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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."
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.
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
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.
...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.
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.