Viral visuals driving social media disinformation — research

LONDON: The success of viral memes, videos and pictures in spreading online disinformation is fuelling organised social media manipulation on Instagram and YouTube, researchers at Oxford University said yesterday.

In an annual report on disinformation trends, the

Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Research Project said Facebook remained the most popular platform for social media manipulation due to its size and global reach.

But a focus on visual content more likely to be shared online means users of Google’s YouTube video platform and Facebook’s Instagram photosharing site are increasingly being targeted with false or misleading messages, Samantha Bradshaw, one of the report’s authors, said.

‘‘On Instagram and YouTube it’s about the evolving nature of fake news — now there are fewer textbased websites sharing articles and it’s more about video with quick, consumable content,’’ she said.

The report’s findings highlight the challenges faced by

Facebook, Google and other social media companies in combating the spread of political and financially motivated disinformation, as tactics and technologies develop and change.

A Facebook spokesman said showing users accurate information was a ‘‘major priority’’ for the company.

‘‘We’ve developed smarter tools, greater transparency, and stronger partnerships to better identify emerging threats, stop bad actors, and reduce the spread of misinformation on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp,’’ the spokesman said.

YouTube said it had invested in policies, resources and products to tackle misinformation on its site and regularly removes content which violates its terms of use.

A spokesman declined to comment on Oxford University’s findings.

Bradshaw said the move to target internet users with visual content would make it harder for social media platforms to identify and stamp out manipulated activity.

‘‘It’s easier to automatically analyse words than it is an image,’’ Bradshaw said.

‘‘And images are often more powerful than words with more potential to go viral.’’

The Oxford University report said that increased awareness of social media manipulation meant such activity had now been identified in 70 countries worldwide, up from 28 in 2017.

‘‘Computational propaganda has become a normal part of the digital public sphere,’’ the report said.

‘‘These techniques will also continue to evolve as new technologies . . . are poised to fundamentally reshape society and politics.’’