Information Threats to Democratic Societies of UK and Taiwan: Inter-regional and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Area Studies
Abstract
The proposed project will bring together researchers from academic and non-academic institutions which are interested in research on information threats including dis/misinformation, with the specific focus on China and Russia, and the impact of such threats on democratic societies of UK and Taiwan.
Information threats come in various forms and presuppose appreciation of the regional contexts in which they appear, analysis of hostile actors which produce information threats, understanding of audiences which information threats target, as well as the impact of information threats on certain audiences and democratic societies more broadly. As research by the Doublethink Lab has demonstrated, information threats appear in at least nine different domains, namely media, academia, economy, society, military, law enforcement, technology, domestic politics, and foreign policy (https://china-index.io/domain). Much socially significant communication occurs through the media, hence our project will focus on that domain and its relation to other aforementioned 'information threats' domains. More specifically, our project will engage with one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century - dis/misinformation communication in the media.
There is the need to understand production, communication, reception and contents of dis/misinformation. There is also the need to go beyond identifying fakes to researching viewpoint construction in communication, which is a subtle but powerful approach used by state and non-state hostile actors to manipulate and influence public opinion. While fact-checking efforts address obvious falsehoods, viewpoint construction - evoking certain framings of events and situations - is a more pernicious form of disinformation outside the scope of most current fact-checking efforts. Viewpoint construction techniques are not just verbal but multimodal: they combine words, intonation, gesture, and movement, and other non-verbal elements. They rely heavily on culture, history, and other contextual knowledge to lead audiences to draw a false conclusion, make an assessment, or come to an opinion beneficial to the hostile actor.
To truly understand media communication, it must be understood in its full complexity, and multimodal communication - integrating visual, verbal and sound modes - has become a core research area to address this need. The tackling of dis/misinformation requires the identification and characterisation of manipulation strategies and techniques, at speed and at scale, both at the macro-level of hostile actors and targeted societies and at the micro-level of media content and its impact on audiences. Only if both macro- and micro-levels of analysis are present, leveraging technology, is research on information threats - and disinformation as one of its manifestations - complete. The need for such a completeness of analysis performed at speed and at scale calls for development of new interdisciplinary approaches. It also calls for inter-regional analysis to reveal phenomena which can otherwise be almost invisible.
The project will determine areas of most research interest to our Taiwan-based and UK-based research teams and more broadly to academic communities in relevant disciplines. It will identify research overlaps as well as issues of most interest to policy makers in the UK and Taiwan. Researchers from Taiwan and the UK will work together on developing a list of policy-driven research questions which will allow us to address information threats and more specifically dis/misinformation in an optimal and complete fashion. The project will further develop an international network of researchers and non-academic partners focusing on information threats coming from China and Russia. It will deliver a position paper featuring a new research design for interdisciplinary and inter-regional analysis of dis/misinformation. The project will work to prepare a funding application to conduct pilot research.
Information threats come in various forms and presuppose appreciation of the regional contexts in which they appear, analysis of hostile actors which produce information threats, understanding of audiences which information threats target, as well as the impact of information threats on certain audiences and democratic societies more broadly. As research by the Doublethink Lab has demonstrated, information threats appear in at least nine different domains, namely media, academia, economy, society, military, law enforcement, technology, domestic politics, and foreign policy (https://china-index.io/domain). Much socially significant communication occurs through the media, hence our project will focus on that domain and its relation to other aforementioned 'information threats' domains. More specifically, our project will engage with one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century - dis/misinformation communication in the media.
There is the need to understand production, communication, reception and contents of dis/misinformation. There is also the need to go beyond identifying fakes to researching viewpoint construction in communication, which is a subtle but powerful approach used by state and non-state hostile actors to manipulate and influence public opinion. While fact-checking efforts address obvious falsehoods, viewpoint construction - evoking certain framings of events and situations - is a more pernicious form of disinformation outside the scope of most current fact-checking efforts. Viewpoint construction techniques are not just verbal but multimodal: they combine words, intonation, gesture, and movement, and other non-verbal elements. They rely heavily on culture, history, and other contextual knowledge to lead audiences to draw a false conclusion, make an assessment, or come to an opinion beneficial to the hostile actor.
To truly understand media communication, it must be understood in its full complexity, and multimodal communication - integrating visual, verbal and sound modes - has become a core research area to address this need. The tackling of dis/misinformation requires the identification and characterisation of manipulation strategies and techniques, at speed and at scale, both at the macro-level of hostile actors and targeted societies and at the micro-level of media content and its impact on audiences. Only if both macro- and micro-levels of analysis are present, leveraging technology, is research on information threats - and disinformation as one of its manifestations - complete. The need for such a completeness of analysis performed at speed and at scale calls for development of new interdisciplinary approaches. It also calls for inter-regional analysis to reveal phenomena which can otherwise be almost invisible.
The project will determine areas of most research interest to our Taiwan-based and UK-based research teams and more broadly to academic communities in relevant disciplines. It will identify research overlaps as well as issues of most interest to policy makers in the UK and Taiwan. Researchers from Taiwan and the UK will work together on developing a list of policy-driven research questions which will allow us to address information threats and more specifically dis/misinformation in an optimal and complete fashion. The project will further develop an international network of researchers and non-academic partners focusing on information threats coming from China and Russia. It will deliver a position paper featuring a new research design for interdisciplinary and inter-regional analysis of dis/misinformation. The project will work to prepare a funding application to conduct pilot research.
