Building resilient communities in the age of disinformation

TEN million Chinese migrant workers entering Indonesia, a long-haired male journalist portrayed as a female election volunteer for the governor of Jakarta, as well as uprisings of Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar - what do these have in common? They are all disinformation making their rounds on online platforms and closed-group channels such as Facebook Messenger.

In the Myanmar case, Facebook had discovered that people from both sides - the Buddhists and Muslims - were spreading messages that the other camp was staging uprisings at specific locations. It was reported that Facebook's system detected and stopped the circulation of those messages before they reached a bigger audience.

In our written submission to the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, my colleague and I made the observation that disinformation typically mirrors the political and societal fissures that pervade each country. The producers of disinformation are strategic in how they exploit the different pain points in each system. For instance, the above examples are taken from Indonesia and Myanmar where there are complex and long-standing feuds among different ethnic and religious communities.