Misguiding, betraying and deceiving. The three things that our internet has made easily accessible. Our social media landscape is infested with strategically placed mis-information designed to achieve unfair political agendas and ideologies. We consume fake news and disinformation daily and more than we realise. Often democracy is tainted through the use of troll armies, bots (automated accounts), propaganda and more.
Philip Howard’s 2020 book (Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives) successfully explores the mechanisms of manipulation used to spread misinformation within politics. The first part of the book is a general discussion about the spread of lies that trolls generate to influence social movements and undermine democracy. An example of how this is done can be through the use of micro-targeting.
Kruikemeier (2016) states that micro-targeting involves finding precise information about an individual’s political preferences and consumer habits in order to target them with specific messages. Most members of the public are not aware of how much of their information is being sold to campaigners which is then used for deceptive micro-targeting. It is done to help swing elections and make you question authority.
“Technology comes with features. They let you stay in touch with your friends and family. They let businesses extract data about you.” — Philip Howard (2020)
Howard refers to junk-news operations as lie machines (which can be a system of people or technologies). Lie machines try to gain social control by misinforming us about politicians, advertisers who are involved with politics, lobbyists and more. They manipulate algorithms to serve a wider political agenda. Lie machines can negatively affect politics and more recently, have been working during the corona virus crisis.
On the internet there has been a vast growth of misinformation about Covid-19. In April (2020) Donald Trump controversially suggested that injecting disinfectants could cure Covid-19 and this was seized upon by the media to discredit the president. In similar fashion, false claims stating circulating on the internet that drinking methanol could cure you of the virus. This tragically resulted in hundreds of deaths in Iran. Howard stresses that junk news can spread rapidly and have different effects in different countries.
“525 people had died from swallowing toxic methanol alcohol since February 20” — Iranian health ministry spokesman: Kianoush Jahanpou.
False messages can be deadly, so how do we work together to stop them?
The second part of Phillip Howard’s book explores the solutions to protecting the public and our democracy from these lie machines. Fake news has been a long part of our history even before the age of internet. It is undeniable that it is a complex and demanding burden to fix.
To conclude, we can counter-balance misinformation by educating the wider public and advising them to get their information from reputable news sources. Doing this and the action of social media sites eliminating detectable trolls will help fight the war against misinformation and hopefully eradicate lie machines.
References:
- Howard, P. N. (2020). The Science and Technology of Lie Machines. In Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (pp. 0–18).
- Kruikemeier, S., Sezgin, M., & Boerman, S. C. (2016). Political Microtargeting: Relationship between Personalized Advertising on Facebook and Voters’ Responses. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 19(6), 367–372. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2015.0652
- N.A. (2020). Hundreds die in Iran over false belief drinking methanol cures coronavirus. ABC News, p.1.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-28/hundreds-dead-in-iran-after-drinking-methanol-to-cure-virus/12192582
- Pilkington, E. (2020). Bleach touted as “miracle cure” for Covid being sold on Amazon. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/19/bleach-miracle-cure-amazon-covid
- Price, B. (2020). Lie machines: how to save democracy from troll armies, deceitful robots, junk news operations, and political operatives. Information, Communication & Society, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1844778
- Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., Setzer, W., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., & Blackburn, J. (2019). Who let the trolls out? towards understanding state-sponsored trolls. WebSci 2019 — Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Web Science, (3), 353–362. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326016
