The past few years, researchers, companies, regulatory authorities, and the wider public have become increasingly aware of attempts to manipulate politics online. International actors use bots, cyborgs, and sock puppets to disrupt information environments. Extremists use memes to spread hatred, encourage violence, and harass users on prominent platforms like Twitter; they also use less public channels like Discord to organize boots-on-the-ground activity, and they copy platforms (for example, creating a version of Patreon called Hatreon) to crowdfund their activities. The papers in this panel focus on attempts by governments, companies, journalists, and citizens to reduce the harm caused by these manipulation activities. Though focused on misinformation and manipulation online, these papers root their analyses in other examples of this kind of behavior, to which governments, companies, journalists, and citizens have developed responses for decades. Thus, this panel analyzes current problems through a historical lens, cautioning against easy solutions while suggesting countermeasures that build on past successes.
