Reading the Civic Information Handbook

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This spring, Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein from the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative published a document they call the Civic Information Handbook, which they produced in collaboration with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Civic information—“important information needed to participate in democracy—is too often drowned out by viral falsehoods, including conspiracy theories.” The Handbook is intended as a resource to help knowledge-producing organizations in the “amplification of fact-based information.”

To learn more about the handbook and the ideas on which it is based, Justin Hendrix spoke to GMF's Goldstein and Kathryn Peters, the executive director of CITAP.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

What was the motivation behind producing this document?

Adrienne Goldstein:

So, we are a policy organization and so had developed different tech policy recommendations for how to confront the amplification of conspiracy theories and extremism online. And so as part of this work, we had also done empirical case studies of how these narratives spread, and we're realizing that as much as we need these policy proposals, we also need civic information providers, so election officials or public health officials or climate scientists or advocates to be playing the game as well. And so as much as we wish that it was enough to stand at a podium and read a press release, really we need all of these advocates to be playing the game as well and to be working to amplify their messages online.

Justin Hendrix:

Let me ask you how you would define the game as you put it. What's going on right now in the information environment? We're a few years into what seems like perhaps a different period. Some might look at 2015, 2016 as a turning point in public understanding of what's happening in the information ecosystem. What is the game at the moment?

Adrienne Goldstein:

I think a key difference that we're seeing now is the infrastructure that has been built up to amplify these messages. And so we propose this model in our handbook and it begins with building the pipeline, which includes outlets, video channels, influencers, public pages, community forums, that sort of thing. And so what we're seeing now is that those who hope to amplify conspiracy theories have this whole infrastructure that they can use. So the second they see the opportunity to promote a false claim, they're ready to activate this network and spread their messages.

Justin Hendrix:

This report is coming out in a moment of change, transition in the way we think about how to deal with misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, various forms of falsehoods that you refer to in the report. Is there a, you think, turning of the page that's going on right now in terms of the way we think about what should be done to promote a healthy information ecosystem?

Kathryn Peters:

There was a moment after 2016 where I think a lot of people started paying attention to information flows online in a new way. And I think a lot of people understood it as a new problem and a new challenge and something that was coming external to American politics and was sort of a threat. And I think as some of those experts came in, I began to look at this, it became clear fairly quickly to many observers, especially in academic research, that this was not as new as it appeared. From within CITAP, for example, Alice Marwick led with Rachel Kuo and Shanice Cameron and Moira Weigel critical disinformation syllabus that really traces a history of how some of these same propagandas and falsehoods really stretched back throughout American history and have been led not only by outside forces but by elected officials and trusted government sources as well, and how those same types of practices have been used in the past.

From within our team, Francesca Tripodi really looked at how conservative audiences seek information and the ways that malicious actors can use data voids to seed false narratives online and really draw on doing your own research practices. Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor have looked at how political identity plays in and how people really rely heavily on who we think of as being ours and who we are and who we sit with as part of how we evaluate political information.

And so, I think all of that work has been going on for several years and I'm really excited that what I think I'm seeing happen is that that's getting outside of academic journals, that's really becoming more popular. It's starting to shape the more common understanding, and I think that's a really important way of catching up. I think some of these insights when brought together in a format like the handbook, make it possible to imagine countering this information in a different way and getting past fact checks and getting past feeling like it's a game of whack-a-mole. And so that was where when the German Marshall Fund approached us about helping to advise this project and helping bring the research to bear on the report that they were writing. We were really excited to step up and do that.

Justin Hendrix:

I should mention Alice Marwick and Francesca Tripodi and Daniel Kreiss, Shannon McGregor, all former guests on this podcast as well, and I’ve tried to keep up with their research and findings, which are of course very important in this space. Let me also just ask you a little bit about, there's a section of the handbook that focuses in on some of the psychology of mis- and disinformation, what we've learned about that, which I think has been bolstered by new science, particularly in the social media age. Are there key concepts that you think are important for folks to understand as they think about how to contend with this problem?

Kathryn Peters:

Absolutely. I think to recap somewhat from the report, behavioral psychology really gives us a lot of this and some of that isn't new at all. We describe how system one and system two work. System two is our brains as we like to think that they work. We read things, we consider them critically, we put them in the full context of our knowledge, we evaluate carefully. We can't do that all day. It would be exhausting. We would never get anything done. Some of this like Nobel Prize winning research really came to study and understand system one. These are our shortcuts. This is how we get by and through the day.

Most importantly, for the purposes of this handbook, we look at, as I've mentioned briefly before, identity. We look at who's presenting the message, we look at whether or not they are like us and in what ways and is that salient? We get shortcutted by emotional appeals. Does it make you angry? Does it make you proud? Does it make you laugh? Those things can really get less evaluated. They speak to system one much more than to system two. One of the things that's not as much in the handbook but that shows up in our research a lot are these concepts of deep stories or deep frames. And that's that we all have these narrative shortcuts about how we see the world. Good people get ahead. Karma in some ways is the kind of deep story. And so we use those as well. So does this that we're seeing fit one of our existing deep narratives? Do we tie it to a story or a frame that we're already familiar with and can we hang it to that? Those can all shortcut our doing that more considered evaluation.

And then the second big area, beyond those shortcuts, is that hearing something repeated, even if we haven't quite shortcut our way into accepting something is true the first time, hearing it multiple times over and over can really start to sink in. That exposure makes it feel more true in the same way as you intentionally repeat the same information in a class setting in order to really drill it in. Especially when it seems like it's coming from different sources or on different channels, that surround sound or stereo effect really gives something more of a veneer of authority.

So we spent some time addressing all of that in the handbook and really making sure that people are thinking about not just is the information shared being true or false, but how is it reaching people, how is it connecting people, and how are they coming to accept it?

Justin Hendrix:

So perhaps it's right to think of this handbook almost as a counter propaganda handbook in many ways. You do lay out what looks like to me a strategy for counter propaganda. First describing what propagandists do and then describing essentially how to do it in reverse. Take me through the steps really quickly.

Adrienne Goldstein:

This handbook builds out what we call the model for how networked information campaigns online work. So this, as you said, is something that we see coordinated deceptive campaigns use online, but we hope that the handbook can help civic actors repurpose it to spread their own information. So the first step of this, and this happens in the months or years before you actually want to share a message, is building the pipeline. So this includes building up social media pages, connecting with relevant influencers, building up video channels, that sort of thing. And then once you have the opportunity, whether it's through current events or through a need to share your message, that's when you seed a message. And so with these coordinated campaigns, we often see it start with a kernel of truth. This might be an emotional truth that the election is not fair, this could be something that has basis in headlines, that sort of thing.

And once you have your message and your pipeline, you can flood the zone with this message. As Katie mentioned before, a really key part of this is repetition, and so repetition across platforms and across time so that as users see this more and more, they're more likely to believe it and feel motivated by it. And the final step of this model is activation. And so this is giving users the opportunity to engage with the content. Sometimes it's gamifying it. And so it can be anything like, please subscribe to our channel. It could be please go vote, please sign a petition. And this lets users feel involved in the campaign and can also then help build up your pipeline for future networked information campaigns.

Justin Hendrix:

So this report is aimed at what you call civic information providers, which I assume are all the institutions that produce knowledge that try to produce factual information in the world. What is your assessment presently of how well the universe of civic information providers are following the type of advice that you've got in this report?

Adrienne Goldstein:

We do see civic information providers doing really innovative and creative work to try to share their messages. The problem is that it's not being done at the scale that's necessary. And so for this project, we met with a lot of folks in Colorado working in the election administration space. And what we found was that they're doing exactly what we propose in this model. They're building their pipeline by identifying who has trust in their communities, who's the right messenger for the audience rather than just relying on the traditional election officials. And so they're connecting with county clerks offices, connecting with people across parties to try to get out their messages. They're seeding really creative and emotionally compelling messages focusing on who election workers are and showing their humanity before the election even starts.

And then they're flooding the zone across YouTube, Instagram, all sorts of platforms, trying to meet their audiences where they are rather than just sending out a press release. And then obviously activation can be tricky for election officials, but they provide clear information on if you want to vote, here are the days, here's how to vote, that sort of thing. And so this is really great and interesting work. The problem is that it's not being done everywhere. It's not being done across all fields. And so this is the sort of thing that we hope to help uplift and also shine a light on how it can be done in the future.

Kathryn Peters:

I came to CITAP from the voter engagement community, and so I would say I've gotten to see some of this election administration piece, especially up front and up close, and I would just second what Adrienne is saying is that election officials specifically as one type of civic information provider are really working hard to try to implement some of these tactics in just an environment with not enough resources. State election offices may have communications roles, counties especially don't. Speaking in the sense of once to one local reporter or to one press release is one type of capacity. Speaking to six different types of local communities with tailored emotionally appealing identity based messages to each is just not something that many of them are able to do. I think we're seeing some really positive case studies that Adrienne just spelled out and that's great. And I think that getting past that is going to require additional actors to step in.

So if these especially official groups creating positive information are a starting point and they need to be able to make things that are shareable, and in this case memeable, and memes here don't just mean funny images but that are small concrete ideas we want to get across. They're only the start. And so then I think there's a significant number of other civic actors who are not necessarily information generators but that need to come to understand themselves as part of the pipeline that we're still talking to and that I think this handbook can be really helpful for. My mother's a Rotarian, so I'm going to pick on the Rotarians, but I think they're incredibly valuable civic actors in their communities and I think they take up a sign significant amount of pro small-d democratic behavior in their communities. They take up a lot of these civic questions. In general, they're not very online. They are not out here creating pages for their communities that are amplifying public health messages or voting information messages.

It's not just the Rotarians, it's the Kiwanis clubs, it's the interfaith councils, it's the local nonprofits doing food bank distribution. It is community health centers and clinics. And I think there's a huge opportunity there, and I just named a lot of groups that are also often quite resource constrained. So this is where there's a real challenge where there's a disproportionate amount of power and motivation and funding behind some of these negative messages or some of these coordinated and deceptive messages. But I do think there's a lot of room for other actors locally to step in and see themselves as part of that pipeline, join with the information creators and say, "Okay, where can we be amplifiers? Where can we help develop narratives that are tailored to our communities and who we can speak to and can really join in that element of flooding the zone?"

So that's another of the places where I think the handbook can be helpful in introducing some of this to people who have a lot of local trust, a lot of civic credibility, a lot of neighborly role who are currently not participating in this, or as Adrienne put, are not part of the game yet and really could be in the right circumstances. And I'm hopeful that we see more of that activity as well to supplement the ways that public officials have really had to step up and learn this on the fly and have really taken heroic measures with the resources they have.

Justin Hendrix:

I should point out that the report does state up front that the playing field's not even. Social media platforms are better suited perhaps for those who want to manipulate and disinform. Bridget Barrett and Daniel Kreiss from CITAP just pinned the piece in tech policy press, looking at state of the platforms at the moment, and their conclusion is that essentially whatever gains had been made, particularly around issues of civic integrity or election integrity across the major platforms, it seems as if those platforms are now seeding back perhaps both in changes to policy, changes to behavior, changes to ownership in the case of Twitter for instance, and in changes of course to the way that they're resourcing these issues.

So you've put this out at just this moment where we're about to head into what will likely be an exceedingly tempestuous and difficult 2024 election cycle just at the moment where these platforms appear to be essentially moving backwards. I don't know. If there were something that you could say to those executives in the platforms themselves to address this uneven playing field, what would it be?

Kathryn Peters:

Trust and safety teams matter to the social impact of your work and to your net benefit or harm to the world. Having clear policies and practices is something the platforms owe the public if they really want to be pro public discourse, pro public discussion. They talk a lot about valuing free speech and valuing the first amendment and one of the things that the First Amendment protects is the ability of these platforms to put guardrails on these kinds of conversations and what gets amplified. And Daniel and Bridget really put it well that after 2016, however imperfectly, we really saw platforms understand their role as democratic gatekeepers and sources of information spread and amplification. And we tracked in reports in 2020 and 2022 what kinds of practices they'd put in place, what kinds of policies were there, and how they thought about facilitating healthy public discussion on their platforms.

And what we're seeing right now is in some ways a washing of their hands, a recognition that despite doing that, they received criticism. They didn't get it all right. There was pushback, and it appears that going into 2024 rather than continuing to engage and refine and improve those practices, there's a collective decision to roll it back, keep it simpler, take the criticism, and not worry about the health of our online information ecosystems. And that's deeply disappointing. Again, to paraphrase Daniel and Bridget, they said 2024 online is going to look much more like 2016 and we all saw exactly how poorly 2016 went in terms of political information being shared, being understood, and shaping that public discourse.

Justin Hendrix:

The handbook concludes by talking about moving on from whack-a-mole content moderation and trying to move into a more, I suppose, positive frame. How do we get the good word out about factual information, quality civic announcements, and information of that sort. What else can be done perhaps at the policy level? Are there other kinds of policy recommendations that you're working on outside of perhaps the handbook itself, which I think sort of assumes a policy environment? Are there other things that you think need to be done by governments or by policymakers in order to make this handbook work?

Adrienne Goldstein:

I'll jump in with two proposals that my colleague Karen Kornbluh along with Ellen Goodman have proposed. The first is what they call a virality circuit breaker. And so this borrows from what we see in economics, and the idea is that we can try to slow down the virality of certain content before it has gotten reviewed by fact-checkers. And so, at the core of this idea is that we should be optimizing not just for engagement and for the rapid spread of content, but rather make sure that there's safeguards throughout the process.

One other thing that is key, and I think relates to some of the core ideas of the handbook, is transparency. Transparency about who is paying for content to be amplified. Transparency about why something gets amplified and who a certain actor is. The key message here of the handbook is we want to arm people with as much information as possible, and so with better transparency requirements, we can do that.

Kathryn Peters:

You flagged the handbook as being a project of GMF and of CITAP. I'd like to say the handbook was authored by Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein at the German Marshall Fund. At CITAP we were excited to help advise the handbook and to help bring and suggest research bearings that could help inform the recommendations and shape it. That work was led by our graduate research assistant, Heesoo Jang, whose contributions are invaluable and really worthy of mention.

She was advised in that work by Daniel Kreiss from our team. I was lucky to be an early reader and reviewer, and also– now at the Anti-Defamation League– Yael Eisenstat offered significant contributions to helping think about how to frame this, and I would be absolutely remiss if we didn't thank each of them for their roles in making this handbook exist and come to life. So I'm pleased to have been a small part of its creating team, but I want to make sure that the people not on this call today, Karen and Heesoo especially and Yael and Daniel all get a moment of recognition as well.

Justin Hendrix:

All folks who have contributed in some way to Tech Policy Press as well, so I'll second your thanks to them and their participation intellectually and the energy they bring to these issues.

Kathryn Peters:

As with any healthy information ecosystem, it is the work of many hands in collaboration.

Justin Hendrix:

Absolutely, and I'll thank the two of you for joining me this morning.

Kathryn Peters:

Thank you.

Adrienne Goldstein:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.