Authors:
(1) Filipo Sharevski, DePaul University;
(2) Benjamin Kessell, DePaul University.
Table of Links
2 Internet Activism and Social Media
3 Internet Activism and Misinformation
3.1 Grassroots Misinformation Operations
3.2 Mainstream Misinformation Operations
4 Hacktivism and Misinformation
4.1 Research Questions and 4.2 Sample
4.3 Methods and Instrumentation
5 Misinformation Conceptualization and 5.1 Antecedents to Misinformation
5.2 Mental Models of Misinformation
6 Active Countering of Misinformation and 6.1 Leaking, Doxing, and Deplatforming
7 Misinformation Evolution and 7.1 Counter-Misinformation Tactics
8 Discussion
8.3 Limitations and 8.4 Future Work
4.3 Methods and Instrumentation
To ensure validity to the task of conceptualizing misinformation, we decided to introduce the participants in the main study to the generalized definition of misinformation on social media proposed by Wu et al. [129]. Another reason was to avoid confusion between past trolling and memes “for the lulz” and present alternative narratives that involve information operations, rumors, conspiracy theories, fake news, hoaxes, and clickbait. The hacktivists in our sample were invited to speak about their profiles, activity, and agendas online, before we asked their take on misinformation on social media. The qualitative responses were coded and categorized in respect: a) antecedents to misinformation; b) mental models of misinformation; c) countering misinformation through leaking, doxing, and deplatforming; d) anti-misinformation “ops” (operations); e) counter-misinformation tactics; f) misinformation literacy; and g) misinformation hacktivism.
Two independent researchers analyzed the approved interview transcriptions, achieving a strong level of inter-coder agreement (Cohen’s κ = .82). We utilized a thematic analysis methodology to identify the themes and sub-themes most saliently emerging from the responses in our sample. The themes were summarized to describe the conceptualization, response, and evolution of misinformation in the view of the contemporary hacktivists we sampled. In reporting the results, we utilized as much as possible verbatim quotation of participants’ answers, emphasized in “italics” and with a reference to the participant as either PX or [PX], where P denotes participant and X denotes the number of the participant in the sample (ordered by the time of participation).
4.4 Hacktivists’ Profiles
The hacktivists in our sample, true to the original ethos, represent the voice for advocacy and contemporary policy discussion. While they did not disclose their current operations, several of them hinted they are involved in tracking the rise of the far-right extremism, cybercriminals, as well as the information warfare part of the Ukraine invasion. A couple of the hacktivists’ agenda was leaking documents from companies and nation-state agencies as manifestation of their information freedom advocacy. Few of the hacktivists explicitly mentioned they still create and disseminate memes and participate in the “old school” trolling. And several of the hacktivists did actual hacking as in analyzing security problems (e.g. ransomware) and providing free tools for helping ordinary Internet users fend off related threats.
The majority of the hacktivists noted they have been active for a long time, being brought into the world of computers in childhood or early adolescence. Some of them resorted to hacktivism as a way to protect themselves against online bullies and some of them in response to nation-states offensive operations online, notably ones linked to China and Russia. Several of them started with hacking operating systems to enable unrestricted access to games and/or bypass parental controls. While most of the participants in our sample cited curiosity as their driver to enter the “hacktivist conglomerate” and keep on hacking, there were some participants citing a deliberate determination for cybersecurity education activism.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
