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."
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.
My first impulse on reading the parent comment was an urge to note the difference in propagation speed between the inflammatory political cartoon and the manipulative tweet. On reflection, I think the impact of this delta is more than balanced by the resources a critical observer can bring to bear in the context of the process as it exists today. That being said, the political process in the US seems designed to marginalize critical thinkers trying to arrive at sound public policy, leaving the field to those forwarding and protecting private agendas. The national conversation, such as it is, is driven by those parties most adept at injecting noise into public communication channels.
Every time my kids tell me something they've learned online, there ensues a conversation about how everything posted online must be true because it is posted online.
What I haven't done well enough is teach them where to go to determine if something is true. Thanks for helping me realize that so I can do something about it.
Almost as good as grass fish, though given some weather events they do make an appearance once in a while. I did do a image search of "octopus in a tree" on google and saw more results than one would of thought, which goes to show that on the internet you can always find something to back up your imagination as reality - scary.
xD that's a good one! I haven't seen that hoax before. One of my personal favorites is DHMO, though it's of a slightly different flavor: http://dhmo.org/
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.
Considering that most of the messages in politics are false or distorted you could probably make a more informed decision knowing nothing about the candidates.
While your cynicism is understandable, people need to be educated in order to make informed decisions, otherwise voting becomes pointless; that is a basic tenet of Democracy.
I believe we have similar conclusions but differ on the facts, I don't vote because it's pointless because education has revealed that...
What politicians and the media say are mostly lies (intentional or not). It's difficult to tell what is a lie from what is the truth.
I don't live in an area that can affect the outcome of the election.
Considering the entire spectrum of choices available the two or three options you have are almost identical: Democrats are the left wing of the plutocratic party and Republicans are the right wing. Tide or Sunlight isn't a choice either way you're buying soap from P&G.
Any time, including writing this point, spend worrying about politics is time I could have spent improving my life or the lives of others.
That is certainly one approach and for some thats more than they need.
Thing is when it comes up towards election the various parties wake up and startup the PR spin and with that you get more and more targeted via the communications tools at hand. This has always meant manipulation for PR gains nomatter the form of communication, be it twitter or Facebook etc today or the Newspapers of yesteryear. Nothing new.
If people want to base the vote over advert based timespans then they will, though I always found it better to look at what they have done outside that PR window and not on the PR spun, vote for us ones. In the UK last election I saw the concervatives saying they were about local jobs in a leaflet from my local candidate. Said leaflet was printed in another county and with over 5 local printing companies I did see thru the PR spin on that one.
Personaly if you vote based on what your told by the salesman only then you are opening yourself up to mistakes. If you do your own research and look at the history of the product or party in this case and what it has done and is doing; Then you see the true picture.
Whoever wins I hope they don't suffer the act of children fillybustering and turn the seats of power into a school yard name calling session. In the UK I watch the parlement channel and the way they act at times would not be tollerated in a School Playground, fine examples. But it is the same when you get people fighting for there party and not the greater good of the country it serves. But humans are not perfect; Though we do aspire.
So for me politics can do blipverts and 1 character information posts as I do my own research and make my own mind up based upon actions and effort and not the one year running up to an election, pile of spin. Whatever form they pick.
I guess in that sence, less information from parties blowing there own trumpet is more politics being done instead of being talked about.
Be nice if they could agree on a few more things so that at least those can get actioned and things done that need to be done instead of being blocked just because the other guy came up with the idea, thats my dream and I had it.
Don't forget about voter roll manipulation as the votes of millions of legitimate voters, most of them visible minorities, are thrown out on spurious grounds.
>On Nov. 6, polling places across Maryland will still use Diebold AccuVote touchscreen machines that don't produce paper ballots.
So the entire voting mechanism is handing off to Diebold without a possibility of an independent audit, but you think it's a "brilliant meta-comment" on "social media rumors".
Please see the links provided on that article including studies by Princeton where they say they could hack the Diebold machine in 1 minute.
Do you doubt that voting machine manipulation happens? Programmers of the machines have testified in Congress that they built rigged machines. Exit polls vary dramatically from vote counts almost exclusively when machines are used.
The very idea that 20% of votes are moved through closed-source machines run by Republican friends should be enough to make everyone assume that the votes cannot be trusted.
~20% of the votes will go through machines. Both Diebold[1] and Tagg Romney own a huge number of the machines, specifically in important states like Ohio.
The US elections have been rigged for at least 12 years. This much is obvious. They will be rigged this year, too. But to what extent?
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting. Walden O'Dell was a top fundraiser for George W. Bush. He also ran the machines that elected him president. He is obviously legally allowed to do all of this, including having an opinion (though I do not believe it should be legal to raise funds for a candidate and also run the machines that count the votes).
What I'm saying is: Anyone who builds voting machines should not be taking sides. Especially financial sides. It's a clear conflict of interest, where the result is that I cannot possibly trust the machines to do what they say.
The people building them are Republicans. The machines are closed, proprietary devices. They cannot be trusted. Hence, we must assume they are rigged.
The problem is really the mechanism of voting, it needs to be verifiable and the machines need to be assistants in the process, not black boxes. I think some more thought has to be put into it to make systems which assist the voting process, but not make closed proprietary systems.
The way I see it: It's effectively illegal to prove the machines are fraudulent as they are proprietary machines and are closed source. So, given that they are run by partisan companies and we have absolutely no method of verifying their inner workings:
Don't we have to assume that the machines can't be trusted?
Analogy time. If one left a partisan alone with unsealed boxes of ballots, I would think they would be considered spoiled (correct me if I'm wrong). I agree with you that leaving the electronic ballots in a partisan's computer with no mechanisms to detect tampering should similarly be considered spoiled.
A strong paper trail seems to be the answer. It doesn't matter what the hardware and software tries to do if the machine has to produce a paper record (checked and approved by each voter) that is spooled for later checking against the electronic total.
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.
There is not a think, it is an overall weariness of issues. Reddit founders admitted to creating their content originally when starting up the site. While not a massive manipulation, they pretended to be original posters (with separate user names) when it was not.
The key points here are to take everything with a grain of salt. There are known organizations developing user names on all sorts of forums and social media sites and selling their utilization to people.
I've seen on numerous occasions, an anti-conservative post miraculously parked on the front page above other posts that have twice the upvotes, twice the comments and submitted more recently. If that isn't direct manipulation, then their algo for front page content is completely backwards.
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...
Because to them, you're just another vote and your opinion doesn't matter. You are expected by people like this to just follow instructions. And if you don't just follow instructions and you decide you need to learn something about the subject, chances are you are in the minority and don't matter to them.
Or less cynically, there was advertising money left to spend and not much of it. A quick "vote yes on prop 2" is a great way to spend money and maybe get the result you want if you are the beneficiary of the proposal.
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.
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.