Using the Life Cycle of Media Manipulation, each case study features a chronological description of a media manipulation event, which is filtered along specific variables such as tactics, targets, mitigation, outcomes, and keywords.
Chileans voted overwhelmingly in October 2020 to scrap their dictatorship-era constitution and draft a more democratic new constitution. In the months before that referendum, a hashtag campaign deluged Chilean Twitter with messages opposing a new constitution and spreading misinformation across the South American country. A media manipulation campaign targeting an election in this way was novel for Chile—and journalists in fact-checkers struggled to respond.
When a Trump ally claimed migrants were bringing Ebola into the US, fears of a deadly infectious disease furthered his crowdfunded quest to build a border wall with Mexico and fueled anti-immigrant sentiment. The 2019 Ebola rumor wasn't true, but that didn't stop it spreading in the far-right media ecosystem from Texas across the nation.
David Greene, who lost his medical license after botched surgeries resulted in several deaths, sells unproven—and sometimes dangerous—medical treatments using stem cells. While certain stem cell therapies are effective treatments for a limited list of diseases, Greene persuades customers that the stem cell therapy he sells, using cord blood and amniotic tissues, is a near cure-all. Investigation into his marketing strategies shows that Greene is profiting off a business model that is based on phony science while laundering his online reputation to keep the patients—and their money—coming in.
On Aug. 16, 2019, an anonymous user posted to 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board calling upon fellow 4chan users to impersonate Jewish people online by creating inauthentic social media accounts. In the days that followed, campaign participants created dozens of fake Twitter accounts, many of them posing as rabbis and using stereotypically Jewish names. Twitterquickly removed the accounts, although not before their owners could post inflammatory, often-antisemitic, and anti-Israel sentiments.
After military conflict broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in November, 2020, two contesting narratives designed to influence international understanding of the conflict emerged, playing out largely on Twitter. Based on several months of data collection and mixed methods research, we trace the tactics of the two key online communities participating in these outward-facing advocacy campaigns: the Ethiopian government and its supporters, and Tigrayan activists and their supporters.
