The Influences of Misinformation on Incidences of Politically Motivated Violence in Europe
Date
2023-05
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the modern era of social media and related forms of electronic media, the
issue of misinformation has become increasingly prevalent. To this end, as recent US
presidential elections and experiences in Ukraine in the lead-up to the 2022 Russian
invasion each suggest, transnational misinformation in particular poses an increasing
threat to the security and stability of modern nation states. Furthermore, at least
anecdotally, there are claims of a direct relationship between misinformation
narratives and domestic acts of politically motivated violence. Yet such claims lack
systematic empirical evidence, especially as it relates to the global spread of
misinformation by state-based or transnational actors. As these effects of transnational
misinformation on domestic political unrest remain understudied, I collect and
evaluate empirical evidence of such an association. My research more specifically
assesses the effects of transnational misinformation on several distinct forms of
domestic political violence within the context of Europe, sharpening our empirical
understanding of the purported association between misinformation and political
violence. This is achieved through the fusion of a fine grained spatial temporal dataset
of confirmed instances of news-based misinformation with daily level event data on
incidents of political conflict. These combined data are then modeled and analyzed
using univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics and multivariate LASSO regression
models of misinformation in Europe for the period covering January 2015 to May
2022. These analyses imply a positive association between misinformation and
political violence in Europe for this time period. These findings additionally indicate
that this association is much stronger for civilian to government violence events than it
is for civilian to civilian violence. Altogether this thesis accordingly provides novel
empirical evidence for the pernicious effects of transnational misinformation on
political violence.