Erving Goffman on Misinformation and Information Control: The Conduct of Contemporary Russian Information Operations

Abstract

Misinformation is a social problem increasingly, and routinely, commanding significant political and public attention. Less well known is that Erving Goffman was writing about misinformation as early as 1953 in his PhD thesis. Subsequent to which, he wrote repeatedly about the social organization and conduct of "information control" across several of his most influential publications. This article distils his ideas about these concepts to explore how they illuminate the contemporary phenomena of misinformation. To do this, empirical data are introduced from a large-scale research program exploring the causes, communication, and consequences of digital information operations and campaigns, with a particular focus upon the Internet Research Agency and Instagram. The analysis attends in particular to sequences of "revealing moves" and "concealing moves" performed by the social media account operators. The dialogue between the data and Goffman's concepts outlines the precepts of a sociologically inflected, interactionist position on misinformation.

Hard Work and Fun: Collective Online Interaction in a Case of Photo Fraud

“…To write something that does not accord with the username's reputation, you may create another identity, a so‐called smurf, which may be seen as a way to both save face and control information (c.f. Innes and Dawson 2022), but its writings may be dismissed as ignorant by others as it has fewer comments attached to the username. Alternatively, if the first thing you post gives important knowledge, you may be rewarded.…”

On Doing Concept‐Driven Sociology

“…Other SI contributions apply existing theory to help explain and interpret a definite empirical problem. Fresh examples include Schneider's (2023) implementation of Lyman and Scott's accounts framework to police accounts of body worn camera footage, Innes and Dawson's (2022) employment of Goffman's “revealing moves” and “concealing moves” to the conduct of contemporary Russian information operations, and Vassenden and Rusnes's (2022) extension of Goffman's theories of passing and interaction ritual to the privileged identities of Norwegian college professors. While these are important and fascinating waves (and, perhaps, the mainstream waves) of contemporary SI research, it is worth noting that symbolic interactionism is at its core a general theoretical tradition, accentuating studies of social life, that extends beyond doing qualitative work to make middle‐range theorizing, analytic sense of substantively specific phenomena.…”

Cognitive Security: Facing Cognitive Operations in Hybrid Warfare1

“…Russian informational attacks follow relatively simple and constant patterns. (Chew and Turnley, 2017;Innes and Dawson, 2022;Olchowski, 2022) The propaganda arguments are few and relatively crude: the colonial past of the West, the hidden economic underpinnings of their interventions, the alternative reality and the conspiracies... (Nocetti, 2015) Similarly, the vectors of these operations are well identified: official Russian media and local partners, social networks of oligarchs and associated African entrepreneurs... It is therefore possible to anticipate informational attacks or to detect them at the earliest stages of their development.…”