Annotated Bibliography

The primary objective of this project is to compile research articles about foreign propaganda efforts aimed at influencing local democratic processes and elections. The goal is to highlight evidence regarding the danger these strategies pose to modern democracies and to introduce the growing literature about disinformation campaigns. We focus on the literature regarding efforts by foreign powers to influence democratic politics through online activity.

Foreign influence efforts are defined as coordinated campaigns by one state to impact politics in another state through media channels, including social media. The objective of such campaigns can be to influence political decisions by either shaping election outcomes at various levels to shifting the political agenda on local topics from health to security.

We focus on books, reports, working papers, and journal articles that:

1. Analyze either (a) foreign influence efforts under the above definition or (b) study aspects of political behavior relevant for understanding such campaigns (e.g. survey experiments on the efficacy of fact-checking websites)
2. Are based on a clearly-explained methodology and provide sufficient detail that others could, in principle, replicate the work.

The bibliography thus includes analyses using different databases—from Twitter and Facebook information to surveys of media consumption—and methodologies to characterize foreign influence efforts targeting different countries, identify the causal effect of these efforts on different outcomes, and describe the secular trends in such attacks.