Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet?: Bots, Echo Chambers, and Disinformation

Abstract

Report from a meeting held on the topic of disinformation, the Internet, and public diplomacy held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2017. Executive Summary Scientific progress continues to accelerate, and while we’ve witnessed a revolution in communication technologies in the past ten years, what proceeds in the next ten years may be far more transformative. It may also be extremely disruptive, challenging long held conventions behind public diplomacy (PD) programs and strategies. In order to think carefully about PD in this ever and rapidly changing communications space, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) convened a group of private sector, government, and academic experts at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to discuss the latest trends in research on strategic communication in digital spaces. The results of that workshop, refined by a number of follow-on interviews and discussions, are included in this report. I encourage you to read each of the fourteen essays that follow, which are divided into three thematic sections: Digital’s Dark Side, Disinformation, and Narratives. Digital’s Dark Side focuses on the emergence of social bots, artificial intelligence, and computational propaganda. Essays in this section aim to raise awareness regarding how technology is transforming the nature of digital communication, offer ideas for competing in this space, and raise a number of important policy and research questions needing immediate attention. The Disinformation section confronts Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year – “post-truth” – with a series of compelling essays from practitioners, a social scientist, and philosopher on the essential roles that truth and facts play in a democratic society. Here, theory, research, and practice neatly align, suggesting it is both crucial and effective to double-down on fact-checking and evidence-based news and information programming in order to combat disinformation campaigns from our adversaries. The Narrative section concludes the report by focusing on how technology and facts are ultimately part of, and dependent on, strategic narratives. Better understanding how these narratives form, and what predicts their likely success, is necessary to think through precisely how PD can, indeed, survive the Internet. Below are some key takeaways from the report. In Defense of Truth • We are not living in a “post-truth” society. Every generation tends to think that the current generation is less honest than the previous generation. This is an old human concern, and should be seen today as a strategic narrative (see Hancock, p. 49; Roselle, p. 77). Defending the value and search for truth is crucial. As Jason Stanley notes (p. 71), “without truth, there is just power.” • Humans are remarkably bad at detecting deception. Studies show that people tend to trust what others say, an effect called the truth bias. This bias is actually quite rational—most of the messages that a person encounters in a day are honest, so being biased toward the truth is almost always the correct response (see Hancock, p.49). • At the same time people are also continuously evaluating the validity of their understanding of the world. This process is called “epistemic vigilance,” a continuous process checking that the information that a person believes they know about the world is accurate. While we have a difficult time detecting deception from interpersonal cues, people can detect lies when they have the time, resources, and motivation. Lies are often discovered through contradicting information from a third source, or evidence that challenges a deceptive account (see Hancock, p. 49). • Fact checking can be effective, even in hyper-partisan settings (see Porter, p. 55), and is crucial for sustained democratic dialogue (Bennett, p. 61; Stanley, p. 71). Moreover, it is possible, using digital tools, to detect and effectively combat disinformation campaigns in real time (Henick a