With the recent shuffle occurring around the United States Agency for International Development, a deeper look into their work has revealed that the organization’s central “Disinformation Primer” listed “gaming sites” as notable sources of potential disinformation.
As covered en masse as part of the current news cycle, shortly after being sworn in for his second term on January 20th, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring that “From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.”
From there, the weekend of February 1st saw employees from the Department of Government Efficiency and their boss Elon Musk, who is now seemingly the sole head of the department following Vivek Ramaswamy’s sudden exit, set their sights on USAID and began gutting the entirety of its operation.
In the days since this development, more and more scrutiny has been placed on USAID’s past work history, with many individuals taking the opportunity to scour the organization’s publicly released writings in search of anything that may shed light on whether or whether not their funds were truly being mismanaged.
And it was as a result of this newfound attention that the group’s official “Disinformation Primer” was brought to public light.
Created in 2021 through a collaboration between USAID’s Joshua Machleder and Shannon Maguire and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago’s Susan Abbbott, Renée Hendley, and Luis Camacho, the primer serves to help “USAID staff and partners to understand the basics of disinformation, how it is spread, why it is spread, and how programming can help reduce its damaging impact on societies around the world.”
“Today’s digital communications and media landscape is complex and has given rise to a new set of challenges and considerations for democracy support,” reads one of its opening paragraphs. “Across all USAID programming countries, this requires a solid understanding of disinformation and robust approaches for countering and preventing it.”
To this end, following a very basic recap of the different types of mis/disinformation (such as claims made with ‘False Context’ or as overt ‘Propaganda’) and their uses by local and foreign agitators, the team then proceeds to provide a closer look at their methods of spread, the social factors that make them work, and the “anticipated challenges” one may encounter in trying to combat them.
One such ‘challenge’ presented by the primer is “understanding alternative media spaces”, as the document asserts that although “discussions on disinformation and misinformation often revolve around assumptions of state actors driving the issue,” in actuality, “problematic information more regularly originates from networks of alternate sites and anonymous individuals who have created their own ‘alt-media’ online spaces,” which include “message board and digital distribution platforms (e.g., Redditt [sic], 4chan, or Discord); conspiracy news sites (e.g., RT and 21s* Century Wire); and” – perhaps most curiously – “gaming sites.”
“While information on alternative systems such as conspiracy theories may seem farcical or preposterous to an outsider, to users these spaces enable them to collaborate and validate their own claims and interpretations of the world that differ from ‘mainstream’ sources,” wrote the primer’s authors. “With this, individuals contribute their own “research” to the larger discussion, collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes, and supports their alternative beliefs. As these discussions become larger, “mainstream” institutions may pick up on the issue but because they do not understand the platform or alternative media system more generally, they may unknowingly provide wide coverage of misleading information.”
Curiously, despite providing specific examples of each other type of ‘alt-media space’ like ‘message boards’ or ‘conspiracy news sites’, the USAID primer did not do so when it came to the ‘gaming site’ category.
As such, it’s unknown if the organization was referring to actual, non-mainstream news outlets that cover video games like Niche Gamer or Bounding Into Comics, or ‘video game community’ websites like the individual forums provided for each and every title hosted by Steam.
Meanwhile, in terms of what actions USAID recommends for its employees and associates in “dealing with misinformation”, the organization lists the following ten as potential additions to one’s metaphorical toolkit:
- Conduct a disinformation diagnostic – Take stock of the information environment in your country
- Carry out actor mapping – Assess the key stakeholders who contribute in positive and negative ways to the media and information ecosystem in your country.
- Support media literacy initiatives – Given the changing nature of mass media and news and information consumption habits, youth as well as other segments of the population benefit from opportunities to learn critical thinking skills and to acquire the knowledge to spot disinformation and other aspects of information disorder.
- Fund independent media and local public interest journalism – One of the best forms of resilience against mis- and disinformation is journalism.
- Support media monitoring and fact-checking initiatives specifically – You cannot fight disinformation with disinformation. You need to fight back with the truth and good reporting.
- Stay up to speed – Disinformation is a growing field and threat, and there is a need to stay current on new research and tools for identifying disinformation trends and threats and to stay abreast of the different disinformation narratives that could undermine USAID’s work.
- Support internet governance and digital rights initiatives – Consider potential partnerships with digital security trainers, digital forensic investigators, digital literacy specialists, internet governance experts, and others who can work with your local USAID programs as part of democracy and governance programs.
- Engage government – Where it is possible, reach out to local government and national government officials to begin a dialogue, if one is not already in place, about how USAID can partner in countering and preventing disinformation.
- Collaborate and engage with other international partners (civil society, media, social media platforms, internet governance forums, and other donors) – Some of the best examples in countering and preventing disinformation involve collaborative approaches that include data scientists, social scientists, and journalists.
- Measure the impact of your efforts to counter and prevent disinformation – Because there are so many unknowns in terms of what works and what does not in the field of countering disinformation, research and learning opportunities are important, and data collected should be shared with both USAID and its implementing partners.