Election Interference: Governments Undermined Elections In 18 Countries Last Year

While much ado has been made of Russian interference during the 2016 United States presidential election, a new report found that governments around the world attempted to influence the outcome of elections in at least 18 elections last year.

Freedom House—a nonprofit organization that conducts research and advocacy for democracy, political freedom, and human rights—released its annual Freedom on the Net report that found the rise of social media has led to new attempts to undermine the democratic process around the world.

The organization found at least 18 instances of foreign actors attempting to influence an election—including in the U.S., where new information is revealed every day about Russia’s attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Those attempts to undermine democracy came in different forms. In the U.S. and other countries, it was the spread of misinformation on social media. In others, like Azerbaijan and Venezuela, the interference came in the form of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted internet connections and, in some cases, knocked independent media outlets offline entirely.

Much of the electoral disruption highlighted by Freedom House’s report stems from the rapid advance of technology and reach of social media and online communications platforms. The report found that governments in 30 countries are currently “mass producing their own content to distort the digital landscape in their favor.”

Russia has notoriously created a government funded “troll farm” that is responsible for generating endless amounts of disingenuous content designed to trick users into engaging and sharing. The government-backed trolls managed to grow followings on Twitter and Facebook and at one point even managed to create real-life events that resulted in conflict between groups with opposing ideologies in the U.S.

But Russia isn’t alone in these practices. According to the report, nations with oppressive regimes like Turkey, Venezuela and the Philippines all have started to create their own interference campaigns.

In Sudan, the government has created an online army that spreads pro-government messages across Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms. In Venezuela, the government regularly spreads manipulated video footage and other false information to discredit the media and anti-government protesters.

“The use of paid commentators and political bots to spread government propaganda was pioneered by China and Russia but has now gone global,” Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz said in a statement. “The effects of these rapidly spreading techniques on democracy and civic activism are potentially devastating.”

The report, which focused on 65 countries and examined online discussion that took place between June 2016 and May 2017, found that internet freedom is on the decline around the world as governments find new ways to suppress opposition.

Nine countries sought to block live video streams for the first time in the past year, for example. Those attempts were often made to stop the broadcast of anti-government demonstrations.

China continued to be the worst abused of online freedoms, given its limits on free speech and censorship of the internet behind the Great Firewall, as well as the government’s tendency to hack or imprison critics of the current regime.

While the usual suspects topped the list in terms of repressing internet freedom, nations that usually top the list also saw a decline. The United Kingdom and the United States both experienced a drop in internet freedom from the previous year’s report.