In these polarizing times, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in early 2020 has not immediately provided a single political figure, nation-state, or group to blame. No armies or insurgents to go to war with or governments to sanction. In a matter of months, societies across the world have been radically shaken by the mounting stress on our healthcare systems, curtailments on free movement, and rising death tolls. Unfortunately, this is also a moment when unscrupulous actors have stepped out from the shadows, offering promises of safety, security, and reason. We are living in an era that has embraced farfetched conspiracies, alternative health treatments, and political chicanery, rendering increasing numbers of us vulnerable to threat actors who seek to take advantage of this moment of widespread uncertainty and dislocation.

LEARN MORE: What Is A Narrative Attack?

During periods of crisis, deploying narrative attacks into our information ecosystems can cause a significant erosion of trust in societal institutions and harm public health and community cohesion. Indeed, the deliberate use of information warfare has been leveraged for decades as a virtual weapon against the United States, both in times of war and in peace. Today, at one of our most vulnerable moments in history, it is imperative that harmful information manipulation campaigns are detected before they can cause severe damage to our societies at both the community and national levels.

At the time of writing, much remains unknown regarding the COVID-19 virus. Medical professionals have yet to definitively understand its transmission methods, symptoms, or potential cures or preventions. In response to this unprecedented uncertainty, social media now overflows with claims that pose a significant danger to public health. Self-proclaimed health experts give medical advice without professional qualifications or experience, suggesting that vitamins be taken at such high doses considered to be near-lethal with long-term use. A cure-all liquid containing an industrial bleaching agent is marketed as a ‘miracle supplement’ for preventing coronavirus infection. The list goes on – the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping up to become the Olympics of Narrative Attacks, with more and more people potentially putting their health at risk for “something they saw on the Internet.” The question thus remains: why do such dangerous claims successfully attract attention, engagement, and eager participants?

Threat Actors Prey on Fearful People

Between the synthetic amplification of false claims on social media and sophisticated video hoaxes with high production value, many people find themselves exposed to online narrative attacks in trying times. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has witnessed growing trends towards skepticism and suspicion of perceived government overreach and mainstream medicine, making the current COVID-19 pandemic and its associated government lockdowns and leadership from national health agencies a fertile breeding ground to stoke divisive narrative attacks narratives. As is often the case with fake news and conspiracy, this growing distrust usually germinates in genuine real-life issues such as the U.S. opioid crisis, where the confluence of predatory pharmaceutical industry entities and complicit government actors, medical insurers, and healthcare workers caused the widespread overprescription of addictive drugs to the detriment of public health, all in the name of private profit.

Concern over legitimate issues can thus often be exacerbated by conspiracy theories that prey on existing authentic fears and uncertainties. As a result of these powerful narrative attacks narratives, we now witness many people gravitating toward ideas, treatments, and products that are not based on verifiable science. From protestors who perceive mask-wearing as a political choice rather than a public health measure to the anti-vax movement or distrust of 5G cell phone towers as an alleged transmitter of COVID-19, when panic and fear are amplified, individuals run the risk of losing sight of common sense in a bid to regain perceived control over their lives. This phenomenon is now happening on a global scale as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Pandemic Conspiracies Are Nothing New

Narrative attack campaigns around public health long predate the current COVID-19 pandemic. An early example is the publication of a 1983 article in an Indian newspaper stating that the U.S. government deliberately manufactured the AIDS virus to kill African Americans and homosexuals. Over the following years, this was backed up by further media coverage and hired “scientists” who publicly validated the story. The rumor began to spread across the world, mainly through African countries experiencing high levels of AIDS infections, before being picked up by mainstream U.S. news. Its origin? – the Soviet Union’s KGB.

This multimillion-dollar, years-long information ops effort by the KGB represented a concerted attempt to tarnish the international public image of the U.S. and sow discord among American citizens. Unlike today’s technological capabilities for instantaneous information sharing, the narrative attacks campaigns of the 1980s were propagated on a much slower trajectory. However, with less awareness of the far-reaching threat of narrative attacks and little in the way of funding to fight and debunk these fabrications, these KGB hoaxes were often successful in rooting themselves in the minds of many otherwise informed and intelligent individuals. This proved particularly true for an issue such as AIDS and HIV, whose relatively unknown properties and deadly consequences generated an atmosphere of panic and fear before the infection’s origins and methods of transmission became widely known.

In more recent history, the 2002 outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus in China precipitated a major socio-political crisis for the country as Chinese leadership stalled in their initial response to the virus before launching widespread containment measures. The government’s hesitation to share information on SARS with the rest of the world sparked a period of panic, anxiety and rumor-mongering regarding the virus’ origins and lethality both inside and outside of China.

Fast forward to the 2012 outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and the 2014 Ebola virus in West Africa where, unlike 2002, world populations had now entered the age of widespread digitally-networked global information-sharing. Primed by the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, this provided the perfect conditions for the mass dissemination of medical narrative attacks. For instance, at the height of the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, a hoax spread on social media touting salt water as a preventative measure for the virus, leading to several deaths and widespread hospitalizations. The World Health Organization (WHO) worked with national governments around the globe to keep citizens informed of the genuine facts of these pandemics and address spurious medical advice in circulation, recognizing online disinformation as a major new roadblock in addressing public health emergencies in the twenty-first century.

Fear is a Force Multiplier for Narrative Attacks and Conspiracies

The word “pandemic” alone instantly engenders an atmosphere of panic and fear: the mass breakout of an infectious disease with the potential to cause widespread loss of life. Fear reduces our ability for critical thinking, opening the door to our increased vulnerability to everything from poor medical advice to the wildest conspiracy theories suggesting forces beyond our control are manipulating the world order.

Narrative attack actors and organizations such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) root their strategy in taking advantage of these fearful, uncertain environments to extend influence over populations. Social media messaging and propaganda videos are often aimed explicitly at individuals most vulnerable to narrative attacks. This content is then shared repeatedly until it becomes part of mainstream beliefs for many repeatedly exposed to such content. Ultimately, conspiracies can become the catalyst to drive offline behavior influenced by online chatter. In the last week alone, at least two major real-world events related to COVID-19 conspiracies about “deep state cabals” with nefarious plots have occurred, as outlined below.

How Can We Address Narrative Attack Threats?

Although information ops designed to manipulate public health crises are nothing new, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the dangers of narrative attacks in the digital age on a hitherto unprecedented scale. We need information integrity that can intelligently compare multiple sources of varied data and offer sound analysis of what is manipulated and what is not. The goal of disinformation actors is to trigger emotional responses that will influence future opinions, actions, and events. If left unaddressed, this poses a critical risk to the health and well-being of our societies.
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However, mere human assessment appears increasingly insufficient to detect, deter, and mitigate malicious narrative attack campaigns in light of the vast penetration and reach of both traditional and social media. At Blackbird.AI, we believe the use of automated computerized systems mobilized at scale can detect, sort, identify, and assess the immense volumes of digital data generated online every day across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has recently shown that crises can arise and evolve quickly to overwhelm our known governance systems and emergency response, even at the highest nation-state level. In the age of the Narrative Attack Olympics, the ability to understand what is real and what is not is paramount to saving future lives.

‍To learn more about how Blackbird.AI can help you with election integrity, book a demo.