organizations to look at information campaigns against journalists in a few countries. 

The Global Reporting Centre focuses on solutions to the problems that journalists face, so we will be working with partners like PEN Canada to provide recommendations and resources for journalists .

PC: Isn’t this mainly a foreign problem? How does it affect Canada?

CT: Canadian journalists tend to have thick skins,  but they face increasing abuse and harassment. A recent IPSOS survey of Canadian journalists found that 72% had experienced harassment, such as violent threats and sexualized messages, in the last year. The survey came out not long after Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, called on Twitter for his supporters to “play dirty” with journalists. The Coalition for Women in Journalism found that at least 18 women journalists received vile and threatening emails following his remarks. (Twitter briefly suspended Bernier’s account.)  In a rare show of unity, many news organizations came together to publicly declare that “there can be no tolerance for hate and harassment of journalists or for incitement of attacks on journalists doing their jobs,” and observed that such attacks “inordinately target women and racialized journalists.”

By Chris Tenove & Heidi Tworek, originally published Sept 13, 2021, in Policy Options

Right from the start of the 2021 election campaign, the political parties’ social media strategies have been in full swing. Justin Trudeau was masked and bumping elbows with children on Instagram (where he has four million followers); Annamie Paul retweeted Margaret Atwood’s tweet to demand a leaders’ debate on climate change; Erin O’Toole was on Facebook posting video rebuttals to perceived gaffes by Trudeau, and Jagmeet Singh has continued to build his popularity with younger demographic groups as the dominant Canadian politician on TikTok.

As candidates across the country push their carefully orchestrated videos and chatty posts, they often receive hostile responses. To better understand this problem, we researched online abuse in the 2019 federal election campaign. We interviewed more than 30 candidates and staff; we used a novel machine-learning model to analyze more than a million tweets directed at candidates; and we made recommendations on how to mitigate the problem. We found that 40 per cent of the tweets were negative; only 7 per cent were positive (figure 1). The more prominent the politician, the greater the volume of negative messages they received (figure 2). (For more details, including reflections on online harassment by five women in politics, see our report Trolled on the Campaign Trail: Online Incivility and Abuse in Canadian Politics, published by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia).

Online attacks can threaten candidates’ security and undermine their psychological health. The communications officer for a very prominent candidate recounted that the candidate “received not terribly infrequent death threats.” Some candidates told us they were anxious about what online trolls might do next, or felt demoralized by insults from apparently random members of the public. (Others, it should be acknowledged, said they do not find online abuse to be a major problem.) The psychological toll extends beyond the candidate. Much of the labour of evaluating, hiding or reporting online abuse falls upon political staff, some of whom described this work as an occupational health and safety hazard.

Online abuse can also undermine the quality of candidates’ engagement with the public. “Social media abuse is designed to take energy and time away from a campaign and to demoralize,” a former cabinet minister told us. Many candidates respond by limiting their personal engagement on social media, sometimes at the behest of protective staff. They use social media as a way to broadcast messages rather than to interact with users. Furthermore, research suggests that members of the public are less likely to engage in productive discussion or seek credible information when they encounter uncivil messages on social media platforms.

Hot off the presses – a new report by Heidi Tworek and me on the online harassment of Canadian politicians. It’s published by UBC’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, with funding from SSHRC, Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge, and UBC’s Language Sciences Initiative.

Here’s a little Q&A with me on this project for the UBC Political Science Research Portal.

What motivated you to investigate online incivility and abuse during the 2019 election? 

For several years I’ve been studying how the internet can be misused to undermine human rights or democracy. I’ve examined foreign election interference, and cyber-security threats faced by human rights advocates in Syria and elsewhere. Like everyone, I’d encountered media reports on the online harassment faced by politicians. There’s some good research on this topic in other countries but almost none in Canada. So, together with Heidi Tworek (Associate Professor of Public Policy and International History), I decided to try to fill that gap. The 2019 federal election seemed the right time to do it, and we got a grant from the Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge to begin the project.