Oftentimes, foreign agents will offer monetary rewards in exchange for carrying out these acts, which may begin with starting a fire in a trash can and can escalate to acts that pose a serious threat to the public.
FIMI has intensified with the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the presence of bots on social media. Oftentimes, bots will generate controversy in the comment sections of social media posts, hoping to evoke a strong emotional reaction from you. This tends to be the type of content that is promoted by social media algorithms, and you might know it as "rage bait." Foreign actors often outsource this controversy farming to bots, which will target you if you interact with certain types of social media content. For example, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our lecturer shared an anecdote about one of his colleagues with us. This colleague had liked a Facebook post in support of Ukraine, and a suspected Russian bot commented on one of her posts threatening her safety.
Foreign actors use many different methods to do this. FIMI targets your emotions to provoke strong reactions, creates confusion and chaos and causes you to question your understanding of reality. You can combat FIMI through education and “pre-bunking,” which is the practice of warning people in advance about misinformation, how to spot it and why it happens. These tactics allow you to better recognize FIMI when you encounter it.
However, the problem remains: what do we do when this content is so ubiquitous on social media platforms? Is education really enough? Some proponents argue that social media companies should be obligated to better regulate the content on their platforms and if they do not, they should face strict sanctions.
