Have you ever wondered how trolls, bots, and paid influencers are quietly manipulating what you see online and why even smart, skeptical people fall for it? Today, disinformation expert Dr. Darren Linvill pulls back the curtain on the tactics that bad actors are using to try and shape our beliefs.

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Darren Linvill discuss the various forms of digital deception and the strategies used by state actors to manipulate global discourse. Dr. Linvill distinguishes between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation and gives examples of each, including tactics used by different international organizations from Iran, China, Israel, North Korea, and others. He also discusses the psychological impact that this disinformation has on humanity.

Key Takeaways:

• Fraud is the oldest form of disinformation, and it's rampant across social media. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry.

• The main way that AI is being used right now to disseminate false information, disinformation, whether it's fraud or political disinformation, is the scale at which this content is created.

• Sometimes there is not enough information to attribute disinformation accounts to a specific person or group. Sometimes it can be traced either through the content being posted or similar information on other websites.

• At the end of the day, people will believe what they want to believe, regardless of whether it is true or has been fact-checked as false.

"At the end of the day, all of us humans are emotional animals. And we are interpreting the world around us, including the information we find on social media, through an emotional lens, especially when it comes to the communities that we're a part of, and our emotional attachments to those communities and our emotional needs that we derive from those communities, that absolutely affects the lens through which we interpret information." — Dr. Darren Linvill

Episode References:

• Clemson University Media Forensics Hub: Spot the Troll - https://spotthetroll.org/

Connect with Dr. Darren Linvill:

Professional Bio: https://www.clemson.edu/cbshs/about/profiles/darrenl

Twitter: https://x.com/DarrenLinvill?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-linvill-6673655b

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gQl4PlQAAAAJ&hl=en

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Bluesky: @CriticallySpeaking.bsky.social

Instagram: @criticallyspeakingpodcast

Email: theresemarkow@criticallyspeaking.net

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