The results of Brexit or Trump happening were shocking but not surprising. However, a greater concern emerged: the accidental or deliberate propagation of misinformation via social media.
44% of Americans get their news from Facebook (Solon, 2016). Many millions of people saw and believed fake reports that “the pope had endorsed Trump; Democrats had paid and bussed anti-Trump protesters; Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation for sexually assaulting a minor” (Smith, 2016). If our democracy is built on reliable information, what is real?
The good, the bad and the ugly admission fee
In the Arab Spring campaign, Facebook as well as Twitter were first politicized and used to inspire people as tool for democracy. With Brazil, Brexit, and US we saw the equilibrium shift to the other side. We assume that there is an admission fee to pay before we are allowed to the connected world (Thompson, 2019). How many times a day have you been asked to agree with the terms on a website and clicked accept to only access the data behind it?
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal exposes Facebook’s rather porous privacy policies and the company’s casual attitude to oversight. By using the platform, Cambridge Analytica, a British data mining firm, was able to extract data of 270.000 people by conducting a survey. People accepted to share details about themselves –and unknowingly about their friends (Economist, 2018). This amounted to information from 50 million Facebook users in overall, which the company happily shared with their customers, including Trump (Economist, 2019).
Full-service propaganda machine and Nazi Germany
In essence, companies like Cambridge Analytica can use Facebook to “target voters who show an interest in the same issues or have similar profiles, packaging them into what it calls ‘lookalike audiences’.” (Economist, 2018). The practice used effectively shaped voting results in several countries such as Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, and South Africa even before the US presidency in 2016 (Thompson, 2019).
The practice to address certain lookalike audiences with feelings rather than facts, playing up vision to create a fake emotional connection, is not new. Nazi Germany shows this. Yet, we have the internet-driven efficiency (Smith, 2016).
Clickbait
Like the headline of this article, revenue-driven platforms such as Google and Facebook are using news feeds that engage more people, essentially to expose them to more ads. Whether the article is reliable or not does not matter, the algorithm boosts sensational stories that reinforce prejudice in order to draw more clicks (Smith, 2016). As mentioned before, if we use this as our primary information source, how can we assure that we are able to make informed decisions?
To conclude, platforms cannot stand at the sidelines making profit and see how they are used as a stepping stone to the next political victory for the highest bidder. They should be held accountable. Now.
References:
Economist (2018) The Facebook scandal could change politics as well as the internet. Data privacy. Available at: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/03/22/the-facebook-scandal-could-change-politics-as-well-as-the-internet
Economist (2019) “The Great Hack” is a misinformed documentary about misinformation. The Facebook scandal. Available at: https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/07/24/the-great-hack-is-a-misinformed-documentary-about-misinformation
Smith A. (2016) The pedlars of fake news are corroding democracy. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/25/pedlars-fake-news-corroding-democracy-social-networks
Solon O. (2016). Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories
Thompson A. (2019) The Great Hack terrified Sundance audiences, and then the documentary go even scarier. IndieWire. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/08/the-great-hack-documentary-oscar-cambridge-analytica-1202162430/
Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters
Thanks for sharing the thoughts on the unethical side of social media’s operation mechanism, in particular, misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. Although it is without doubt that the social media platforms were to blame during all those scandals (They should have implemented a more strict control, etc.), I do want to add that the users, should also take some part of the responsibility–for example, they can decide how much attention to give on a given post, based on their own information accuracy assessment. Moreover, the regulation should also come into play, revising or making policies that align with the current digital business models.
Thank you for your comment! I definitely agree that revised regulations need to come into place to guide the rules of the game. Ultimately, though, we as users need to make a choice. We now know that our choice is between the bottom line of social networks and democracy. I know which I prefer. Or will we let the algorithms decide?
Indeed a critical issue, because of the 7 billion or so inhabitants of our little globe, how many peple are capable or interested or attentive enough to see through the headlines presented. On top, we can see right wing politics misusing this to push ‘bad thinking’ in people’s minds, e.g. in the Brexit discussion Johnson talking about surrendering or Trump about the whistleblower in the impeachment proces saying he deserves a death sentence
Thank you for your comment! I think, while some people say that every user on itself must decide to believe or not believe what is stated on e.g. Facebook, there is a great need for education! Throughout the debate, Facebook has added a ‘report fake news’ button. I do not think this is sufficient. Maybe governments can guide social networks to educate people?
I also wanted to add the following to create a picture of how real this issue is. Facebook create positive same-side effects, which effectively means that the value of the platform increases, the more users join the network. Now, Facebook has already build up a very large customer base that they can leverage. People are locked-in as they do not want to leave their online friend base. This is why social platforms are so interesting for companies like Cambridge Analytica, people keep accumulating personal details and are active on the network. What Cambridge Analytics did was harvesting publicly available Facebook data. This includes your likes, your friendships, etc. They used the OCEAN personality traits and formed them to an algorithm which was being optimized by AI. Essentially, users were categorized into variables such as personal characteristics or geographical location. What I call the highest bidder in my blog post above, can than specify what groups to target. In an interview by the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, he revealed to have compiled 5000 data points of 220 MILLION Americans and use 100 variables to model target audiences and predict their voting behaviour.
Very interesting topic! This subject applies to every internet and social media user, practically every human being on this planet. Misinformation, disinformation and fake news are, therefore, enormous problems. However there is not much effort done (in my opinion) to overcome these problems. Besides social media platforms and users, governments should also make more effort to minimize these problems. Governments can for instance; create more clear regulations for social media platforms (rules, laws, fines etc.) and better educate users of social media platforms (TV advertisement, pop-ups before reading articles etc.). The government can achieve more as they have more power.
Thank you for your comment! I agree with you that policies and rules need to be set up to regulate our information age. This becomes increasingly important not only for news, but also for privacy and security. However, I am not sure if the government needs to be the sole rule-setter here. To overcome a very centralized information distribution, I think we must invest in new technologies such as Blockchain.
Very interesting blogpost and a very interesting topic! I just wanted to leave a tip for other people who are interested in this, to watch the Netflix documentary about Cambridge Analytica “The Great Hack”. It explains the topic in a very interesting way, and was a true eye-opener for me.
There was especially one segment that remained with me after watching the documentary: the British government conducted an investigation on election processes, fake news spreading on social media pages and democracy, and concluded that there is no way we can experience free and fair elections because the influential power of social media advertisement is so strong and can be altered by whoever who are willing to pay for it. Cambridge Analytica was involved in the election processes of Brexit, Hillary vs Trump and several others. I completely agree with you that the platforms should be held accountable, now!
If this blogpost is interesting to you, I very much recommend also watching the documentary!
Dear Hedda, thank you for your reply! I’m delighted that you captured my main take away!
Good read! The whole phenomenon of clickbait draws our current society away from what is real towards boosting sensational stories. Why do we create this fake world? Do we want to live on the platform instead of offline? What is the difference? These are the questions we need to start asking ourselves.
Thank you for your comment! Personally I think that we need to become more critical as consumers of these fake news and what not. I think it is shocking that 44% of Americans use Facebook as their primary source of news. That is around 75 million people in America that can be targeted by whoever pays the highest price! So being critical is the first step, next to that regulations and others must follow.
We need to learn more about the algorithms that we are creating. They are not neutral but are fed and learn from existing biases. Next to that, the algorithm is programmed to make the highest profit. So, why do we lean so much on algorithms that we do not know anything about? Last year, Germany introduced a new law going against the spread of misinformation. Maybe worth-while to look in to! (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/05/tough-new-german-law-puts-tech-firms-and-free-speech-in-spotlight)
Thank you for your comment! Next to Germany, other countries have indeed implemented social media laws because of the events described above. However, aren’t these laws also inhibiting free speech?