Social Media Manipulation Rising Globally, New Oxford Report Warns (phys.org) 99
A new report from Oxford University found that manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms is growing at a large scale, despite efforts to combat it. "Around the world, government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in media, public institutions and science," reports Phys.Org. From the report: "The number of countries where formally organized social media manipulation occurs has greatly increased, from 28 to 48 countries globally," says Samantha Bradshaw, co-author of the report. "The majority of growth comes from political parties who spread disinformation and junk news around election periods. There are more political parties learning from the strategies deployed during Brexit and the U.S. 2016 Presidential election: more campaigns are using bots, junk news, and disinformation to polarize and manipulate voters."
This is despite efforts by governments in many democracies introducing new legislation designed to combat fake news on the internet. "The problem with this is that these 'task forces' to combat fake news are being used as a new tool to legitimize censorship in authoritarian regimes," says Professor Phil Howard, co-author and lead researcher on the OII's Computational Propaganda project. "At best, these types of task forces are creating counter-narratives and building tools for citizen awareness and fact-checking." Another challenge is the evolution of the mediums individuals use to share news and information. "There is evidence that disinformation campaigns are moving on to chat applications and alternative platforms," says Bradshaw. "This is becoming increasingly common in the Global South, where large public groups on chat applications are more popular."
This is despite efforts by governments in many democracies introducing new legislation designed to combat fake news on the internet. "The problem with this is that these 'task forces' to combat fake news are being used as a new tool to legitimize censorship in authoritarian regimes," says Professor Phil Howard, co-author and lead researcher on the OII's Computational Propaganda project. "At best, these types of task forces are creating counter-narratives and building tools for citizen awareness and fact-checking." Another challenge is the evolution of the mediums individuals use to share news and information. "There is evidence that disinformation campaigns are moving on to chat applications and alternative platforms," says Bradshaw. "This is becoming increasingly common in the Global South, where large public groups on chat applications are more popular."
Seems this story is media manipulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Social media allows the pushed narrative to be challenged. It's pretty easy to see how that would upset people who had worked very hard to gain control of it. If you depend on preferential treatment from the government to move your product the last thing you would want is people wondering why they were paying to make you rich.
Or just something a little more obvious, you live in a state that hasn't built a water project in half a century, now has to ration water, but instead of using funds to improve the water system has decided to spend on the order of a hundred billion to build a high speed train system that there is no demand for.
Just saying, if my land was slated to be part of that train system, or I had a large contract to build it, the last thing I would want is voters getting together and talking about how badly they were taking it up the poop shoot.
Lots of political articles (Score:3, Insightful)
Has anyone else noticed that 80%+ of slashdot posts seem to be trying to push some narrative that has nothing to do with the topic at hand?
I'm wondering how many people now read slashdot that are not paid to do so. I'm also considering the possibility of setting up a fake social networking site that caters to paid trolls, and providing special troll access for a fee. I really doubt most of the paid trolls would notice.
There are definitely a lot of those posts.
Starting from about 3 months before the 2016 election, Slashdot started posting political articles, some of which are completely non-technical. People complain when random political news that they can get on CNN gets posted here, but it still happens.
Then there are the technical articles with a political aspect, such as things having to do with Net Neutrality, "Your Rights Online", and so on. Although technical, they do seem to attract a number of partisan sides.
The
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There are definitely a lot of those posts.
Probably could've quoted a better section of the comment... but one of my favorite random out of nowhere political moments was an article about sharks dying in cold water, and the post said something like: "- likely due to global warming, which President Donald Trump refuses to admit exists."
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What if, gasp, that position is objectively correct and the current administration is really abysmally bad?
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When people talk about the "pushed narrative" or "mainstream media" they usually mean "reputable, reliable journalism" and have a desire to elevate random blog posts and Brietbart to the same level.
This post is a perfect example: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
While no source is infallible, this kind of false equivalency is dangerous and leads to the propagation of fake news and entrapment in extreme political bubbles.
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It's pretty hard to speak of reputable journalism these days. There is very little in the way of big media that is interested in letting people reach their own conclusions.
Seeing as you brought up game companies, lets not forget how gamergate happened, you had a female developer that was sleeping around with game journalists to get good reviews.
Funny enough the game journalists actually are taking their cues from the "professionals"
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
You have reporters at the times and the was
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Social media allows the pushed narrative to be challenged.
No, it just reinforces a hive mind. You can theoretically say whatever you want on social media, but if you go against the dominant narrative on the platform you get modded down, downvoted, blacklisted, or brigaded. Say something bad enough and you'll get doxed and your life will be ruined. But if you can somehow manipulate the narrative to bring it in line with your goals, be they political, commercial, or social, you can saturate social media with a message that will be omnipresent and which noone will
Oh and seeing this is from phys.org (Score:1)
https://phys.org/news/2012-03-... [phys.org]
Here they are publishing an article claiming light emitting diode conversion efficiency exceeds 100% I am betting on measurement error and somebody forgot that everything with a temperature greater than abs zero emits radiation.
So more "Peer Reviewed" bad science ?
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Looks actually like pretty good science to me. The effect is explained nicely and the cooling of the LED (where the additional light-energy comes from) gives a possible application.
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It's pretty poor. What they did is build a thermocouple and run it in reverse. It isn't even new and it certainly isn't overunity.
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Maybe criticize only research you do actually understand?
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Well seeing as I have been using the reverse, taking a PN junction and using the current it generates to measure temp for likely longer than you have been alive, I just might understand this.
monopoly on manipulation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Translation: "I prefer blogs that tell me what I want to hear."
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Translation: "I prefer legacy media to tell me what to think."
I can help ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... I'm 72 years old and started doing computers back when Jesus was a carpenter.
Social media is real-time entertainment; not to be taken seriously.
News sites are alive and doing well outside the social media bubble.
I'm disappointed that people who were born after the Internet was well-established don't know this by now.
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Social media is real-time entertainment; not to be taken seriously.
I am a bit younger than you, but there was no Internet until I went to University. I see this clearly. But younger generations seem to be lacking the comparison. When you have read a well-written newspaper for a few years, you will not ever think that social media is in the business of serious news. But what if you lack that? Or what if you are one of those that would not have read said newspaper before the Internet either? I think the problem may not even be made worse by social media, it is made only a lo
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To be fair, if you are capable of checking plausibility, there is a lot of good information on the web. But it can be tricky to filter it out, some independent general intelligence required. And while supposedly everybody had that, a lot of people seem to chose not to use it.
For example, Amazon reviews are very helpful if you read them right. Always read a few high and a few really low ratings. This usually gives you a pretty good picture. You can have exactly the same overall rating for two products were o
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I agree with you about Amazon and want to add that reading the questions is very helpful.
As to your initial point, I, too, think it's important to know the difference between bullshit and wild honey.
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Hopefully, my and your concern will be packaged with the traditional "stranger danger" lecture at some future date.
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None.
If you aren't sophisticated enough to figure it out, busting my butt to load your gun is as stupid as getting your fucking news from a goddam social media site.
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Use social media appropriately and it's not a problem.
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It's a problem because people are not going to move away from social media.
Instead of avoidance, we need education.
The Internet, as an entity, is trashed out by capitalism.
It's OK to stay in the water as long as you have a life jacket with the bullshit detector upgrade.
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Social media is real-time entertainment; not to be taken seriously.
All media is entertainment. You want real news, go to your barbershop. [medium.com]
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"I'm disappointed that people who were born after the Internet was well-established don't know this by now."
I think it's a corollary to Goedel's Theorem: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems) in that you cannot prove a system completely from within that system, I think it's likewise even hard to recognize a system, and to know its rules and bounds accurately, from within that system as well.
Ergo, those of us who grew up before there was a social media see it from outside (w
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Perhaps you are correct.
You and I learned a long time ago that there are no nude photos of Anna Kournikova, and that we didn't send a package via UPS that will never arrive unless we click on the link to fix the invoice.
Apparently, a shit load of people, including those in governments, never learned that.
I don't know if it's ignorance, stupidity or apathy, but it's a shame.
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"no nude photos of Anna Kournikova"
Hope springs eternal, I'm not willing to give up the search.
So basically catching up to normal media (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is how Democracy dies: If you can manipulate what people see, read and hear, you could stop having elections altogether, because only very few can actually check the stories they are fed for plausibility. The rest will just believe. This is not the first time this has happened either, it is more the process of reestablishing a status that was true to most of human history. I think we can safely assume the Enlightenment has failed, and that humans as a group have no appreciation of facts and truth. For a moment there, I was hopeful with the Internet and easy access to information for everybody, but apparently that was vastly overoptimistic.
Operation Mockingbird (Score:2)
I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Operation Mockingbird [wikipedia.org] a CIA program to manipulate the narrative in the media. [wanttoknow.info] Last report in 2015 it is still operational [thefreetho...roject.com] and in 2016 was legalized [thefreetho...roject.com].
I thought everybody knew about this considering how sadly obvious the "mockingbirds" are on /. to manipulate and moderate the conversation here, mostly ACs, but some with pseudonyms.
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Ah, thanks. I was not aware of this project. I am very aware of the trolls and that they work from a set of scripts, not actual intelligence or understanding of the subject on their part involved. It is just basic propaganda with the usual tricks for manipulating an opponent in an exchange. Funnily, I had a course on that when going to university and it explained this all rather well, even though I do not find the materials anymore. It was on manipulating commercial negotiations, but that is basically the s
All news is propaganda... (Score:4, Insightful)
...or PR or fake news or whatever you like to call it nowadays. Every news item has an agenda and every news outlet skews its reporting to favour particular vested interests. It sounds like social media companies are just like traditional newspaper, radio, & TV media companies but with a lot less oversight or responsibility and more prone to being misled because they don't employ skilled, experienced editors.
Looking on the bright side, we can now access propaganda from all over the world, including those not sympathetic to our own governments and corporations. Our governments and corporations hate that and are now crying foul. Apparently, we should only be reading, listening to, and watching their propaganda, not everyone else's.
Um... no (Score:2, Informative)
Now, if you're talking "mainstream" media (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC) yeah. They're owned lock stock and barrel by mega corps. The only thing you'll get out of them is a pro-corporate, anti-worker narrative that
Re: Um... no (Score:1)
Last time I watched the BBC - they had it on at a downtown bar - it seemed exactly the same as CNN.
Well no, the BBC presenters had those cool posh British accents. But everything else was the same.
Same mindless shilling for "free trade" and big business interests. Same hysterical "leftist" social activism. Same warmongering and police state apologetics. Same ignoring and dismissing the interests of working people.
There may well be some Truth somewhere out there. But you surely won't find it on television
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Either you were drunk or it was early afternoon (GMT) and you were watching Justin's House.
It's an easy mistake to make.
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you are hilarious, the BBC is controlled by the UK government. Fascism tactics are tried out in the UK first, then rolled out in the USA. Pry your head out of your ass....or keep it in and we'll enjoy the freak show.
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You do know that the BBC receives £254 million (approximately $400 million) directly from the UK government, right? (See their own report here [bbc.co.uk], p19).
Now, the BBC is not bad compared to all the other media outlets but almost half a billion dollars directly from the British Foreign Office compromises its claim to impartiality.
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So? That doesn't mean it's run by the government.
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It's not like you could have, say, a board that's independent and supervises it or something.
And last I heard judges were paid by the government and yet they regularly rule against it.
Maybe things are different where you come from. Or maybe people are.
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So? That doesn't mean it's run by the government.
The BBC is a statutory corporation, i.e. set up and run by the government, and also established by Royal Charter. It's not only answerable to govt. but also to the crown (not to be confused with the monarchy, the crown in an autonomous authority which has crown immunity, effectively putting it above the law).
Three members of the current BBC executive board have royal titles.
Employees used to be (I don't know if they still are to some degree) vetted by MI5, the domestic wing of our secretive security agencie
found the teabagger (Score:2)
Are you saying that the government actually exercises direct editorial control to the level of, say, choosing the guests on The One Show?
The police are funded by government too, but they make their own decisions to investigate him or let her of with a caution.
P.S. *Our* security agency? Such assurance when you're wrong points clearly to the other side of the Atlantic.
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You're either being deliberately obtuse or don't understand the nature of the influence of the British government and crown over the BBC.
The police are funded by government too, but they make their own decisions to investigate him or let her of with a caution.
Only where the cases aren't politically sensitive. As soon as rich and powerful people get involved, it's a different story. Have you not followed the Julian Assange case? Why do you suppose that the crown prosecutor is dedicating so many resources to pursuing Assange so relentlessly on an alleged sexual assault charge?
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You bought it hook, line and sinker. Now you're open to being told anything, no matter its relation to reality.
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It's relatively easy. Just don't rely on US news.
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dammit! (Score:2)
Oxford: "The only way to spread disinformation and junk news should be via billionaire owned media corporations, government propaganda ministries, and privileged highly paid
Rising? (Score:2)
To what levels could that possibly rise anymore? We are already at a level that makes the signal to noise ratio of email look favorable.
private subcontractors (Score:2)
I guess, it is not governments themselves who are doing it, but some private subcontractors. Probably, such a subcontractor may fulfill orders from different parts of the political spectrum. I mean the same employee may argue at a forum with himself.
Everything New Is Old (Score:1)
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> Step 2: consider getting a life, going outside and maybe smelling flowers, or read a book or a
> newspaper if you can still find one anywhere, or maybe even help another person with something.
Forget newspapers entirely. They're mostly lib-left MSM. E.g. in 2016 in the USA, editorial endorsements were as follows http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu... [ucsb.edu]
* Hillary Clinton 57
* Gary Johnson 4
* ABT, i.e. "Anybody But Trump" 3
* Donald Trump 2
* None of the above 5
Guess who won?
Reductionin Technical articles loses folk. (Score:2)
Quote "In 2013, Slashdot's global ranking [wikipedia.org] was about 2000. Right now it's between 6000 - 7000. We've lost a lot of readers because the site is considerably more toxic." Unquote I have no means of checking this but it might be valid from my experience as I now find the political articles of comments an off putting thing