The Impacts of Foreign Informational Interventions on Citizen Attitudes in MENA

• In Event: Authoritarianism and Contentious Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

Research on foreign government “influence operations,” and especially on social media disinformation, has flourished in both academic and policy circles in recent years. Yet our understanding of the effectiveness of these operations in their various forms remains underdeveloped. Do these operations succeed in shifting citizen attitudes or behaviors? Does their success depend on the form of media, the source of the message, or its framing? In this paper, I present the design and preliminary results of an experiment testing the impact of “informational interventions” — a government’s use of information to foster attitudes or behaviors among citizens in another state. In particular, I explore the impact of knowledge of foreign sponsorship on audiences' belief in the credibility of a given message. This paper contributes to a larger project exploring informational influence in the Middle East and North Africa during and after the Arab Spring.

Author

• Sarah Mohamed, Harvard University