Propaganda on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is a powerful tool for manipulating public opinion according to a set of studies carried out within the Computational Propaganda Research Project by the Oxford Internet Institute, of the Oxford University.To reach this conclusion, on the other hand nothing surprising, researchers have analyzed the use of social networks for the manipulation of public opinion, between 2015 and 2017, in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany , Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine and the United States.
Bernays, women smokers and eggs with bEIcon
Today few know Edward L.Bernays, father of the theory of propaganda and public relations , who in 1928 wrote that "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an element of importance in democratic society.Those who manipulate this hidden mechanism of society constitute the invisible government that holds the true power that governs the destiny of our country."
Thanks to Bernays, for example, tobacco became popular among women as a symbol of gender liberation , in a campaign paid by the American Tobacco Company that included recommendations from doctors about the benefits of filling the lungs with smoke.Also made the bacon a key piece of American breakfast with great joy from the Beech-Nut Packing Company , a company dedicated to the distribution of packaged meat products, which asked for your help so that your bacon became more popular among a population that had a light breakfast of coffee and toast.
It is easy to imagine what Bernays would have enjoyed is this connected and stunned society, exposed to a constant flood of unleashed informative impacts , many of them belonging to that new reality-that old lie-that It has been called post-truth.
disinformation factory
The set of studies of the University of Oxford would surely have stimulated him to design new public opinion manipulation campaigns and it is difficult not to feel a chill thinking about what he would have achieved.To carry out this work, twelve researchers from nine countries interviewed 65 experts and analyzed tens of millions of publications on seven different social media platforms during elections, political crises and national security incidents.
In the Russian case, where about 45% of Twitter accounts are bots, suspicions about the use of networks to influence political events beyond their borders are well known, like the American or French elections, as well as to stifle internal dissent.
In an investigative report entitled "The Agency", published in June 2015 in The New York Times Magazine, the activity of a company known as The Internet Research Agency was revealed as "disinformation factory".
In it, young people with computer knowledge publish about 200 messages a day distributed between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LiveJournal (a blogging platform that is still popular in Russia) and comment on current news in Russian or foreign digital newspapers.This activity is aimed at supporting initiatives of the Russian State and manipulating information about what is happening abroad.
propaganda in social networks and Ukrainian resistance
Facing the power of social media propaganda at the service of Putin, sources of resistance have emerged, such as the one starring Ukraine , one of the main Russian objectives for manipulating public opinion.from the University of Oxford on This country highlights its efforts to step out of the misinformation of Russia, with initiatives such as the StopFake project, an effort to unmask fake news "produced mainly by the Russian media".
This platform has recently submitted a report stating that 58% of Ukrainians recognize the threat of Russian propaganda. Among the main sources of propaganda 45% of respondents indicate chains Russian television; 34.5%, social networks; and, more than 20%, digital newspapers."During the next stage of our investigation we analyzed more than 1,000 fake news published on the StopFake website.We have already indexed the media organizations involved in the creation of fake news and soon We can provide your list.In fact, this is a list of untrustworthy sources, because we are talking about your systematic participation in a propaganda machine, "explained Yevhen Fedchenko, chief editor of StopFake.
to Ukraine, an extension of Chrome that allowed the automatic blocking of thousands of Russian websites, as well as the government prohibition of Russian social networks such as VKontakte and Yandex, as part of the sanctions of the United States, also stands out in the Oxford University study country against Russia.
Macedonian trump voters
Another of the cases highlighted by the researchers is that of Trump in the United States that achieved an appearance of popularity through social networks that did not correspond to reality but that contributed to build the image of the candidate as presidential among the voters, with the result known to everyone.
According to CNN, the social media company SocialFlow calculated during the campaign that Trump was getting three times more free social media exposure than Hillary Clinton. The company found that, by January, the tycoon he had become "the most talked about person on the planet."
In an article in Buzzfeed, inhabitants of the city of Veles, in Macedonia, developed an industry last year that created more than a hundred fake news sites to spread news in favor of Trump in all social networks.Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, calculated that a single false news about Pope Francis supporting Trump was seen by tens of millions of people on Facebook.
Taiwan and Chinese propaganda
The study also includes the case of Taiwan where a campaign against President Tsai Ing-wen involved thousands of coordinated, but not fully automated, accounts that shared Chinese propaganda.In that campaign, the Facebook page Taiwan's president-elect was filled in two days with more than 40,000 critical messages with the characters used in mainland China, which on the island was attributed to Chinese manipulations.
Germany and its bill
The German case is also highlighted as an example of a country that works in laws to force social networks to take responsibility for what is published in them, although researchers warn of the danger that, for freedom of expression , you can have this line of action.
The German Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas , presented a bill that will force networks like Facebook or Twitter to delete messages with "clearly criminal" content ", after the complaints of the users." Freedom of expression in democracy protects disgusting and ugly statements, but ends where the criminal code begins and, for incitement comments to hate and slander on the network there should be as little space as in the street , "said the minister at the press conference in which I present this proposal that, if approved, would impose fines of up to 50 million euros to companies that were not able to remove these contents in less than 24 hours.
disinterests of facebook and twitter
Finally, these researchers point to an apparent disinterestedness of social media companies about the way their networks were being used. According to them, Facebook, for example, delegates most of the work propaganda control and fake news to external organizations such as Snopes or Associated Press, while Twitter anti-bot systems seem more interested in intervening in cases of inappropriate commercial advertising than political propaganda.
This same year, Facebook has shown its concern regarding the dissemination of fake news through its platform announcing a series of measures, including: end economic incentives, because most of fake news is financially motivated; create new products to stop the spread of fake news and help people get more information when making decisions when they find fake news.
In a recent interview published in El Pais, Eli Parisier , author of The Bubble Filter, a book that deals with how Internet platforms like Facebook and Google, with their algorithms, filter information that comes to us, thus answering a question about the novelty of the "fake news" phenomenon: " What is new is the ability of this fake news to reach millions of people, despite being hosted in a means of communication that nobody has ever heard of. Yes, in the past there were rumors, conspiracy theories, but they did not acquire the appearance of serious means of communication to appear credible, as happens today »..
Images: Wikicommons and Pixabay
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