Despite ongoing discussion of the need for increased regulation and oversight of social media, as well as debate over the extent to which the platforms themselves should be responsible for containing misinformation, there is little consensus on which interventions work to address the problem of influence operations and disinformation campaigns. To provide policymakers and scholars a baseline on academic evidence about the efficacy of countermeasures, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project conducted a systematic review of research articles that aimed to estimate the impact of interventions that could reduce the impact of misinformation.
This article introduces a dataset on the covert use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial viewpoints, and spreading disinformation. Influence efforts (IEs) are defined as: (i) coordinated campaigns by a state, or the ruling party in an autocracy, to impact one or more specific aspects of politics at home or in another state, (ii) through media channels, including social media, by (iii) producing content designed to appear indigenous to the target state. Our data draw on more than 1,000 media reports and 500 research articles/reports to identify IEs, track their progress, and classify their features. The data cover 78 foreign influence efforts (FIEs) and 25 domestic influence efforts (DIEs) – in which governments targeted their own citizens – against 51 different countries from 2011 through early 2021. The Influence Effort dataset measures covert information campaigns by state actors, facilitating research on contemporary statecraft.
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