I have many collaborators, coauthors, and organizations to thank for their support, assistance, and creative energy. For their fieldwork, data analysis, scholarly insight, political values, policy investigation, and research assistance, I am grateful to Dan Arnaudo, Nicole Au, Gillian Bolsover, Samantha Bradshaw, Scott Brennan, Mona Elswah, John Gallacher, Bharath Ganesh, Monika Glowacki, Robert Gorwa, Douglas Guilbeault, Ana Grouverman, Alex Hogan, Monika Kaminska, Bence Kollanyi, Mime Liotsiou, Cindy Ma, Nahema Marchal, Sam Maynard, Nick Monaco, Vidya Narayanan, Lisa-Maria Neudert, Erin Simpson, Samantha Shorey, and Sam Woolley. The Graphika team, particularly John Kelly and Camille Francois, are a pleasure to work with. It can be depressing to work on this topic! Being part of this investigative team has made it all manageable, rewarding, and impactful.
Some of the ideas and evidence presented here have appeared in our academic and policy papers. For short passages that are taken from those reports I provide additional acknowledgments with specific citations at the beginning and end of the passages, and for data, interviews, or fieldwork observations made by the team I provide citation to the researcher doing the fieldwork and the pseudonym of the person interviewed.
I thank Yale University Press for its support of the book, in particular Joe Calamia for helping me find ways to keep the normative agenda and hone the message. I am indebted to the editorial, design, and marketing team of the Press for making the agenda and message polished and presentable.
I am very grateful to the community of the Oxford Internet Institute for providing an incredible home for multidisciplinary research. This kind of research used to involve drawing ideas from several different domains of inquiry. Increasingly, it also means doing the public engagement that all those different disciplines are good at. The computer scientists aren’t just part of the analytical team. They must help the researchers who aren’t computer scientists build and release computational tools for the extended network of investigators. The policy analysts aren’t just good at interpreting the machinations of political leaders and industry PR teams. They must help the researchers who aren’t policy analysts host and curate workshops so that government and industry can encounter each other on the neutral turf of Oxford University. The field researchers’ role is not simply to do participant observation and interviews among varied organizations in faraway places. They coordinate the transfer of research capacity to the civil society groups and journalists we want to assist. I’m obliged to the Oxford Internet Institute, which has become a spectacular incubator for new research and a powerful platform for high-impact tool building, policy engagement, and capacity transfer activities.
I thank the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for sharing data. This book and its conclusions are based in part on the analysis of social media content provided by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under the auspices of the Committee’s Technical Advisory Group, whose members serve to provide substantive technical and expert advice on topics of importance to ongoing Committee activity and oversight. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions presented herein are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or its Membership. All the data provided by the US Senate was for fake accounts operated by the IRA (Russia’s Internet Research Agency), not human subjects, and no user data on real human subjects was used in this part of the analysis.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council for the grant “Computational Propaganda: Investigating the Impact of Algorithms and Bots on Political Discourse in Europe,” Proposal 648311, 2015–2020, Philip N. Howard, Principal Investigator, and the grant “Restoring Trust in Social Media Civic Engagement,” Proposal 767454, 2017–2018, Philip N. Howard, Principal Investigator. Additional support for this research has been provided by the Adessium Foundation, Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, Omidyar Foundation, Open Society Foundation, and the Oxford Martin School’s “Misinformation, Media and Science” program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders or the University of Oxford.
I’m very grateful to the people who were willing to be interviewed. They were offered several kinds of protections. The research was guided by the highest contemporary ethical standards, which were reviewed by an independent ethics auditor. As part of these protections, several people and companies have been given pseudonyms. Overall research activities were approved by the University of Oxford’s Research Ethics Committee (CUREC OII C1A15-044), with additional approvals to study the flow of misinformation over social media in the United States (CUREC OII C1A17-054) and the activities of fake and trolling accounts (CUREC OII C1A17-076).