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