Disinformation campaigns such as those perpetrated by far-right groups in the United States seek to erode democratic social institutions. Looking to understand these phenomena, previous models of disinformation have emphasized identity-confirmation and misleading presentation of facts to explain why such disinformation is shared. A risk of these accounts, which conjure images of echo chambers and filter bubbles, is portraying people who accept disinformation as relatively passive recipients or conduits. Here we conduct a case study of tactics of disinformation to show how platform design and decentralized communication contribute to advancing the spread of disinformation even when that disinformation is continuously and actively challenged where it appears. Contrary to a view of disinformation flowing within homogeneous echo chambers, in our case study we observe substantial skepticism against disinformation narratives as they form. To examine how disinformation spreads amidst skepticism in this case, we employ a document-driven multi-site trace ethnography to analyze a contested rumor that crossed anonymous message boards, the conservative media ecosystem, and other platforms. We identify two important factors that filtered out skepticism and contested explanations, which facilitated the transformation of this rumor into a disinformation campaign: (1) the aggregation of information into evidence collages—image files that aggregate positive evidence—and (2) platform filtering—the decontextualization of information as these claims crossed platforms. Our findings provide an elucidation of “trading up the chain” dynamics explored by previous researchers and a counterpoint to the relatively mechanistic accounts of passive disinformation propagation that dominate the quantitative literature. We conclude with a discussion of how these factors relate to the communication power available to disparate groups at different times, as well as practical implications for inferring intent from social media traces and practical implications for the design of social media platforms.

中文翻译：

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设计造假：在媒体操纵活动中使用证据拼贴和平台过滤

美国极右翼团体发起的虚假宣传活动试图侵蚀民主社会制度。为了理解这些现象，以前的虚假信息模型强调身份确认和误导性事实陈述，以解释为什么共享此类虚假信息。这些描述让人联想到回声室和过滤气泡的图像的一个风险是，将接受虚假信息的人描绘成相对被动的接收者或管道。在这里，我们对虚假信息的策略进行了案例研究，以展示平台设计和分散式通信如何促进虚假信息的传播，即使虚假信息在出现的地方不断受到积极挑战。与在同质回声室中流动的虚假信息的观点相反，在我们的案例研究中，我们观察到对虚假信息叙述形成的实质性怀疑。为了检查在这种情况下虚假信息如何在怀疑中传播，我们采用文档驱动的多站点跟踪民族志来分析跨越匿名留言板、保守媒体生态系统和其他平台的有争议的谣言。我们确定了过滤掉怀疑和有争议的解释的两个重要因素，这有助于将这一谣言转变为虚假宣传活动：（1）将信息聚合到证据拼贴中——聚合正面证据的图像文件——和（2）平台过滤——随着这些声明跨越平台，信息的去上下文化。我们的研究结果阐明了先前研究人员探索的“向上交易链”动态，并与占主导地位的定量文献的被动虚假信息传播的相对机械描述相对立。我们最后讨论了这些因素如何与不同时间不同群体可用的沟通能力相关，以及从社交媒体痕迹推断意图的实际意义以及对社交媒体平台设计的实际意义。