Fake News and weaponized bots: how algorithms inflate profiles, spread disinfo and disrupt Democracy
by
T.J. Coles
Algorithms
are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly
difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are
generated by “bots”; which sites are genuinely popular and which
are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News (Red Pill
Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon
(at least) and that today’s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation
of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given
elite “right-wing” or “left-wing.”
DO
BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?
Online
fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came
to power, few Americans had heard of the “alt-right,” the
ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump’s electoral
success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million, but he won the
Electoral College vote. In other words, “alt-right” voters were
numerous enough to give Trump a plurality in the overall vote and
thus the Electoral College. How do we explain this discrepancy, that
online fake news is a phenomenon, yet its main champions remain
obscure to most Americans?
It turns
out that bots are pushing fake news to make stories go “viral” by
sharing them among fake bot accounts (“sock puppets”) on social
media. In 2011, a team at Texas A&M University created
gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have
possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers.
They found that their Twitter “followers” were, in fact, bots.
In 2017
under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al. analysed 14 million Tweets
spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential
campaign. They found that “[a]ccounts that actively spread
misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.” Fake
news, they say, includes “hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories,
fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.”
Incentives include sending “traffic to fake news sites [which]
is easily monetized through ads, but political motives can be equally
or more powerful.” During the presidential campaign 2016, it
was discovered that the popularity profiles of fake news are
indistinguishable from fact-checking articles.
The
authors note that, “for the most viral claims, much of the
spreading activity originates from a small portion of accounts.”
The so-called super-spreaders of fake news are likely to be “social
bots that automatically post link to articles, retweet other
accounts, or perform more sophisticated autonomous tasks.”
Regional vote shares toward Trump did not match the geographical
location of (likely) bot accounts. Though it is unconfirmed, it is
likely “that states most actively targeted by
misinformation-spreading bots tended to have more surprising election
results.”
Ratkiewicz
et al. argue that Twitter has a structural bias for fake news due
to its “140-character sound bytes [which] are ready-made
headline fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.” Ferrara et al.
write that bots can “engage in … complex types of
interactions, such as entertaining conversation with other people,
commenting on their posts, and answering their questions.” The
authors go on to note that bots “can search the Web for
information and media to fill their profiles, and post collected
material at predetermined times, emulating the human temporal
signature of content production and consumption,” including the
time of day when bot activity spikes.
Not
surprisingly, the military is in on it, too. In addition to the
Pentagon funded mentioned above, in 2014 the Guardian revealed that
the UK Ministry of Defence was spending over £60,000 of taxpayers’
money on a project called Full Spectrum Targeting. The project was
conducted with Detica (a subsidiary of BAE Systems), the Change
Institute and Montvieux. “Emphasis is put on identifying and
co-opting influential individuals, controlling channels of
information and destroying targets based on morale rather than
military necessity.” The Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of
Cyber Activities project cost over £310,000 and included Baines
Associates, i to i Research and several universities, including
Northumbria, Kent and University College London.
BOTS
AS PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPONS
There
were serious underlying structural problems that led to Donald J.
Trump becoming President of the USA. But fake news and the
“alt-right” acted as a trigger for those underlying problems.
Social media and bots helped Trump’s cause. Scientists have argued
that the sheer volume of social media users means that the
comparatively small influence of psychological targeting can
translate into significant numbers of impacted users.
In
2014, scientists working for the Center for Tobacco Control Research
and Education at the University of California and San Francisco
exploited nearly 700,000 Facebook users by making them participate in
an experiment without their knowledge or consent. “The
experiment manipulated the extent to which people … were exposed to
emotional expressions in their News Feed,” says the research
paper.
The
experiment “tested whether exposure to emotions led people to
change their own posting behaviors.” The two parallel
experiments involved 1) reducing friends’ exposure to positive
content and 2) reducing their exposure to negative content: “[F]or
a person for whom 10% of posts containing positive content were
omitted, an appropriate control would withhold 10% of 46.8% (i.e.,
4.68%) of posts at random, compared with omitting only 2.24% of the
News Feed in the negatively-reduced control … As a secondary
measure, we tested for cross-emotional contagion in which the
opposite emotion should be inversely affected: People in the
positivity reduced condition should express increased negativity,
whereas people in the negativity reduced condition should express
increased positivity.”
The
results concerning emotional contagion were statistically miniscule:
0.001. But, as the authors, point out: given “the massive scale
of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have
large aggregated consequences.” This, they theorize, equates
“to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status
updates per day.”
This is
relevant to fake news because it shows how bots can spread fake news
and cause emotional contagion among large numbers of potential
voters.
FAKE
NEWS, BOTS & THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT?
The New
York Daily News reports that Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s
billionaire hedge-fund backers, worked for IBM on technology used to
develop its Watson super-computer (“Brown clustering”), as well
as Apple’s Siri technology. Mercer is a Trump mega-donor. There’s
no evidence directly connecting Robert Mercer to pro-Trump bots. Yet,
the kind of technologies and services in which Mercer-related
companies are involved include influencing elections: “Trump has
30 million Twitter “followers,” only half of whom are real; the
other 50% are bots. The newspaper also spoke to Simon Crosby of
Bromium technologies, who explained that some of the Watson
technology, allegedly developed by Mercer, “can quickly build, test
and deploy bots or virtual agents across mobile devices or messaging
platforms to create natural conversations between apps and users.”
Crosby goes on to say that “arbitrary and ridiculous information
[is] spread very quickly, and now to targeted user[s],” who are
“more susceptible to believing it and spreading it.”
One of
Trump’s first Twitter “supporters” was a bot called
PatrioticPepe, in reference to Pepe the Frog; the unfortunate
creature appropriated by the “alt-right” for its bigoted agenda.
A whole fifth of Twitter accounts tweeting about the election in 2016
were bots. Hilarity ensues when the organization reporting on this,
the Washington Post, also reports that the data for fake,
Trump-supporting accounts are accrued from Twitter Audit. Twitter
Audit also points out that an estimated 35%+ of the Washington Post’s
Twitter’s followers are also bots! The reporter overcomes this
hypocrisy by writing that Trump’s percentage of fake followers is
higher than that of his own organization—so that’s okay, then.
As I (in
The Great Brexit Swindle) and others (e.g., Cadwalladr) have
documented, Brexit was in part a psychological operation aimed at
the public by mega-wealthy hedge fund managers who want out of Europe
and its financial control directives. The Guardian’s Carole
Cadwalladr spoke with Andy Wigmore, communications director at the
Leave.Eu campaign. Wigmore was behind the famous Trump-Nigel Farage
meeting and photo op (Farage being the hard-right, pro-“free
market,” former leader of the UK Independence Party).
Recall
the contagion effect measured above. Referring to Brexit, Wigmore
explained that (in Cadwalladr’s paraphrase): “Facebook was the
key to the entire campaign.” Wigmore is quoted as saying:
“using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts
of things about that individual and how to convince them with what
sort of advert,” i.e., spread contagion about things that
matter to voters, such as immigration.
CONCLUSION
Psychological
warfare emanating from billionaires like Mercer under the guise of
online, grassroots (in reality astroturf) organizations, as well as
from the military in as-yet-undisclosed forms, cannot dictate
politics in a vacuum. Rather, they provide a subtle background to and
trigger for complicated underlying factors, the main one being
widespread discontent with current political systems. Fake news
lights a fuse, igniting the powder keg of discontentment. But we
should keep in mind, too, that monarchs, despots, big business, and
advertisers have, throughout history, used the latest technologies to
manipulate, dazzle and even the terrify those over whom they exercise
power.
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