Fight Fire with Fire: Hacktivists' Take on Social Media Misinformation

TL;DR

This paper explores hacktivists' perspectives on social media misinformation, revealing their opposition to propaganda tactics and their advocacy for confronting misinformation through hacking and literacy interventions.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into hacktivists' attitudes and strategies against social media misinformation, highlighting their role in defending democratic online discourse.

Findings

Hacktivists oppose misinformation and propaganda.

They favor deplatforming and doxing as countermeasures.

They recommend literacy campaigns alongside hacking efforts.

Abstract

In this study, we interviewed 22 prominent hacktivists to learn their take on the increased proliferation of misinformation on social media. We found that none of them welcomes the nefarious appropriation of trolling and memes for the purpose of political (counter)argumentation and dissemination of propaganda. True to the original hacker ethos, misinformation is seen as a threat to the democratic vision of the Internet, and as such, it must be confronted on the face with tried hacktivists' methods like deplatforming the "misinformers" and doxing or leaking data about their funding and recruitment. The majority of the hacktivists also recommended interventions for raising misinformation literacy in addition to targeted hacking campaigns. We discuss the implications of these findings relative to the emergent recasting of hacktivism in defense of a constructive and factual social media discourse.