Misinformation and Disinformation in Social Media as the Pulse of Finnish National Security
Social media is becoming more and more of a security threat. Dissatisfaction with the content and quality of the information flow is increasing not only at a national level, but also at the level of people’s everyday lives. Social media is one of the key
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Social media is becoming more and more of a security threat. Dissatisfaction with the content and quality of the information flow is increasing not only at a national level, but also at the level of people’s everyday lives. Social media is one of the key channels for distributing misinformation and disinformation and has also become a key instrument for influencing political activity in particular. We define misinformation as shared information which is unintentionally false, whereas disinformation refers to false information which is purposefully shared for systematic informational influencing as well as for propaganda. The post-Cold War age has created a new global power order by using information – which is increasingly shared through social media – for political purposes. Small countries like Finland have become more and more dependent on the global information flow, while at the same time increasingly being subjected to the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. Hence, social media has become an ever-more crucial factor in terms of national security threats. At the same time, however, it is also a potential platform for creating (generalised) trust in national security by means of sharing correct information among citizens. This study focuses on the flow of misinformation and disinformation on social media in relation to armed forces and national security. In this contribution, we also address issues related to the role of gener-
T. Norri-Sederholm (*) · A.-M. Huhtinen Department of Leadership and Military Pedagogy, National Defence University, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] E. Norvanto Finnish Defence Command, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] K. Talvitie-Lamberg Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Moehlecke de Baseggio et al. (eds.), Social Media and the Armed Forces, Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47511-6_12
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alised trust for psychological resilience and explore the European Union’s role in countering disinformation. Keywords Disinformation · Misinformation · Armed forces · Social media · Society · Generalised trust
1 Introduction Digitalisation and social media as new opinion builders have changed the speed at which information travels, the way information is produced, and the way people are connected across national borders. The changing domain of the information space as well as the media landscape have majorly affected today’s security environment (Kofman et al. 2017). The use of social media has also exposed Western countries to a new way of informational influencing. Social media is a key player in the support of authoritarianism taking media space from traditional journalism. It can be used to fuel tensio
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