You have probably seen with the new
kind of ticker that the cable news networks have become fond of showing on the
bottom of the screen. It used to be news
headlines. Now it is their live Twitter
feed. I wonder what this says about the
famous firewall between the content and the business sides of the news
media. The headlines had real
value. The Twitter feeds get better
ratings. They stimulate the social impulses
that we all have in the depths of our primitive brains. On the other hand, the news headlines feed
the modern analytical, knowledge-seeking brain – which is quick to fatigue and
get bored. Knowledge is hard. Gossip is
juicy.
This has not only taken over the
ticker. Many news shows now have a segment
dedicated to reporting on what is trending on Twitter. Twitter trends, instead of just quantifying
what is being talked about, have become the subject of the discussion itself.
So why am I bringing this up
today? I heard about a very subtle but
insidious trick that has been used to rig elections in places such as Russia
and Mexico. These could easily be used
here as well.
Let’s say we are in the run-up to
an important election. At some point,
the media is bound to report on which candidate is trending higher on
Twitter. There was even a recent study
that found Twitter volume was a better predictor of the winner of elections
than the official polls are. In the
cases that were uncovered (and probably many that went uncovered), Twitter bots
were programmed to post random (but human-sounding) tweets about one
candidate. This is not too hard. You could but random constructions together
in the form of “I liked what Joe said about taxes/education/guns/healthcare/etc.
today/last night/yesterday/etc.” All
kinds of combinations works and when you only have 140 characters you don’t
expect much detail anyway. Thousands of
these get sent out from hundreds of fake accounts. At first, just the people following the
candidate’s hashtag see them. But when the media picks up on it, it becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy. The media
tells the world (or at least the voting region) that Joe is skyrocketing on
Twitter. The subconscious desire to find
agreement with our social group makes us all give Joe a second look. “Hey, maybe he is better than I thought !!” This isn’t going to get a crazy radical
elected, but it could certainly change the election by 5-10%, which is the
margin of most contested elections.
The same tactic has been used to overload
a Congressional office. If your local
Representative gets 10,000 tweets/emails/Facebook posts all in favor of one
policy or another, he/she is going to think twice about voting against it. They all seem to be coming from different
accounts, even if they are all bots. If
he/she wants to get re-elected, well, you know the rest.
This doesn’t just bother me in the
way that user experience problems do. This scares me. We already have enough losers in
government. This could make it much worse.
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