April 14, 2021
While there is no easy answer or magic solution to countering foreign disinformation designed to influence our elections, an essential piece of this effort has to involve increasing media and digital literacy, so voters don’t automatically believe everything they read online. This is, of course, a much broader societal problem beyond the impact it has on our democracy. But it is an area where we have already seen the deadly consequences of bad information being shared online, at the January 6th insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and it’s spreading faster than fact-checkers or tech companies can keep up with it.
As experts debate how to improve American voters’ news literacy, they generally agree on the need to take the fight against disinformation to a younger generation, to try to develop good online habits at an earlier age. If we can stem some of the susceptibility to nefarious actors when students are first learning how to interact online, maybe there is a path to a brighter future ahead — one that makes it harder for other countries to cause turmoil here with their digital disinformation.
An early test case for bolstering American digital literacy is currently at work in Florida, led by former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. He runs an organization called Cyber Florida, which was founded in 2014 to help the state improve its cybersecurity education, academic and practical research, and community outreach and engagement.
Late last year, Cyber Florida announced it was piloting a new program with the New America Foundation and the Florida Center for Instructional Technology to improve “cyber citizenship” skills for K-12 students. A key part of that work is dedicated to teaching students about digital literacy and how to spot disinformation. One of the program’s stated goals is to develop a training curriculum that can be used nationwide to help standardize best practices across incredibly diverse school districts with varying local resources available to them.
In a recent Time op-ed, McConnell and one of the project’s other leaders, P.W. Singer, emphasized how the threat is much bigger than being hacked:
“This goes far beyond the need to protect oneself from on-line scams or the theft of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Such skills should go to the very heart of what it means to be a U.S. citizen. The growing challenges of misinformation, deliberate disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false information have not only made the internet a more toxic place, but they have also fueled extremism, poisoned public health and threatened the very basis of our democracy.”
So while we have to train campaigns, political parties, and elections officials how to detect foreign-based disinformation, it is this work with average citizens that may be among the most influential in the long run. Bad actors need people susceptible to their tactics, so we must counter that influence at a very localized level, in our real world and online communities. And starting with students is smart; it is much easier to teach good habits than for people to unlearn bad ones.
Notably, the fact that national security thinkers like McConnell and Singer — who have spent their careers examining how to counter threats overseas — are now focused on doing so here at home is indicative of how pervasive and dangerous this problem is.
Improving digital literacy is an incredibly tough challenge, especially when the financial incentives of tech companies and media organizations often drive them toward promoting conflict and the extremes. And, crucially, people need to want to know when they’re being fed disinformation online. There were disturbing anecdotes after the 2016 election about voters who were not particularly upset that they had attended rallies organized by Russian Facebook accounts pretending to be Americans, or about how many voters continued to believe false stories even after being shown incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
There is a lot of research being done on why people are susceptible to such disinformation. Efforts like this one in Florida offer a potential way to have some success in the tedious work of turning Americans of all ages into more astute media and digital observers. As these kinds of projects become more widespread, we would hope to see ripple effects across our social networks.
As McConnell and Singer write: “It is our obligation to train and equip the next generation with the kind of skills that will allow them to avoid repeating the mistakes of our era. And who knows, maybe some of those skills just might rub off on their parents and grandparents too.”
Marie Harf
International Elections Analyst, USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative
Marie Harf is a strategist who has focused her career on promoting American foreign policy to domestic audiences. She has held senior positions at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, worked on political campaigns for President Barack Obama and Congressman Seth Moulton, and served as a cable news commentator. Marie has also been an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.