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In this episode, Layal speaks with Abdullatif Sleibi about how misinformation and disinformation undermine trust, fragment communities and weaken nonviolent action. They treat disinformation as a structural threat rather than a side effect of the digital age.
Latif explains how conspiracy ecosystems like QAnon grow from fringe spaces into political forces. They thrive on belonging, gamification and moral certainty — crisis accelerates their spread, while uncertainty gives them purpose. The conversation takes a turn to deepfakes and synthetic media. These tools erode the idea of truth itself. Latif describes the liar’s dividend, where the existence of fake content allows real evidence to be dismissed, as trust collapses, accountability fades. Layal grounds the discussion in lived experience. Even informed users struggle to detect manipulation, including activists, journalists and marginalized voices, who face reputational attacks with little protection. Automated moderation worsens the problem because platforms have the power to suppress political speech through opaque systems.
The episode ends with strategy and principle. Countering disinformation goes far beyond fact-checking. It demands patience, persistence and hope. Digital nonviolence refuses outrage as currency, because it centers human voices, builds trust slowly, and treats truth as a shared responsibility.
Abdullatif Sleibi is a Senior Data Analyst at PAX, working within the Protection of Civilians Department. His work focuses on online misinformation and extremism, humanitarian data, surveys, and artificial intelligence regulation. He has contributed to fact-checking, media literacy, and disinformation projects with the European Institute of the Mediterranean. His work bridges research, policy, and peacebuilding practice.
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Layal Beyhum: Hello everyone and welcome to the Nonviolence Now podcast, brought to you by Pace E Bene, where we explore the principles of nonviolence, where it all started, and how it shows up in today’s digital world.
Across the world, the lines between fact and fiction are blurring. Conspiracy movements like QAnon and Deepfake have become powerful tools in reshaping how people see one another, and how they’re also taught to fear one another. In an age of rising authoritarianism and deepening polarization, misinformation has the potential to disarm nonviolent movements by dividing communities and eroding the trust that collective action depends on. That’s why today’s conversation matters to the Nonviolence Now podcast, because the struggle for nonviolence is fought in comment sections, timelines, and quiet corners of our feeds today.
In this episode, we’re joined by Abdullatif Sleibi, who is a senior data analyst at the Peace Organization, PAX, Protection of Civilians Department. He specializes in online mis/disinformation and extremism, humanitarian data, surveys, artificial intelligence regulations. He has previously collaborated on fact-checking, media literacy, and mis/disinformation projects at the European Institute of the Mediterranean. Latif also happens to be a friend of mine, we’ve worked together in the past on your Mediterranean affairs, and I am so happy he is here with us today. Together, we’re going to dive into how conspiracy narratives like QAnon evolve from fringe mythologies into political movements, how deepfakes and synthetic media exploit distrust to discredit leaders and dismantle truth, how outrage algorithms isolate communities into echochambers, and finally, how activists can respond in the ways or in terms of flooding the digital arena with empathy and strategy.
Today our conversation revolves around power and persuasion, and how can resistance look like in a world where every click can be weaponized. Latif, welcome aboard to the Nonviolence Now podcast.
Abdullatif Sleibi: Thank you, Layal, and thank you for a great introduction. I’m quite excited to talk about this topic. I can honestly say it’s a professional and a personal passion, so it’s always a pleasure to especially discuss this in a nonviolence or peace-building capacity.
Layal Beyhum: So good to have you here Latif. Before we dive into anything really, can you start by telling our folks out there what are QAnon and conspiracy narratives? Where does it show up in our day-to-day lives?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Now, in talking about QAnon and disinformation in the US context, it’s good to frame the problem a bit. So what is actually mis- and disinformation? I’m sure many people know, but I do like setting out the definition from the get-go to just get us started. Generally speaking, in most policy or academic circles, disinformation is seen as content or false information that is intentionally spread with the aim of achieving some kind of profit (economic, social, political), or causing harm. Now, the main word here, the key word here is intention. This misleading or false content is intentionally spread. How misinformation differs is that there is no intention. It’s not intentionally there to cause harm or achieve something, it’s just there.
Where the line gets a bit thin between these two concepts is, okay, let’s say someone spread disinformation intentionally, and then it got reshared. Now, the people resharing it don’t necessarily want to spread that disinformation, but at the same time, they did. So the lines between what becomes what get thinner as you go through second orders or third orders over time.
With that in mind, let’s talk a bit about QAnon and what this whole thing is. I think QAnon is a very fun topic because there are so many potential definitions of what this thing is, and I’ll give you a bit of a summary that combines a lot of different sides. So broadly speaking, I would call QAnon a wide-ranging, semi-unfounded umbrella theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of elite Satan-worshiping pedophiles. I want you to take a minute and process that, and that is fundamentally the main argument with these Satan-worshiping pedophiles being in government and media and in business, so they run the world largely. That’s a basic story, but there are so many offshoots and detours and internal debates that make QAnon a bit bigger than that.
This core theory, the whole Satan-worshiping pedophiles, is the center, but what it’s become, what it’s morphed into has really expanded a lot, and there are so many claims which are often even contradictory, so you can’t really trace a line through them. Given that, I like to call QAnon a big tent conspiracy.
So what’s a big tent conspiracy? It’s a constantly evolving theory/ecosystem that adds new features and claims with a fundamental core, but it’s kind of slowly moving outwards, and you can’t really pin it down all the time. Now, I can talk about the history a bit, the members, or well, the alleged members and what goes on, but if you have any specific questions you’d like to get us started with, I’d be happy to focus in on that.
Layal Beyhum: Maybe we can talk about its evolution.
Abdullatif Sleibi: Yeah, so evolution. QAnon, let’s say, officially started around October 2017, and it’s a funny story. So if you’ve ever heard about this platform, it’s called 4chan. It’s a messaging board that, well, I think many of the American audience will be familiar with, as they’ve heard it in the news a couple of times by now. But yes, in 2017, an anonymous user put a series of posts on the message board, and this user signed off with the name Q, which kind of links up to the name QAnon. Anon is a shorthand for anonymous, so QAnon. They claimed to have top-level security clearance and wrote a lot of cryptic messages, which are called QDrops. These slogans, pledges, pro-Trump themes, and overall claims had a lot of predictions, a lot of theories on what would be happening. And the biggest one was that there would be a big war coming, a big war that would culminate in a storm. So when Mr. Trump in the storm, or President Trump, would finally unmask the cabal, punish the members for their crimes, and restore America to its greatness. However, obviously, since then, it’s been viewed a bit of that, oh, it’s a joke, it’s a meme, you know, some simple stuff.
But as we now know, it grew way beyond that. So for instance, QAnon began in 2017. But from the last statistics, by 2024, it had over 30 million interactions on Facebook groups, well, before major takedowns. And the beauty of QAnon is that its whole strength lies in the gamification aspect. It’s all about the clues that followers decode, the breadcrumbs, and there’s a sense of belonging through this participation. And nowadays, you see that QAnon has grown to involve major political figures. I think the biggest one is Marjorie Taylor Green, who does not necessarily associate with QAnon these days, but still parrots lots of their claims, lots of their main messages. And it’s kind of still a big movement, despite there being a clear deplatforming. So QAnon is no longer permitted on many platforms, X or Facebook, but they exist on Telegram, Discord, on Rumble, and of course, on Truth Social.
Layal Beyhum: How do you think these conspiracy narratives incorporate, you know, different sorts of anxieties, be it cultural, religious, social?
Abdullatif Sleibi: So that’s a good one. I think it’s because, largely speaking, a big misconception here about QAnon is that it’s purely political, but it’s not. It functions for people who believe in it as both a social community and as a source of entertainment. So one analogy I like to make about QAnon is like it’s a massive multiplayer video game where people can co-create a kind of shared reality filled with recurring characters, shifting storylines, like these puzzle-solving quests with these QDrops or breadcrumbs. It’s, in a way, also a church. So when we talk about these shared realities, QAnon has become a way for its followers to have a social support structure where they can organize a narrative around their lives. It provides a meaning and belonging in a very uncertain period.
So like we mentioned that it started in 2017, but when QAnon really exploded was around 2020. Around that period, we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, a lot of health scares, a lot of political distrust and social distrust. So consequently, QAnon became a way to explain away a lot of the issues people are having. And at its core, it also simplified things. You have this moral dualism, good versus evil. Complex social issues become a lot simpler when you’re like, okay, Satan worshiping pedophiles, bad. Us, good. But as with any conspiracy-oriented group, these narratives act as a coping mechanism when the distrust and economic hardship or anxiety keep growing bigger and bigger.
Layal Beyhum: Who funds these people?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Funding. That’s a tricky one because obviously you have major supporters behind QAnon, a lot of political figures. But that’s also the beauty of such a group. The funding isn’t really necessary. It’s all about creating the social belonging in a deconstructed or decentralized group.
Their power lies in the fact that information or spreading information doesn’t really require a lot of money nowadays if you know what you’re doing or if you have people spreading this information or this disinformation. I would say that definitely there are big players behind QAnon simply for the sake of taking advantage of this community. Let’s not go conspiratorial here, but in the principle of this is a ready group who is in big support of a political figure being President Trump. So there are ways to harness them, there are ways to target them, there are media campaigns that you can specifically create for them. However, is there direct funding behind the group itself? I wouldn’t say so. At least there are no obvious lines to trace at the moment.
Layal Beyhum: What role do influencers play in the middle of all of this? I feel like social media influencers notably, they can play some sort of role in media amplification. Political actors would be to push for their particular agendas, let’s say.
Abdullatif Sleibi: Oh, well, I’d say the biggest role they play is simply taking advantage of a ready audience. So a lot of influencers nowadays, and let’s say the last two years, 2024, 2025, don’t necessarily subscribe to the ideology, but they subscribe to parts of it. Even major political figures who are also influencers have stated themselves to be aligned with a lot of the pillars or theories behind QAnon, which is quite easy because as a big-tent theory, it’s so expansive. I’d say the main role influencers play is simply guiding, prioritizing, and escalating or amplifying certain trends or narratives.
Influencers can simply pick up one of the many strands behind this whole QAnon ecosystem and say, hey, let’s focus on this and make a whole movement out of it. Although, for instance, the late Charlie Kirk wasn’t necessarily a QAnon face in the sense that he didn’t personally subscribe to the movement itself, he was still a big supporter of a lot of the main theories or tenets in QAnon, and he was able to amplify them and make these more major. Another issue is when you take these, let’s say, fringe narratives, and when I say fringe, I say spaces outside the mainstream legitimacy, so image boards like 4chan and 8chan or 8kun, they’re able to take these fringe theories and bring them into the ecosystem of the mainstream. They’re able to take, let’s say, something like, oh, they’re eating the dogs and cats. Take that out of this random image board and put it into the major news by simply speaking about it. So that’s really the power of the influencer.
Layal Beyhum: You mentioned something about Charlie Kirk, about not necessarily subscribing to QAnon. How do people actually subscribe and how can we see who is subscribed to these platforms?
Abdullatif Sleibi: I might have misused that word a bit, but by subscribe I meant more like they align directly or they vocally support it. We unfortunately—that’s really the beauty of it, but it’s a very good question because we can’t actually directly trace who is part of the QAnon movement unless they say it. And although in the past when QAnon was more—I’d say less radical, less mainstream, a lot of people were willing to say, “Oh, yes, I am part of QAnon or I believe in QAnon.” Nowadays, especially after the capital riots where QAnon played a major role, people are less willing to admit participation.
However, that doesn’t mean to say that they’re still not interested in it. And I guess the way to really trace if someone is part of QAnon is to simply listen to the main theories they espouse, the main narratives they’re talking about. And you’ll often find that, oh, even if they’re not part of QAnon, if they’re aligned with them, they are likely to have the same mentality or the same approach, politically or socially.
Layal Beyhum: Latif, do you mind sharing with us some rigid case studies, for instance, on how activists maybe have identified these rhetorical strategies without necessarily amplifying them?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Let’s see, I can’t give specific examples on, let’s say, oh, they detected X situation or Y situation, but I can give you some strategies that have been recommended by many activists in the field. So one thing that’s really a major thing is when you’re finding a conspiracy, when you’re investigating it, don’t quote or screenshot the content directly. Don’t share it or reshare it in your own networks to prevent amplification.
When trying to actually understand what’s going on behind the scenes, try to deconstruct the logic. What is this narrative? What need is this narrative fulfilling? Why are we speaking about this narrative? Why has it become popular? I guess this is a bit of a tricky one. I like to recommend it, but it’s not always effective to offer alternative moral narratives. So look, rooting your own counter narratives and morality and transparency. This is a great idea in principle, but it fails to capture why mis- and disinformation spreads so quickly. Moral and transparent narratives aren’t engaging. They aren’t exciting. So even if you try to spread them, they’re not going to spread. It’s almost impossible to motivate people to spread something that’s not exciting. But not to say that you shouldn’t.
And one actual example I can give where this was attempted against QAnon in 2020, I think there was a Save the Children hashtag movement that was hijacked by QAnon, which was quite terrible. QAnon kind of turned it into the whole pedophile situation. And NGOs did try to fight back against it and they responded with careful reframing focused on actual protection, on mentioning case studies, what they’ve done, what they’ve achieved. And luckily the mainstream media picked up on it and amplified this narrative. However, without the mainstream picking up on it and there being this boost, it would have been kind of confined to this little bubble of the, let’s say, NGOs and activist groups, which would have not spread to the bigger, scarier QAnon bubble of general media.
Layal Beyhum: I’m gonna take on this last idea that you said and I’m gonna hop more towards deepfakes and synthetic media in the sense that today with everything that is so perfectly being done or being conducted by AI generation, we have videos of different presidents around the world, of different people giving speeches that make absolute no sense or that are gibberish. It looks so good, so real, except that it’s not. It’s either generated by Sora, it’s either generated by, I don’t know what, it can be so misleading. So tell us more about the risks of these manipulated videos and audios or even texts at this point in discrediting leaders and movements.
Abdullatif Sleibi Yeah, certainly. And I love that we’re covering this topic. When talking about deep fakes and synthetic media, I like to talk about a little concept that we started covering, which is the liar’s dividends. So we’ve entered a sort of liar’s dividend era where people will and can dismiss real evidence as fake. So the very notion of what is true, what is valid has kind of faded away.
But for the sake of the audience, I do want to cover a couple of definitions first, just to be clear, in case I start spouting things off and be like, oh, what’s that?
Deep fakes. So deep fakes generally are AI generated, synthetic video or audio that convincingly mimics real people. The word convincingly here used to be a bit more, let’s say, oh, yeah, convincingly. Because prior to, let’s say, the onset of the AI era of ChatGPT, with Sora, and now Sora 2, deep fakes have existed for the last, let’s say, 5 to 10 years, we’ve seen them before. And we’ve laughed a lot, I think many have seen the Will Smith eating spaghetti deep fake that was horrible, but it blew our minds at the time. Nowadays, there is a lot of fear because the deep fakes are able to convince and could mimic a lot of people, which leads us to the next thing.
So generally, synthetic media, as Layal mentioned, can also include text. So text, audio, image or video that simulates authenticity. And finally, as we mentioned, the liar’s dividends. Why I like to mention this idea is because it’s before now, it used to be a concept that we spoke about as, oh, what if this happens as a fear? We’ve entered an era where this is not a fear, this is a reality. So the existence of fakes gives a lot of liars or, let’s say, malicious actors the cover to deny real evidence. And this has become so common that we even have a term for it—fake news—which applies to fake-fake news and fake-real news or real-fake news. Yeah, somewhere there.
Layal Beyhum: That’s quite the ____.
Abdullatif Sleibi: And yeah, unfortunately. Just like the news. But you also see there’s a lot of examples of this happening. So I think it’s easy to say, ah, I can see if something’s AI. I’ve noticed this, I know. That’s not necessarily true.
And like, let’s think of the US context specifically. I remember in 2024, there was a robo-call in New Hampshire, imitating President Biden’s voice, urging voters, well, not to vote. So we had voter suppression happening. If we’re talking about images, during the Trump-Harris kind of, let’s say, battle royale happening in social media, you saw AI-generated images of Taylor Swift on X trying to build culture wars, start something. And then you have the, which is my favorite kind of new development in this whole deepfake AI-era, and I like to call them—they’re called cheap fakes. So these are simple edits, out of context clips, like things that aren’t really so specific. And they’re more effective, because you know, if you take something out of context, and just send it out somewhere, you can really see it doing damage because it is an authentic clip just simply misused.
And I think it’s important to say that we’ve talked a lot about QAnon, President Trump, and how there’s a bit of a link there. But cheap fakes target all actors as do deep fakes. We’ve seen cheap fakes target Donald Trump by taking him out of context on a lot of issues, though, also in context on a lot of issues. I think a major one that comes up a lot talking about cheap fakes is any of Biden’s kind of little tangents that he goes on. And a big one that’s often seen on the internet is Nancy Pelosi’s edited blurred speech kind of videos. But yeah, overall, I think the impact of these kind of synthetic media things or deep fakes is reputational.
So activists, politicians, journalists, and especially marginalized, so people who have a weaker voice on the broader media landscape, are at risk of reputational damage because they simply can’t defend themselves. And this results in a growing trust crisis. So people begin to doubt all media evidence. So for a long time, we’re in this era where, okay, we’ll believe online evidence where, oh, okay, we’ll believe false information, we’ll believe the disinformation.
Now we’re evolving to an even worse stage where neither genuine nor fake information is believable. We don’t trust anything. So then who has the real voice? And here it gets dangerous because when you start trusting specific figures, and these figures are not always benign.
Layal Beyhum: This is a lot of good content to digest and to think about because this is something—we live with that on a day to day basis without even noticing it by simply scrolling through our feeds, reading memes, reading tweets. Thing is, I’ve been at several instances and I count myself, I’d like to believe that I’m someone that can identify when something could be mis/disinformation or when something is just out of place, and I have been deceived several times for actually believing some videos.
I’d be like, wait, this actually happened? I watch a video and I actually ask myself this question, this actually happened? And then I go into the comments sections to see how people are reacting to it. And I see that someone says, “This is generated by Sora 2,” for instance, or, “This never happened—this isn’t true.” And then I have to go back and Google it to see whether or not this instance actually happened, which I find is crazy. I mean, we are people in the field. We are people that are super engaged in regional and international politics and even we can easily get deceived. So what about the masses? What about people that just scroll on Instagram to just enjoy life and to have some fun time during their downtime? It’s so misleading. If we want to conclude and talk about some practical ways or some practical tactics for not just activists, but for day-to-day users, how could they potentially spot or identify, like what are the cues someone needs to look for to be able to potentially detect something?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Oh, the big question, I think it’s on everyone’s mind is how do you actually detect fake content or mis- or disinformation? Obviously there’s a lot of technical signs to detecting whether a video or an image is fake, and I think this we can limit a bit more to the activist discussion since the average user is not going to look at metadata or try to really dig into an image or video. But one benefit of a lot of social media is, or one benefit and disadvantage is the fact that it is a crowdsourcing and co-creation space. As you mentioned, comments, opinions, whatever will always be on videos, on images, and to some extent these can either convince you or kind of change your mind on a lot of things, so take advantage of that.
But when it comes to actually tackling mis- or disinformation, let’s say broadly speaking, here it becomes a lot about media literacy. How literate are you in tackling the media you consume? A lot of these are very simple things, but things we don’t think about often and to a large extent things that aren’t taught anymore. So I’ve talked to a lot of high school, middle school kids discussing media literacy, and I try to link our experiences on the discovery of computers, of the internet, growing up. And I think to some extent, Layal, you have the same, we had computer classes, we had the internet classes, which sounds a bit silly now, but this isn’t really a thing now. Kids aren’t taught, oh, the way a title is written can indicate whether it’s sensationalist, if it’s correct/incorrect, if it’s clickbait or not. So that’s here, you go, one form of signpost literacy is not saying, oh, is the title clickbait? How many views does a piece of content have? Does it look inflated? So a lot of times when looking at videos, you should pay attention. Okay, this video has, let’s say, 100,000 views, but only 100 comments. Immediately, that should tell you that there’s something going, there’s something wrong here.
Another thing to pay attention to, and I think this is always the case, the source. Who made this piece of content? Who made this video? Who wrote this article and where is it published? Now, obviously, you will trust or you have a neutral approach to anything posted on YouTube because it’s YouTube, but look at the channel, look at their subscribers, look at their credentials, especially when the channel was created. Now, this is a very new phenomenon, you’re watching thousands of new YouTube channels that are educational, talking about science, media, et cetera, that are fully AI-generated, absolutely, the voice, the image, the text, everything, and you’ll notice that they suddenly appear, they post a lot of things, very high quality over a short period, and then they’ll disappear if they don’t achieve their like subscriber metrics, so you can see these small things.
And finally, I think the main thing I like to work on a lot is text and really this is going to be the most boring part of this, the most fundamental or mundane. Double check your sources, look at multiple sources, don’t focus on only one source of information. So look at multiple outlets, try to go beyond your bubble, look at different—especially in the US, it is a bit politically divided, but it is also helpful to look at right- and left-wing sources, or at least centrist right and left wing sources, try to diversify your view because at the end of the day, there’s always a bit of bias, there’s always a side to a piece of information.
Layal Beyhum: Is there a way to potentially limit what you can see and what you cannot see? Because the algorithm sees what we’re interested in and then you start—when we’re doom scrolling through reels, for instance, i’m just talking about instagram, different things pop up, things that are totally irrelevant and that are totally out of place. And these are the things thatI’ve mentioned earlier of watching things actually thinking they are real and then having to take a step back and look into it more. Are there any parametrics where we can actually limit that, stop that? Do you think is there a discourse happening on working towards that? Because we don’t—you said we need to pick our sources. So yeah we are picking our sources, but is that enough today?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Oh, absolutely not. And this is kind of touching on the bigger topic of algorithmic bubbles and self-selection. And you are absolutely correct. Algorithms do shape what we see. They reward us for outrage and not necessarily for nuance or for trying to see new perspectives. It is true that platforms, be they Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook, they reward or prioritize engagements of clicks and reactions, not accuracy, not real factual information. But oftentimes, it’s a lot more boring than the really explosive stuff. And this creates polarization.
Now on what is being done to tackle this, I’ll be honest with you, not much. Social media companies, at some point for a very short period, let’s say, mid 2020s, were willing to rein themselves in. We had codes of practice on misinformation. We had stronger moderation, we had human moderation—so actual people looking at content. And we had, let’s say, actual attempts at limiting the spread of false narratives and trying to balance out perspectives. This has essentially stopped being the case. Human moderation is almost non-existent because of the advent of AI. So we use AI to moderate everything, which is good and bad. And most media platforms have decided that we care more for free speech, we care more for expression. So moderation should be light touch. And obviously, you have, to some extent, political voices driving this. We saw that President Trump has pushed more for a light touch towards moderation. We saw this in the case of Elon Musk and X, now Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
And even in this, not only saying this from the US perspective, I can say also from the European perspective, there almost are no attempts to control our algorithms, all policies, all voluntary policies or attempts to do this have kind of faded into the background. There are limited regulations. But here, this touches on the fundamental issue trying to regulate how social media works. The whole money-making kind of practice of social media is engagement. If you try to limit engagement, you limit the business principle of social media, which creates a bit of an impossible issue. So as to what’s being done in that capacity, very little, which means the responsibility likely falls on the individual or any groups that are interested or willing in improving media literacy and inoculating communities.
Layal Beyhum: But we have seen the concept of shadow-ban emerge, especially when the genocide started unfolding in Gaza, notably after the October 7th attacks. And this is where we started seeing whoever was speaking against the oppression that is going on in Gaza and in the West Bank has been totally suppressed, their profiles have been completely banned.
I really want to evoke the example of Salah al-Jafrawi, which was a very prominent Palestinian journalist on the ground in Gaza, whose account has been suppressed by Meta more than nine times. And he was one of the very few who remained alive after the war and was killed two days later. And after his killing, Meta deleted his account. How does this feed into this narrative?
Abdullatif Sleibi: I think this actually perfectly encapsulates this whole idea that, okay, let’s approach this from two sides. On the one hand, there is the malicious aspect. We do definitely see that there’s attempt to restrict and restrain any narratives on the genocide, on Palestine. And thus, you could arguably say that there is an intention to limit this, to hide content, to shadowban. And to some extent, we’ve seen evidence of this. Obviously, no one has owned up to it because they wouldn’t. But there are certain instances that make you doubt, make you think, okay, maybe something’s going on.
Now, the second aspect, and this is more worrying because it’s less intentional. And that is an absolute block on anything that is politically controversial. And the reason I mentioned the second side is because we’re seeing it now also in the US in relation to ICE and immigration. So anything, we’ve seen it before in the Middle East, on smaller issues. In Europe, we see it on anything that’s related to protests, be it Palestinian or immigration, or even women’s rights. And this side is the scarier part, and it relates to the fact that anything that’s controversial politically, anything that could create outrage in the bad way, in the non-money-making way, social media will block, will restrict, and will limit. And this is scary because it’s not intentional, it is automated. So usually, an AI model of some sort or just an auto-moderating system will start noticing certain hashtags, certain kinds of tones or tonalities behind the lexical use of videos, text, image, and it’ll shut it down.
And I think this is a slightly new experience for our western audiences because if you historically look at how the Middle East has been approached in terms of social media moderation, especially from platforms like Facebook, their auto-moderation systems are a bit, I’m going to use this word, stupid. They don’t understand the nuance of language because they just don’t have enough material to use. So they will stupidly auto-moderate anything that’s like, okay, this is a bit too close to terrorism, has no relation to terrorism, but we’re going to block it anyway. Now we’re seeing this happening a lot in our current communities where anything that gets a bit too political, that passes that threshold, gets killed. However, despite saying this, I think there is still some level of contentionality to a lot of the shadowbanning happening, but I cannot say it in absolutes because, well, again, no one’s going to admit to it. However, patterns and trends do emerge, be it in terms of Gaza, be it in terms of immigration protests, be it in terms of government actions that are more authoritarian, be they in the west or in the east.
Layal Beyhum: To circle back to the initial point that we were talking about, we dove quite deeply, but I think this is a really important segment and important to talk about these things because we’re living them on a day-to-day basis. And the fact that sometimes things are hidden from us, narratives are not just being silenced, they’re being erased, this puts a huge responsibility on citizens, on beings, to be intentional with the sources that they choose to read, with the voices that they are looking for.
Because sometimes some people disappear from our feeds and we just live on with our lives as if nothing’s going on, when in fact it’s much more intentional and it’s much more dangerous than one can think. And at the end of the day, this voice behind this voice behind this platform is a human being, and behind this human being is a total reality that they are living. And especially, I’m giving the example today since we just mentioned Salih, whose soul may he rest in peace alongside every journalist that has lost their lives trying to voice out the truth. We have a responsibility to play as people, not just as activists. So from a people aspect, I really wish our audience or our listeners here today, whatever it is that you do in your life, be intentional with who you choose to listen to, avoid doomscrolling, and as Latif mentioned, read multiple facets of the story. And don’t just get outraged with whatever clickbait you see and choose to automatically reshare and repost and throw your opinion on it before actually dissecting it and calming down. Let’s move on to what are activists supposed to be doing? What tactics could activists use? And this is the gist of it.
Abdullatif Sleibi: Well, there are a lot of strategies, but I want to say as a preemptive statement, they might work, but this is an uphill battle. You are fighting against an ecosystem that doesn’t want you to limit this engagement bait or outrage bait, and wants it to prosper.
But here are my recommendations for my, I guess, semi-optimistic strategy. So the first one is taking inspiration from what is happening on the mis- and disinformation front, which is, let’s say, let’s call it flooding the zone ethically. In this case, the beauty of activists, of NGOs, of civil society organizations is the network, is the connections, the strong interconnection between them. So mobilizing these networks to share verified, hopeful, or even just emotionally resident stories is a big chunk or a big strategy towards pushing against negativity and the outrage that’s kind of falling in. And I’ll give this one example. It’s specifically about Ukraine.
So there was a movement called We Are Still Here that came out, and it did a good job of sharing local stories, people on the ground in villages and smaller cities. And it helped counter this massive Russian amplification of, oh, it’s all bad, over evil, just kind of human faces, human voices. And I think this is a big, important aspect that I’ll come back to in a bit. But the next one is more technical, which is pre-bunking and debunking. I don’t love these words. They’re a bit of kind tech-speak. But pre-bunking is essentially inoculating audiences by showing the tactics of manipulation before they’re exposed. You’re essentially kind of predicting what narratives will come out or what narratives are slowly forming and just already talking about them, or you’re talking about what tactics are going to be happening. Or you could say, oh, they’re very likely to mention that this event is going to be fake, or this initiative is damaging, etc. Just pre-empt it.
So essentially, you’re just pre-empting the disinformation. YouTube and Google have attempted to do this to some extent in their policies with some limited successes, but it’s not great. I think the issue of pre-bunking is you can never really predict what’s going to happen. And oftentimes, you’re not going to have the same reach as a disinformation campaign. Now, debunking is a nice word to essentially say, reacting to false information directly, so actually targeting it and speaking to it. One example that combines both these aspects—and I think the US had an initiative like this that slowly died away. The EU still has—it’s called the European Union versus Disinfo Lab, where they essentially notice stories that begin to trend and immediately debunk them, providing a straightforward narrative. Or they’ll notice, oh, this information can be misinterpreted. Let’s explain it more fully. It’s had more success, but again, who is it reaching? A very specific audience of people. However, I will give it credit. During the COVID period, there used to be an EU versus COVID site, similar principle, that worked quite well.
It was cited as a major source by major newspapers, news outlets, but again, you need the mainstream to catch on to it to make it spread. But going back to something I mentioned earlier, just amplifying local issues, and I think this is the most important thing an activist can do, especially, let’s say, in the US context.
Now, unfortunately, politicians, journalists, and activists, especially now, are not the most trusted messengers. Let’s admit there’s been a bit of a counterculture against them, but I think they still have access to lots of key figures. And when we’re talking about amplifying local voices in the US context, in the small town, small city context, we need to talk to local pastors, community leaders, to nurses, to teachers, people who are genuinely trusted and who have access to the people and whose voices will be heard. Now, you do run into some issues when these local voices aren’t necessarily on your side, be it politically in terms of narrative or socially. But still these are the voices you need to reach. These are the messengers you need to target. As mentioned earlier as well, coalitions, networks, amplification efforts that combine activists, journalists, and content creators or influencers.
Now we kind of mentioned them earlier during this podcast in a slightly bad way, but influencers are also a positive influence. They do have the access and the reach to spread good messages, but you have to be careful in what kind of influencer you approach and what their core values are socially, politically, and it does help maintain visibility. So finally, just as a nice little statement, I think that truth spreads best when it’s told by someone your audience already believes. If they don’t believe you from the get go, no matter what you say, it’s not going to be convincing.
Layal Beyhum: I have two things to point out to that, and maybe give a small example of especially the influencers aspect. Recently, Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump bought influencers and paid them to vocally stand with Israel and to spread false news. So they even deployed them on the ground to say, yeah, look, we are sending humanitarian aid in Israel to Gaza, but they are lying. The Hamas is stealing them. This is all fake. This is all lies.
So they actually created set ups. And so these videos were actually leaked by activists showing, I think, exposing this kind of truth—I would call it whistle blowing—is really important. And this is the role that activists must play today because people are so easily bought in. And what we need really is to know how to discredit these people in the most legitimate and respectful ways possible. That is one.
Second of all, we’ve had exceptional guests on the Nonviolence Now podcast, including Kate Bogan and Hani Chaabo, who have created the podcast called the Superhumanizer podcast, which has reached top charts in the US and around the world over the past two years, debunking all of the myths and disinformation that has been going on specifically in Gaza. This is, for example, a very strong and credible tool that I would recommend people to go and listen because the people that they bring in, they are health care workers, there are UN reporters and practitioners, there are people in the field that have actually witnessed things and their accounts, their social media accounts have been banned for quite some time. They had faced so many shadow bans and even Kate had her scholarship, her PhD scholarship, revoked on and on because of how extremists have sent to her university saying that she is the one spreading false information and she wants the Jews to die, which is total absurdity. But in return, activists have supported her and academics and exceptionally credible people. So she is back on track.
Other people I could think of include Bianca Castro, who is a climate justice activist, who was also with us on the Nonviolence Now podcast, and who debunks everything related to climate justice. So these myths that they talk about, that climate activism is just absurd and global warming is not real. She is there to prove through finance, through climate financing, how these things will actually lead to an endurable, sustainable future and how it would not actually lead to an economic failure.
We’ve seen on social media platforms, some activists come up with initiatives like EX Vendetta or the climate propagandists that talk about these intersectionalities as well. These people exist. These are people we need to be calling influencers because they are actually trying to talk about things that matter. They’re trying to find an intersectionality. They are credible people to be doing that, and they are people we, as the Nonviolence Now podcast, highly recommend that our audience can follow. And Latif, if you can think of a few, please feel free to share with us.
Abdullatif Sleibi: No, I think you’ve covered some great ones. Unfortunately, I’m a very institutional kind of guy. So I’ll keep that to myself. But I love the recommendations. And I’ll also definitely check out a lot of them.
Layal Beyhum: Amazing, very happy to hear that. Then Latif, to wrap up everything, how can we use digital nonviolence as a strategy to counter this authoritarian wave that we see?
Abdullatif Sleibi: I think it’s a nice section to end things on and a nice kind of big idea to keep it simple and to give us a bit of a core idea. I think it’s important to say that resisting disinformation is not just about content. It’s also about ethics and stamina. So nonviolence online does also mean refusing to mirror the hostility, even when you realize and as we’ve mentioned, outrage is more profitable.
And here, I think we’ve talked about tactics, we’ve talked about the strategies. So I want to touch on principles a bit in this case. And the three core principles I want to focus on are patience, persistence, and hope. Now as with any kind of activism, be it physical or digital, you do need a lot of pacing. To make it sustainable, we need to respond to these issues strategically and not impulsively. And this becomes very difficult in this online ecosystem. Things move so quickly that you do feel a bit trapped, you feel attacked. The whole outrage cycle keeps going. And here also comes in a bit of persistence. So building communities, building online ecosystems that are based on truth, on verification, on actually developing media literacy and developing the norms of fighting this way of fake content is slow and it’s cumulative, but it’s possible. And this is a large part of current, let’s say, trends in digital activism. We’re coming to realize there’s no quick solutions. There’s no funding cycles and after a year, oh, we’re done. It’s a slow build that requires a lot of investment long-term.
And well, finally, hope. I’m often asked as a peace builder who works in conflict zones for physical and digital security, how do you keep going, listening to stories coming out of Gaza, South Sudan, out of Iraq, out of Burkina Faso? And I guess my main response is always a bit of humor, a bit of hope. Because hope does function as a big narrative inoculation. It does prevent despair. It prevents cynicism, mainly. And keeping in mind, this is important because cynicism and despair are disinformation’s strongest allies. They are what allows it to build. And especially, they cause you to stop fighting, stop resisting. You kind of say, okay, well, whatever. I know it’s fake. Doesn’t matter what else is fake. It’s not how it works.
So I guess to kind of close this off a bit, I’m sure Layal will have a lot of nice comments afterwards, but a bit of practical guidance to combine a lot of things we’ve said today. It’s important to blend online responses with offline relationship building. As we said, real voices, real people are at the core of these things. Trust doesn’t scale, but it does spread. We need to establish a lot of peer support, mental health protocols for volunteers, especially those combatting harassment. Just because, let’s say, automated moderation is now possible doesn’t mean that we don’t need human moderators and humans who can actually sift through this. And keeping in mind, people who are tackling disinformation, people who are fighting this day by day, I’m a researcher, so I won’t speak to understand completely the actual environment of having to sift through this. But there are people who do need support. Mental health, we didn’t talk about it a lot, but it does matter in this whole battle of narratives and slander and just vileness.
And finally, positive rituals are a big part of it. So verification chains, posts of solidarity, posts that are just uplifting and sharing the work of others. If you know any fact checkers, if you know anyone who’s fighting disinformation in your local community, local champions, do try to highlight them to the extent possible. You cannot imagine how a small reshare, a positive word or just, you know, word of mouth, how much influence it could have. So do your best. And at the end of the day, you know, this is an ongoing issue, but there are people trying to tackle it. So we don’t have to worry too much. Let’s stay a bit hopeful.
Layal Beyhum: If I were to ask you, how do you see the future of mis- and disinformation looking like as activists in one word, what would it be?
Abdullatif Sleibi: Ambiguous, I’d say is my best word. If I’m given two words, if you’ll permit me that it’s hope or I say three words, hopeful, but ambiguous is I think the approach I take and I’m mainly saying this because technology moves a lot quicker than we can keep up with especially as political actors. So I guess a slightly more somber note that—AI is moving quickly, and one big thing us as activists, as researchers, as political actors need to remember is we can’t fight it, we need to learn to adapt to it and to work with it. And as much as I’d like to think that we are capable of this, we have seen politicians struggle to understand how to convert a Word document to a PDF. So assuming that legislation will keep up is a bit optimistic. So I think it does lie in our hands to keep learning and developing. Whether we can keep up that’s the ambiguity here.
Layal Beyhum: Latif, I could go on for days and speak to you, it never gets dull or boring or the conversation just never ends. I really want to thank you for your time and your expertise and we hope our audience enjoyed listening to this episode. Thank you so much and have a great rest of the day.
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