DisMis: Explore our 3-part series on election propaganda.

N2K's Rick Howard sits down with election experts to navigate the information storm surrounding the 2024 Presidential election. The series offers a toolkit to help you distinguish between deceptive narratives and legitimate content in today’s rapidly shifting election security landscape.

Pundits and scholars have suggested self-imposed technology improvements for the social media platforms to mitigate the propaganda spread. Policy wonks have floated proposed government regulations to force change. But none of these ideas are likely to be in place in time for the US Presidential election of 2024. How then does the average American citizen pick between the signal and the noise when both sides are launching propaganda bombs into the ether?  

This 3-part mini-series on election propaganda tries to address that question. We aim to provide you the toolkit to identify the propagandist tropes that have been around for centuries, long before social media platforms were a thing. We show how platform designers created these diabolical systems designed to arithmetically amplify the messages associated with paid influencers, unpaid wannabe influencers, culture war policy propagandists, and nation-state chaos instigators in order to hype up the rage machine on both sides of the political spectrum. They are designed to convince you, the average American voter, to hit that like button and broadcast your rage to your friends, family, and colleagues all in the service of making more money for the platform owners who are already bringing in billions of dollars of revenue. 

You may be asking yourself, why is N2K doing a series on election propaganda? This is a topic that is, strictly speaking, not about cybersecurity. That's true. But, let’s call it security adjacent. It’s an anti-propaganda toolkit for everybody, not one side of the political spectrum or the other. And, it’s an effort on our part to separate the signal from the noise, which is the N2K motto. We'd love you to join us on this journey and check out all three episodes;

Part 1: How does election propaganda work?

In this episode, Rick Howard, N2K CyberWire’s Chief Analyst and Senior Fellow, discusses personal defensive measures that every citizen can take—regardless of political philosophy—to resist the influence of propaganda. This foundational episode is essential for understanding how to navigate the complex landscape of election messaging.

Part 2: Modern propaganda efforts.

In preparation for the US 2024 Presidential Election, Rick Howard, N2K CyberWire’s Chief Analyst and Senior Fellow, discusses recent international propaganda efforts in the form of nation state interference and influence operations as well as domestic campaigns designed to split the target country into opposing camps. Guests include Nina Jankowicz, Co-Founder and CEO of the The American Sunlight Project and Scott Small, Director of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Tidal Cyber.

Part 3: Efforts to reduce the impact of future elections.

Thinking past the US 2024 Presidential Election, In part three of the series, Rick Howard, N2K CyberWire’s Chief Analyst and Senior Fellow, discusses reducing the impact of propaganda in the future elections with Perry Carpenter, Chief Human Risk Management Strategist at KnowBe4 and host of the 8th Layer Insights Podcast, Nina Jankowicz, Co-Founder and CEO of the The American Sunlight Project, and Scott Small, Director of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Tidal Cyber.