I have been highlighting this article on Obama's election, every time these stories come up:
<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...</a><p>He was lauded for using "big data" and "data science" to run a successful campaign.<p>The social media companies picked on this and ran with it. Now this seems to have backfired.<p>Then there has been the culture of "attack ads", a lot of them based on misrepresenting facts to put it mildly.<p>So, now Congress and politicians want to do some posturing on Russian "interference". In case they do pass laws banning RT or some special interests from buying ads/bots etc. What then? The can of worms is already open.<p>People will find a way around. It can be as simple as registering a LLC and then having the Russian "data scientists" work through that. Or even American companies knowingly engaging in this.<p>The root problem here is the data collection being run by every other company out there. It helps companies and invariably advertisers identify people based on their tastes. So, will Congress and the politicians actually ban outright data collection? My guess is they wont. Posturing this as a Russian and a commie problem gets them enough brownie points.
I'm struggling with the takeaway here. Most of the people on the planet have grown up watching blatant misinformation being broadcast on TV, radio, and print. Specifically, during every single government election of note, anyone recall John Kerry and the swiftboats? Social networks now present a new tool to amplify a message, in addition to TV, Radio, Print. So is this a movement to police the messages? And where does this lead, marketing companies can't do business with international organizations during elections? And who decides what messages are allowed and disallowed? Seems this line or reasoning only leads to infringement of freedom of speech.
Tanushree Mitra wrote a computational paper on this in 2016 [1], finding something similar:<p>"Using four years of longitudinal data capturing vaccine discussions on Twitter, we identify users who persistently hold pro- and anti-attitudes, and those who newly adopt anti-attitudes towards vaccination. After gathering each user's entire Twitter timeline, totaling over 3 million tweets, we explore differences in the individual narratives across the user cohorts. We find that those with long-term anti-vaccination attitudes manifest conspiratorial thinking, mistrust in government, and are resolute and in-group focused in language."<p>[1] <a href="http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm16.vaccine.mitra.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/icwsm16.vaccine.mitra.p...</a>
There's a lot of pushback on these kind of findings from those in the tech industry.<p>One common argument is "oh, old media is just trying to undermine new players", and sometimes there is some truth to this.<p>But that misses the point. New media is winning is because it is <i>effective</i>, and misinformation campaigns on social media platforms are much more effective than traditional media.<p>It's easy to see this, by looking at where advertising spending has moved. If it works for selling contact lenses, it sure works for selling "Don't mess with TX Border Patrol"[1] or "Get ready to secede" or "Being Liberal/Bernie Sanders: Clinton Foundation is a Problem"<p>[1] <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a377ej/facebook-instagram-russian-ads" rel="nofollow">https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a377ej/facebook-i...</a>
How is peer-to-peer misinformation any worse than centralized misinformation?<p>I've seen a lot of hand wringing from the Legacy media over every other source's misinformation but I've yet to see a story from the NY Times calling bullshit on their own bullshit.
In a somewhat similar vein in 2009 I wrote about how useful Twitter is for spreading disinformation.<p>Some of the points I made were somewhat mitigated by Twitter product changes but I still think it holds up as an article/paper.<p><a href="http://memeover.arkem.org/2009/12/twitter-as-vector-for-disinformation.html" rel="nofollow">http://memeover.arkem.org/2009/12/twitter-as-vector-for-disi...</a>
Again, the problem is that "social media" is so centralized.<p>It seems to me that there is too much focus on "how Facebook and Twitter are doing it wrong". Reliance on Facebook and Twitter to solve misinformation is absurd. We should be focused on <i>alternatives</i>.
Does anyone else think it is possible this could explain the 'surprise' part of the loss by the presidential Democratic campaign?<p>Considering Democrats probably are also the most social media savvy/participant of all the voting participants it just seems plausible.