The government should put out data on the effectiveness of foreign influence campaigns as part of its public communications on election interference, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies says in a new report on election security trends.
“The U.S. government should add an analysis of the reach and impact of foreign malign influence to its regular updates about influence-related threats to the U.S. elections. This would help Americans avoid either overestimating or underestimating the threat,” FDD says in a report published today.
The FDD report from senior analyst Max Lesser and retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery is a follow-up to a September memo that analyzed foreign influence activity from Iran, Russia and China.
The latest report warns the government and election stakeholders about a tactic known as “Perception Hacking,” where cyber actors exaggerate the impact of an attack or falsely claim success to undermine public perception of election integrity.
FDD states its goal in the report is to assist Americans in avoiding “either overestimating or underestimating the severity of the threat of foreign influence to U.S. elections” while documenting the “limited reach” of social media tactics and fake websites leveraged by foreign actors, according to the report.
The report says, “To facilitate balanced appraisals, the U.S. government should similarly provide metrics or estimations of reach and impact whenever it shares information with the public about malign influence operations. Americans must remain vigilant without becoming fearful.”
FDD adds, “False claims of successful influence operations are themselves a form of perception hacking to undermine Americans’ faith in the democratic process.”
To combat exaggerated or underestimated perception of the success of influence campaigns, FDD says the government can specifically integrate “statistics about visits to websites and social media engagement and use established frameworks to assess impact” into its public messaging.
The think tank points to a “breakout scale” developed by the Brookings Institution in 2020 as an example of a methodology for assessing “whether a campaign has spread across platforms and communities, reached mainstream media, led to policy changes in response, or led to calls for physical violence.”
FDD will discuss the report and broader election security issues at a Thursday event. Lesser provides opening remarks, followed by a panel with Montgomery; Bradley Bowman, senior director of FDD’s Center on Military and Power; FDD research fellow Ivana Stradner; and former Department of Homeland Security official Suzanne Spaulding. -- Jacob Livesay (jlivesay@iwpnews.com)