Hacking an election through Twitter

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.