Fight Fire with Fire: Hacktivists' Take on Social Media Misinformation

In this study, we interviewed 22 prominent hacktivists to learn their take on the increased proliferation of misinformation on social media. We found that none of them welcomes the nefarious appropriation of trolling and memes for the purpose of political (counter)argumentation and dissemination of propaganda. True to the original hacker ethos, misinformation is seen as a threat to the democratic vision of the Internet, and as such, it must be confronted head on with tried hacktivism methods: deplatforming the "misinformers" and doxing their funding and recruitment. The majority of the hacktivists we interviewed recommended interventions for promoting misinformation literacy in addition to targeted hacking campaigns. We discuss the implications of these findings relative to the emergent recasting of hacktivism as a defense of a constructive and factual social media discourse.