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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The Grim Consequences of a Misleading Study on Disinformation:

Last month the esteemed Oxford Internet Institute [(OII)] announced a major report on disinformation and "cyber troops" with a press release describing an "industrial-scale problem." Worldwide press coverage echoed claims that OII had revealed the "increasing role" private firms play in spreading computational propaganda. Actual evidence presented in the annual "survey" of social media manipulation, however, is much thinner than the hype.

While the report's website declares, "Cyber troop activity continues to increase around the world," inside the report, OII claim they show "publicly identified" cases of disinformation operations have "grow[n] in number over time." They point to their own studies counting public reporting as evidence of actual operations increasing since 2017. Citing OII's last report, which was based on similar evidence, The New York Times in 2019 heralded that "the number of countries with political disinformation campaigns more than doubled to 70 in the last two years."

The big problem here is the phrase "publicly identified."

[N.B. - This is an opinion piece from the Wired web site.]

As a longtime propaganda scholar, I know we struggled to get disinformation and propaganda reported on before the 2016 US election and Brexit, when journalistic interest suddenly grew. In 2015, a NexisUni search reveals, the Times mentioned disinformation in just 33 articles; there were 95 in 2016, 274 in 2017, 586 in 2018, and 684 in 2019. This is, of course, an indication of increased reporting of disinformation.

[...] OII's methodology also acknowledges that its findings may be impacted by "media bias." This is unacceptable in a study assessing disinformation. The problem is worse than they admit, because their evidence appears to hang on the hope that all the media reporting I describe above reflects the scale of disinformation, not reporters' sudden discovery of it.

Once one knows all this, numbers in the report come to seem largely meaningless. Take the claim that disinformation has increased to 76 out of the 81 countries they found using computational propaganda. If so, politicians in five of these countries apparently never lie online. Wherever that is, I'm going.

The problem is that figures are then presented as authoritative with colorful tables and charts. Statistics look more persuasive than anecdotal examples. And many journalists seem to have taken away from the press release a few impressive numbers without examining the methods.

Original Submission