Political Manipulation, Money and 'Ignorance'
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In August 2018, the 22-year old Ricardo and his 43-year old uncle Alberto Flores were beaten and burdened to death because people thought that they were child snatchers to sell their organs. This happened following the viral news and warnings about the issue on Tweeter, Facebook and WhatsApp. The news wasn’t true but the hysteria whipped up leading to the most brutal form of mob violence.
Possibly even more shocking than the impact of this fake news is the motivation for it. Often ideology plays a small part in a scam that is really all about money. In Mexico, a website can earn around USD 1,000 for every million page views. Creating a website isn’t difficult and most of the times a single group of administrators will have several on the go at once generating around USD 2-5 thousand a month. It doesn’t matter if the content is real or not. With over 2 billion users, Facebook becomes the most powerful distribution tools to share contents. The company is battling a lot of justifiably bad press around the world.
Possibly even more shocking than the impact of this fake news is the motivation for it. Often ideology plays a small part in a scam that is really all about money. In Mexico, a website can earn around USD 1,000 for every million page views. Creating a website isn’t difficult and most of the times a single group of administrators will have several on the go at once generating around USD 2-5 thousand a month. It doesn’t matter if the content is real or not. With over 2 billion users, Facebook becomes the most powerful distribution tools to share contents. The company is battling a lot of justifiably bad press around the world.
Harmoni@Harmoni-Critical Inquiries (HS-0005)
One of the most effective and powerful tools for those who want to push an agenda online is the ‘bots’. Now bots are essentially pieces of software algorithms that run whatever tasks you set them. And a lot of the internet runs on them. However, they also become synonymous with fake social media accounts pushing political agendas or generating artificial likes, shares and followers. The days of these fully automated spam bots are mostly over. Their actions are simply too obvious making them too easy to detect by filters which meant they got purged and easy to spot by users which meant they got ignored. So now literally armies of people are paid to act like bots. They are also called ‘trolls’ or ‘decks’.
“We are talking about 20,000 or 30,000 people working to generate millions of accounts. All you have to do is to change your phone’s SIM card and with that you can create 100-200 Twitter accounts. They are offering you the decks and this is the number of accounts you can buy or rent. In one hour, you can build a trending topic with this quantity of accounts,” says Alberto Escorcia, a blogger turned activist in Mexico city.
Decks are the secret tools used by marketing agencies, publicity managers, political parties and governments to boost topics and people online or to divert and distract from unfavorable attention. The advantage of having these human bots is that they behave more human online so the chances of them being eliminated or dismissed are lower.
“We are talking about 20,000 or 30,000 people working to generate millions of accounts. All you have to do is to change your phone’s SIM card and with that you can create 100-200 Twitter accounts. They are offering you the decks and this is the number of accounts you can buy or rent. In one hour, you can build a trending topic with this quantity of accounts,” says Alberto Escorcia, a blogger turned activist in Mexico city.
Decks are the secret tools used by marketing agencies, publicity managers, political parties and governments to boost topics and people online or to divert and distract from unfavorable attention. The advantage of having these human bots is that they behave more human online so the chances of them being eliminated or dismissed are lower.
Harmoni@Harmoni-Critical Inquiries (HS-0005)
A study by Oxford Internet Institute shows that between 2017 and 2018 the number of countries where organized social media manipulation occurs increased from 28 to 48. The biggest drivers of online manipulation around the world are political parties. The realization many of them have had is that instead of trying to censor social media platforms, it is much more effective to simply flood them with bots, junk news and disinformation.
Samantha Bradshaw from Oxford Internet Institute pointed out that like advertisers, political parties now learn how to use these platforms to sway public opinion. “Instead of selling us … goods, they are selling us world leaders or political ideologies by using the advertising infrastructure and the algorithms to slowly start nudging perspectives and nudging opinions about politics. We are seeing a shift away from purely automated accounts to more human operators. We are finding actual real people for hire to work on political campaigns to work with more repressive governments to target people online with this kind of speech to ultimately suppress their participation in politics and in public discussions.”
Samantha Bradshaw from Oxford Internet Institute pointed out that like advertisers, political parties now learn how to use these platforms to sway public opinion. “Instead of selling us … goods, they are selling us world leaders or political ideologies by using the advertising infrastructure and the algorithms to slowly start nudging perspectives and nudging opinions about politics. We are seeing a shift away from purely automated accounts to more human operators. We are finding actual real people for hire to work on political campaigns to work with more repressive governments to target people online with this kind of speech to ultimately suppress their participation in politics and in public discussions.”
Harmoni@Harmoni-Critical Inquiries (HS-0005) ...
Clicks have become the de facto currency of the online world as the algorithms behind Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the others have rewarded big numbers: more followers, more comments, more shares and more views. The reward of growth is taking place within the context of the virtual lack of regulation in the online world.
The driver for clicks isn’t restricted to governments, political movements or marketing agencies. They are in it to shape perceptions. Many others are in it for the money. Engagement is the way how you can make money online which is the art and science of keeping people hooked. And algorithms are programmed to push content that gets high engagement.
"Algorithms don't necessarily determine the veracity of the content. They are often more concerned with the virality of it. ...
"So if more people are engaging with a certain topic, the algorithm might say that this might matter to you as well. … and this is where we see bad actors trying to manipulate the popularity metric and it is why we get disinformation stories spreading like wildfire because there are a bunch of fake accounts online engaging with fake breaking news story then that might get pushed into the news feeds of real users and then real people will start interacting and sharing these disinformation stories further and further,” Samantha explains.
Harmoni@Harmoni-Critical Inquiries (HS-0005)
Luis De Uriarte, Strategic Manager for News at Facebook Mexico says the company is making substantial investment to help spot the misuse of its services. “What we have found is that a lot of this misuse is done through fake accounts. So we have focused very much on dealing with fake accounts on Facebook.” And Luis says the efforts are paying off with millions of fake accounts taken down and thousands of millions of spam posts cleaned off the site by artificial intelligence algorithms sweeping the platform.
Training algorithms recognize misinformation is incredibly complicated. No algorithm can easily determine what's true or false. After all there are cases where even humans do not agree.
So in an effort to curb the spread of misinformation, the company has begun to collaborate with external fact-checkers. It has also launched a project called ‘Third-Party Verifier’ to collaborate with expert verifiers to help verify content on Facebook. "An item may be flagged in your News Feed if it has been disputed by an independent third-party fact-checker outside of Facebook.” And if they decide that the content is fake, they will inform us and we will make it very visible to people that it has been classified as fake by our verifiers,” asserts Luis.
Samantha still doubts the effectiveness of this strategy. “I don’t think a lot of the changes have really addressed the heart of the issue and real nuts and bolts of why disinformation goes viral in the first place. Going back to their business models and going back to the algorithms and the way that they still incentivize certain kinds of content to go viral opposed to others, there is real systemic challenge in the way that these platforms are governed and operated and there hasn’t been enough attention or rethinking about how these bigger structures are actually contributing to the problem.”
Harmoni@Harmoni-Critical Inquiries (HS-0005) ...
Digital deception is now a global game. So no matter how many purges of bots or tweeks to the algorithm that might happen, nothing is going to actually change until our clicks are seen more than just influence and revenue generators.
“In an Internet environment where engagement and clicks and virality is what drives the spread of content, I don’t think it is fair to cut users off the hook in this problem because democracy is something that’s hard work. It is something that we as citizens have to work towards and invest time in to find accurate information. It’s not something that is easy," says Samantha.
"The real power in the Internet is that it can bring us together and we have seen that time and time again. So going back to that more optimistic view of what the Internet can and could be for a democratic society and political participation, I think it is something we need to remind ourselves of and work towards as individuals,” advises Samantha.
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Source: Aljazeera: 'Click Me' - Trolls, Bots, Fake News: What's the cost of our clicks? |All Hail the Algorithm, (July 17, 2019)
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