A common language against disinformation
For Saman Nazari, the “fairy tale” of social media as a free and useful agora is behind us. With his organization Alliance4Europe, he takes concrete action to make these spaces safer by offering a common language and education allowing us to understand and manage the flow of fake news.
Saman Nazari is an open source intelligence (OSINT) analyst, specializing in foreign interference emanating from China, but also in disinformation. He also establishes methodologies for this purpose, and I also coordinate different projects, while trying to build a community of researchers, investigators, journalists and fact-checkers (specialists in fact-checking). Commonality met him during the second international seminar organized jointly by Cap’Com and the Venice Club, with the support of the City and the Eurometropolis of Strasbourg, on May 23 and 24, 2024.
Commonality: First of all, could you introduce us to your organization and its scope of action?
Saman Nazari: Alliance4Europe is an NGO that builds, who is both doing resilience-building activities, so both activities who aim to strengthen society against disinformation and other threats, who tries to create unity in society and promote European values and European unity. We do everything ranging from organizing football matches between refugee children and locals, to do media literacy and journalism trainings. To also building and incubating, which we have done, we incubated the Disarm framework, which is a framework which allows us to have a common language for when we discuss disinformation behaviors […] and now we're coordinating a European effort to monitor threats towards the European elections. I think we can also add that we are a signature of the Code of Practice on this information, which is an EU initiative. And we are also members of the FIMI ISAC, which we are also hoping to fit into our election initiative. I think that's it.
Commonality: During your speech at this international seminar in Strasbourg you wanted to send a message. What is it?
Saman Nazari: The key message I'm trying to convey is that we need to create more of a common language of how we discuss and how we analyze disinformation so we can have more broader exchanges and collaborations. We need to create collaborations between the actors like myself, so the analysts, the journalists, the investigators, people who are doing, you know, digging and research, with actors who are doing communication, and to do so, we need to give that wide community of actors who can collaborate together.
Commonality: In your opinion, when did the social media “fairy tale” turn into a nightmare? What was the tipping point?
Saman Nazari: It is a good question, a very hard question. I’m thinking. I joined the political side of the internet very early, I think I was 16 and I joined the Arab Spring and there, there was a period of hope we were thinking we could do something for democracy to happen in the Middle East, right? To help people to defend themselves against the terror regimes, help journalists get information into the public and so on. And then I think at some point, I think it was around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the Donbas, all of these things started happening, we started to see a massive amount of disinformation starting to really, actually, potentially have an effect. I think that was the moment I started considering the internet to be a platform which we needed to try to, which wasn't just an open place for us to do good things, but also very bad things could happen, and people could be manipulated. I think indeed it was around that period when Russia initially did that attack towards Ukraine, when we saw this.
Commonality: To what extent are new technologies responsible for disinformation?
Saman Nazari: I don't think it's a matter of technology. Technology is enabling disinformation. It's more a matter of actors who are choosing to use this technology and that the providers of this technology are not taking measures that they should. The technology in itself is very much like a knife. You can do amazing things with it or you can kill people.
Disinformation has physical effects where people are actually going out there and doing really problematic things.
Commonality: On a scale of 1 to 10, to what extent do you consider disinformation to be a major problem?
Saman Nazari: I think disinformation at large indeed is a major problem, and I would say that it is on, I think, a 7. I think it is on a point where it is having real life effects. I would even go as far as 8 because it's become a tool, a very strong tool used by so many different people and so many different actors to cause so much harm. And it's having real world, like not real world, I mean the internet is the real world, but it's having physical effects where people are actually going out there and doing really problematic things like, you know, when it comes to the QAnon movement you know people were killed that's that's a different conspiracy theory but it's also misinformation. Then you know the riots that are happening in different contexts which are also being spurred on by disinformation but with that said it's not always easy to know what is being caused by disinformation from specific actors, right? Drawing this causality is quite hard. But in my opinion, I would say it's an 8.
Commonality: Do you think we can get rid of disinformation?
Saman Nazari: No, I don't think we can get rid of disinformation.
I think we need to learn to deal with it. We need to learn how to understand it and how to not be affected by it. There will always be actors who want to influence us using malicious means. And I don't really like using the word “disinformation”, honestly. I prefer “influence operations”. Because it's not always false information, it's very often just manipulative behaviors.
