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Social Media Manipulation Rising Globally, New Oxford Report Warns (phys.org)
A new report from Oxford University found that manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms is growing at a large scale, despite efforts to combat it. "Around the world, government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in media, public institutions and science," reports Phys.Org. From the report: "The number of countries where formally organized social media manipulation occurs has greatly increased, from 28 to 48 countries globally," says Samantha Bradshaw, co-author of the report. "The majority of growth comes from political parties who spread disinformation and junk news around election periods. There are more political parties learning from the strategies deployed during Brexit and the U.S. 2016 Presidential election: more campaigns are using bots, junk news, and disinformation to polarize and manipulate voters."
This is despite efforts by governments in many democracies introducing new legislation designed to combat fake news on the internet. "The problem with this is that these 'task forces' to combat fake news are being used as a new tool to legitimize censorship in authoritarian regimes," says Professor Phil Howard, co-author and lead researcher on the OII's Computational Propaganda project. "At best, these types of task forces are creating counter-narratives and building tools for citizen awareness and fact-checking." Another challenge is the evolution of the mediums individuals use to share news and information. "There is evidence that disinformation campaigns are moving on to chat applications and alternative platforms," says Bradshaw. "This is becoming increasingly common in the Global South, where large public groups on chat applications are more popular."
This is despite efforts by governments in many democracies introducing new legislation designed to combat fake news on the internet. "The problem with this is that these 'task forces' to combat fake news are being used as a new tool to legitimize censorship in authoritarian regimes," says Professor Phil Howard, co-author and lead researcher on the OII's Computational Propaganda project. "At best, these types of task forces are creating counter-narratives and building tools for citizen awareness and fact-checking." Another challenge is the evolution of the mediums individuals use to share news and information. "There is evidence that disinformation campaigns are moving on to chat applications and alternative platforms," says Bradshaw. "This is becoming increasingly common in the Global South, where large public groups on chat applications are more popular."
Psychological "Nudge" groups for the negative, news at... well as soon as we can think it up.
...as social media manipulation to control social media manipulation increases... I sense a pattern of bullshit here...
Social media allows the pushed narrative to be challenged. It's pretty easy to see how that would upset people who had worked very hard to gain control of it. If you depend on preferential treatment from the government to move your product the last thing you would want is people wondering why they were paying to make you rich.
Or just something a little more obvious, you live in a state that hasn't built a water project in half a century, now has to ration water, but instead of using funds to improve the water system has decided to spend on the order of a hundred billion to build a high speed train system that there is no demand for.
Just saying, if my land was slated to be part of that train system, or I had a large contract to build it, the last thing I would want is voters getting together and talking about how badly they were taking it up the poop shoot.
https://phys.org/news/2012-03-...
Here they are publishing an article claiming light emitting diode conversion efficiency exceeds 100% I am betting on measurement error and somebody forgot that everything with a temperature greater than abs zero emits radiation.
So more "Peer Reviewed" bad science ?
By framing opponents and censoring them.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council for the research project, “Computational Propaganda: Investigating the Impact of Algorithms and Bots on Political Discourse in Europe, ”Proposal 648311, 2015-2020, Philip N Howard, Principal Investigator. Additional support for this study has been provided by the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation.
And suckers like you.
New Oxford Report must be part of the old media.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
To help mitigate bias, we used LexisNexis and the top three search engine providers — Google, Yahoo! and Bing — which provided hits to a variety of professional, local and amateur news sources. To ensure that only high-quality news sources were used to build our dataset, each article was given a credibility score using a three-point scale. Articles ranked at one came from major, professionally branded news organizations (see Appendix 1). Articles ranked at two came from smaller professional news organizations, local news organizations, or expert commentary and professional blogs (see Appendix 2). Articles ranked at 3 came from content farms, social media posts, or non-professional or hyper-partisan blogs. These articles were removed from the sample.
Gosh, and here I'm old enough to remember when these kinds of liberal studies exposed the oligarchical biases of corporate media conglomerates in the "major, professionally branded new organizations" that they owned. Now, they're the ones who are regarded as high-quality news sources. Ohhhkay. BTW, the linked study did not provide the Appendixes with the ranked news sources. Gyp!
Looking at the growth of cyber troop[uh, cringe] activity from 2017 to 2018 has demonstrated that these strategies are circulating globally.We cannot wait for national courts to sort out the technicalities of infractions after running an election or referendum. Protecting our democracies now means setting the rules of fair play before voting day, not after.
ooo, that sounds ominous.
What a hoot. The media has done a damn fine job in undermining that trust themselves. No help was required, whatsoever.
... I'm 72 years old and started doing computers back when Jesus was a carpenter.
Social media is real-time entertainment; not to be taken seriously.
News sites are alive and doing well outside the social media bubble.
I'm disappointed that people who were born after the Internet was well-established don't know this by now.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
And this is how Democracy dies: If you can manipulate what people see, read and hear, you could stop having elections altogether, because only very few can actually check the stories they are fed for plausibility. The rest will just believe. This is not the first time this has happened either, it is more the process of reestablishing a status that was true to most of human history. I think we can safely assume the Enlightenment has failed, and that humans as a group have no appreciation of facts and truth. For a moment there, I was hopeful with the Internet and easy access to information for everybody, but apparently that was vastly overoptimistic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Gosh Dave, you must be suffering from early onset Alzheimer's or something. You done completely forgot that you retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2014 and went to work for CCA. Hint: don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia fool.
If you censor what you find objectionable you're manipulating. They're exploiting social media... are people really that dumb that they don't fact check things themselves? it's not that hard to search a topic and find all viewpoints on a topic and come to your own conclusion.
And if the answer is people are that dumb, gullible or lazy.... then they shouldn't be allowed to vote.
There is no good censorship. All censorship is manipulation.
No, sorry faggot you're mistaken, I came out of retirement specifically to make sure there were hungry rapists waiting for Trump and Don Jr. when they arrive. Traitors deserve a traitor's welcome. Assume the position.
...or PR or fake news or whatever you like to call it nowadays. Every news item has an agenda and every news outlet skews its reporting to favour particular vested interests. It sounds like social media companies are just like traditional newspaper, radio, & TV media companies but with a lot less oversight or responsibility and more prone to being misled because they don't employ skilled, experienced editors.
Looking on the bright side, we can now access propaganda from all over the world, including those not sympathetic to our own governments and corporations. Our governments and corporations hate that and are now crying foul. Apparently, we should only be reading, listening to, and watching their propaganda, not everyone else's.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
there is such a thing as truth. Reality is just that, reality. There's several trustworthy sources. The BBC being a major one. There's still plenty of good journalism in France. And then there's tons of youtubers like Aronra and Secular Talk that promote truth or if nothing else consistent principles.
Now, if you're talking "mainstream" media (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC) yeah. They're owned lock stock and barrel by mega corps. The only thing you'll get out of them is a pro-corporate, anti-worker narrative that focuses on supply side economics and nothing but.
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Has anyone else noticed that 80%+ of slashdot posts seem to be trying to push some narrative that has nothing to do with the topic at hand?
I'm wondering how many people now read slashdot that are not paid to do so. I'm also considering the possibility of setting up a fake social networking site that caters to paid trolls, and providing special troll access for a fee. I really doubt most of the paid trolls would notice.
There are definitely a lot of those posts.
Starting from about 3 months before the 2016 election, Slashdot started posting political articles, some of which are completely non-technical. People complain when random political news that they can get on CNN gets posted here, but it still happens.
Then there are the technical articles with a political aspect, such as things having to do with Net Neutrality, "Your Rights Online", and so on. Although technical, they do seem to attract a number of partisan sides.
Then there are technical articles with a political aspect that are framed one way or another. Recently they all appear to be framed *against* the current administration - I haven't seen one article that showed Trump or his administration in a congratulatory or supportive manner.
For a framing example, consider: In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice, because Trump met with Kim Jong-il without a nuclear expert in the room, and didn't take advice from anyone on how to handle the meeting.
(Those same people said that Trump's tweet war with North Korea would start a nuclear war, when in fact it resulted in the opposite. Now they're saying the meeting was worthless and nothing will come from it, as if anyone can tell at this early date.)
If something is negative, it's always "Trump adminstration" or "Trump officials" that are doing it. If something is benign or positive, it's always the "federal government" or "US government" that's doing it.
The editors set the stage for political bickering.
In contrast, Hackaday.com has a strict policy *against* political articles, and has remained relatively sane in the same time period.
In 2013, Slashdot's global ranking was about 2000. Right now it's between 6000 - 7000. We've lost a lot of readers because the site is considerably more toxic.
Whipslash has stated that he doesn't care about rankings or traffic, he runs the site for other reasons.
smh, Alzheimer's is such terrible disease. Go now and begin that journey that will take into the cesspool of your life, retard.
Dying in prison a traitor is pretty much the worst thing you can get and/or do. But we may hang the treasonous faggot, it's treason. Trump will be destroyed like a dog.
They have missed spain in this report
Oxford: "The only way to spread disinformation and junk news should be via billionaire owned media corporations, government propaganda ministries, and privileged highly paid academics in cushy jobs!"
John Maynard Keynes (Cambridge), Charles Eliot (Harvard), Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr. (Harvard), and Woodrow Wilson (Princeton) were racists and proponents of eugenics, and they used their academic credentials to promote that garbage.
To what levels could that possibly rise anymore? We are already at a level that makes the signal to noise ratio of email look favorable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have got a similar expression. I see at some forums, comments sections, the same people, the same writing style, publishing regularly comments reflecting a specific political persuasion.
I guess, it is not governments themselves who are doing it, but some private subcontractors. Probably, such a subcontractor may fulfill orders from different parts of the political spectrum. I mean the same employee may argue at a forum with himself.
I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Operation Mockingbird a CIA program to manipulate the narrative in the media. Last report in 2015 it is still operational and in 2016 was legalized.
I thought everybody knew about this considering how sadly obvious the "mockingbirds" are on /. to manipulate and moderate the conversation here, mostly ACs, but some with pseudonyms.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
In 1957, Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders about the use of psychological tricks to affect consumer and voter decision making and judgment. It was on NY Times Best Sellers list for a year. The New Yorker magazine's blurb about the book said, "A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command." In the past, the concern was TV and radio advertising. Now it is social media. Other than a change in the way information is transmitted, what is new? Manipulation and propaganda to influence people's decisionmaking and voting are probably as old as mankind and it will continue forever.
Here is how to become immune to global social media manipulation, or GlobSocMedMan for short.
Step 1: get the hell off social media. Globally.
Step 2: consider getting a life, going outside and maybe smelling flowers, or read a book or a newspaper if you can still find one anywhere, or maybe even help another person with something.
Step 3: resist any temptation to return to the soul-crushing, time-wasting, privacy-destroying, mind-deadening that is social media use... the temptation will wane over time, I promise you.
Congratulations! You are now immune to global social media manipulation. Now pass on what you have learned to others, to help make a better world, free from the blight that is the fake, imaginary, made-up, affirmation-seeking, behavioral-modifying, bullshit world of social media bullshit. Yer welcome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
Insane Clown Posse (ICP) is an American hip hop duo composed of Violent J (Joseph Bruce) and Shaggy 2 Dope (originally 2 Dope; Joseph Utsler). Founded in Detroit in 1989, Insane Clown Posse performs a style of hardcore hip hop known as horrorcore and is known for its elaborate live performances. The duo has earned two platinum and five gold albums. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the entire catalog of the group has sold 6.5 million units in the United States and Canada as of April 2007.[1] The group has established a dedicated following called Juggalos numbering in the "tens of thousands".[2]
should be banned. As for the story, yet another good reason to AVOID "SOCIAL MEDIA"!
And yet we didn't have a problem with the biggest manipulation going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/19/cashless-society-con-big-finance-banks-closing-atms
The second biggest manipulation was what 9-11 gave us.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/07/18/10-years-later-the-dark-knight-and-its-vision-of-guilt-still-resonate/
And last, social media in the west bolsters this.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/19/17518086/selfie-will-storr-book-psychology-west
Are you saying that the government actually exercises direct editorial control to the level of, say, choosing the guests on The One Show?
The police are funded by government too, but they make their own decisions to investigate him or let her of with a caution.
P.S. *Our* security agency? Such assurance when you're wrong points clearly to the other side of the Atlantic.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Quote "In 2013, Slashdot's global ranking [wikipedia.org] was about 2000. Right now it's between 6000 - 7000. We've lost a lot of readers because the site is considerably more toxic." Unquote I have no means of checking this but it might be valid from my experience as I now find the political articles of comments an off putting thing
Regards Eion MacDonald