{"id":38848,"date":"2018-10-08T06:56:59","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T11:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38848"},"modified":"2018-10-08T06:56:59","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T11:56:59","slug":"fake-news-and-weaponized-bots-how-algorithms-inflate-profiles-spread-disinfo-and-disrupt-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38848","title":{"rendered":"Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Mike Corbett | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by \u201cbots\u201d; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Red Pill Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon (at least) and that today\u2019s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given elite \u201cright-wing\u201d or \u201cleft-wing.\u201d<\/p>\n

DO BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Online fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came to power, few Americans<\/a> had heard of the \u201calt-right,\u201d the ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump\u2019s electoral success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million<\/a>, but he won the Electoral College vote. In other words, \u201calt-right\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

It turns out that bots are pushing fake news s to make stories go \u201cviral\u201d by sharing them among fake bot accounts (\u201csock puppets\u201d) on social media. In 2011, a team<\/a> at Texas A&M University \u00a0created gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers. They found that their Twitter \u201cfollowers\u201d were, in fact, bots.<\/p>\n

In 2017 under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al.<\/a> analysed 14 million Tweets spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. They found that \u201c[a]ccounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.\u201d Fake news, they say, includes \u201choaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories, fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy Photo Source Mike Corbett | CC BY 2.0 Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by \u201cbots\u201d; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1597,19253,5493,204,3717,2779,17114,22184],"class_list":["post-38848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-algorithms","tag-computer-bots","tag-counterpunch","tag-democracy","tag-disinformation","tag-fake-news","tag-t-j-coles","tag-weaponized-bots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38849,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38848\/revisions\/38849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}