PoliticalMANIPULATIVE

Foreign Interference Inflation

What it is

Overstating the reach, sophistication, or effect of a real or alleged foreign influence operation in order to gain domestic advantage — delegitimizing an opponent, a result, or a protest, or justifying new powers.

How it works

The raw material is usually real: a foreign operation existed. Inflation happens in the step from activity to effect. Reach figures are quoted without denominators; content that was posted is treated as content that persuaded; an operation's existence is treated as proof it changed an outcome. The appeal is strong on every side. For the loser of a contest, foreign manipulation explains defeat without fault. For a government facing protest, a foreign hand turns citizens into agents and justifies restrictions. For agencies, vendors, and researchers, a large threat supports budgets. The measured evidence is more modest than the rhetoric. Eady and colleagues (2023) linked survey data to Twitter feeds and found exposure to Internet Research Agency accounts in 2016 was concentrated among users who were already strongly partisan, and found no measurable relationship with changes in attitudes or voting. That does not show the operation was harmless or that other channels had no effect; it shows that effect claims need evidence of their own. Inflation also does the adversary a favor, as the perception-hacking literature notes.

Real-world examples

  • •Facebook's 2017 estimate that content from the Internet Research Agency may have reached 126 million Americans over two years was widely quoted without the company's accompanying note that this was a tiny fraction of the content in those users' feeds; some commentators treated the figure as evidence that the 2016 result was decided by Russia, a claim the U.S. intelligence community assessment expressly did not make.
  • •After the 2020 U.S. election, some supporters of Donald Trump claimed that voting machines had been manipulated from Venezuela, China, or Italy; courts and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency found no evidence.
  • •Governments facing mass protest routinely credit foreign direction: Beijing on Hong Kong in 2019, Moscow on the 2011–12 Bolotnaya protests, Ankara on Gezi Park in 2013, and Georgia's ruling party in defending its 2024 foreign-influence law.
  • •In November 2017 Spanish ministers said Russian-based networks had amplified the Catalan independence referendum; researchers disputed how much of the measured activity was Russian and whether it affected opinion in Catalonia.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Report activity and effect as separate findings; do not let the first stand in for the second.
  • ●Give denominators: reach relative to everything else the audience saw.
  • ●Do not describe domestic opponents as foreign instruments on the basis of narrative overlap.
  • ●Acknowledge that understating real interference is also an error; the standard is evidence in both directions.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask for absolute numbers and the base rate: how many people saw this, out of how much total content, and how engaged were they?
  • ►Ask what evidence there is of effect, such as panel surveys or experiments, as distinct from evidence of activity.
  • ►Check who benefits domestically from a large foreign threat, and whether the speaker made the opposite argument when the politics were reversed.
  • ►Look for the official wording. The January 2017 U.S. assessment stated that it did not assess the impact on the election outcome; claims that go further are not citing it.
  • ►Keep two ideas together: the interference was real and its measured effect may have been small. Refuse the choice between hoax and decisive.

References

  1. Eady, G., Paskhalis, T., Zilinsky, J., Bonneau, R., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2023). Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior. Nature Communications, 14, 62 · link
    Exposure was concentrated among strong partisans and showed no measurable relationship with attitude or vote change.
  2. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (2017). Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections (ICA 2017-01D). ODNI, January 6, 2017 · link
    The assessment attributes the campaign with stated confidence levels and states that it did not assess impact on the outcome.
  3. Meta (Gleicher, N., Franklin, M., Agranovich, D., Nimmo, B., Belogolova, O., & Torrey, M.) (2021). Threat Report: The State of Influence Operations 2017-2020. Meta (Facebook), May 2021 · link
    The observation that exaggerating operations' impact plays into the hands of actors engaged in perception hacking.
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