
Computer Scientist Warns of Social Media Manipulation in U.S. Election  - vectorbunny
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/computer-scientist-warns-of-social-media-manipulation-in-us-election?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrumFullText+%28IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text%29
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tokenadult
From the article, quoting the profiled professor: "Persuasion is based on
emotion; it is not based on logic. If everybody knew that 1 percent of the
[Twitter] accounts are responsible for 30 percent of the traffic, people would
be more careful thinking about that. But the vast majority of people don’t
know that. Information is propagated through retweets from others who are
either fooled or agree. At the end of the day, people receive some piece of
misinformation, and many will not realize that it has come from one account
that has been blasting messages. They will think that it came from friends."

In other words, young people who have grown up in the Internet era still need
to learn about checking sources, finding information sources off the Internet,
and cooling their emotions and tribal allegiances before deciding complicated
issues of social policy. That's not news to anyone who reads Hacker News
regularly. Every political movement and every electoral campaign for public
office has a tendency to try out various persuasion strategies, empirically,
seeing what works by looking at the results of campaigns. Voters who are
resilient to the spreading of rumors are still the best protection for free
and fair elections. One thing that helps voters become more skeptical is the
back-and-forth of competing campaigns, so I'm not sure that the "social media
manipulation" mentioned in the article is any more inherently dangerous than
the inflammatory political cartoons of the early nineteenth century.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Every time my kids tell me something they've learned online, there ensues a
conversation about how everything posted online _must_ be true because it is
posted online.

What I haven't done well enough is teach them where to go to determine if
something is true. Thanks for helping me realize that so I can do something
about it.

~~~
tgrass
One method to teach them the infallibility of the web is to have them research
the endangered tree octopus.

I had a friend's rather brilliant fourth grade son accept this creature
without a thought. I hope he's more vigilant now.

~~~
Groxx
xD that's a good one! I haven't seen that hoax before. One of my personal
favorites is DHMO, though it's of a slightly different flavor:
<http://dhmo.org/>

~~~
nhebb
My daughter's chemistry teacher had the class research this. Unfortunately, my
daughter thought it was just "stupid nerd humor" and missed the point.

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SoftwareMaven
For the last 30 years, we made voting decisions based on 30 second messages.
That has worked so well, it's time to shorten those messages to 140
characters. Because apparently less information is more in politics.

~~~
fleitz
Considering that most of the messages in politics are false or distorted you
could probably make a more informed decision knowing nothing about the
candidates.

~~~
jmsduran
While your cynicism is understandable, people need to be educated in order to
make informed decisions, otherwise voting becomes pointless; that is a basic
tenet of Democracy.

~~~
mey
Question is who is providing the information that makes us informed?

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amalag
I don't give a rat's ass about social media manipulation. What I care about is
voting machine manipulation.

~~~
waterlesscloud
At first I thought this was worrying comment.

Then I saw this entire subthread was a brilliant meta-comment showing how
spurious rumors are spread through social media.

~~~
cryptoz
Do you doubt that voting machine manipulation happens? Programmers of the
machines have testified in Congress that they built rigged machines. Exit
polls vary dramatically from vote counts almost exclusively when machines are
used.

The very idea that 20% of votes are moved through closed-source machines run
by Republican friends should be enough to make everyone _assume_ that the
votes cannot be trusted.

~~~
ryanhuff
If these people have testified in congress to this, then it must be public
record. Please cite your source.

~~~
cryptoz
YouTube is full of them. I'm at work and can't check, but if you search for
"diebold programmer rigging" I bet you'll find some.

This looks like it might be one of the ones I'm referencing, but as I said I
cannot check 100% right now: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aKOhbbK9E>

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Agustus
This is noticeable on a number of the social media sites like reddit or digg.
For reddit, most of the links are Pro-Obama and anti-Romney. Factoring in that
people know good ranges of when to post to reddit, social manipulation on the
site should be easy. The problem is this is all one-use until failure ideas.
If the socially manipulated realm gives the appearance of not being reality
individuals will search for truth or further bury themselves in a chamber.
Those seeking truth will then need to be found in the new media and a new
program developed.

~~~
brown9-2
Are you saying that you think the pro or anti stance of Reddit is due to
manipulation, rather than demographics?

~~~
Agustus
There is not a think, it is an overall weariness of issues. Reddit founders
admitted to creating their content originally when starting up the site. While
not a massive manipulation, they pretended to be original posters (with
separate user names) when it was not.

The key points here are to take everything with a grain of salt. There are
known organizations developing user names on all sorts of forums and social
media sites and selling their utilization to people.

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rickdale
I saw a commercial for a proposal that just said to vote yes on it. Didn't
have any information, just vote yes on said proposal. I googled the proposal
to figure out what it was and the first page of results was
advertisements/propaganda to say yes on proposal two. I figured, well I guess
I am meant to be a low information voter...

~~~
delinka
Because to them, you're just another vote and your opinion doesn't matter. You
are expected by people like this to just follow instructions. And if you don't
just follow instructions and you decide you need to learn something about the
subject, chances are you are in the minority and don't matter to them.

Or less cynically, there was advertising money left to spend and not much of
it. A quick "vote yes on prop 2" is a great way to spend money and _maybe_ get
the result you want if you are the beneficiary of the proposal.

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Anon84
More in depth coverage of the same Scientist on this Topic:
<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6106/472.full?rss=1>

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candybar
Politics has always been about arousing emotions with rhetoric, whether the
medium is a speech, a newspaper column, a TV interview, a blog or a tweet.
Social media simply democratizes the means of engagement, which lessens the
impact of any given instance of manipulation.

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matznerd
It's well known that many people manipulate followers, retweets, video views,
fan page counts, like, shares, SEO results etc to make it appear as if a given
candidate has more momentum than they really do.

