I will start taking research like this seriously when authors will start discussing media spin as part of the problem. If you think bots are a problem, but news websites engaging in blatant, Orwellian language and fact bending are not... you should at leas be able to back it up with comparative research on effectiveness, which I've never seen being done. Online "discussions" of political topics are saturated with links to traditional media.<p>Increasingly, I think giving up on "news" and social media altogether is the best solution. I've quit most of it. HN is the closes thing to social media I visit. I watch YouTube, but limit videos to specific educational content.
This interview should be held up as a definitive educational material for anyone working around social media platforms. Really shines an important spotlight on how bad actors manipulate digital information, and how to adjust business and mental models towards mitigating platform manipulation into the future.<p>Really pleased to hear how much research and thought is being done in this area now. Looking forward to hearing more from this team.
Giant media corporations owned by billionaires, run by millionaires, and overwhelmingly staffed by members/partisans of a single political party pump out propaganda on all of their mediums 24/7 and totally dominate and saturate public opinion but we are supposed to understand that "bots" are a threat to democracy? As someone who has been deemed a "bot" by people who do not wish to hear information they do not like on more occasions than I can recall, I note an insidious aspect of this emphasis on "bots" is that it allows the ready dismissal of any individual expressing heterodoxy and glorifies/sanctifies the "official" media previously described. Yet we saw this past week that social media users were able to win a rare victory in bringing the "official" media to heel for their lies and manipulation in setting upon a group of innocent schoolchildren. The official media hates it when their marks push back and thus we get propaganda like this study.
It's weird how when we talk about political manipulation we always talk about bots and fake news as only fringe media, while we overlook the biggest manipulation that comes from right wing concentrated multimedia like CNN, CNBC, etc. They have been caught publishing made up stories, communicates, fabricating witnesses multiple times. Like, dunno, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction comes to mind.