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NY Times, June 1 2017
How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation
by Farhad Manjoo
After last year’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role
in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back
then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you
don’t like. The criticism was well placed: Facebook is the world’s most
popular social network, and millions of people look to it daily for news.
But the focus on Facebook let another social network off the hook. I
speak of my daily addiction, Twitter.
Though the 140-character network favored by President Trump is far
smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus
exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business.
That’s an issue because Twitter is making the news dumber. The service
is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes
pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the
silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was
captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.
But the biggest problem with Twitter’s place in the news is its role in
the production and dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It
keeps pushing conspiracy theories — and because lots of people in the
media, not to mention many news consumers, don’t quite understand how it
works, the precise mechanism is worth digging into.
We recently saw the mechanism in action when another baseless conspiracy
theory rose to the top of the news: The idea that the murder last year
of Seth Rich, a staff member at the Democratic National Committee, was
linked, somehow, to the leaking of Clinton campaign emails. The Fox News
host Sean Hannity pushed the theory the loudest, but it was groups on
Twitter — or, more specifically, bots on Twitter — that were first to
the story and helped make it huge.
Here’s how.
The guts of the news business.
One way to think of today’s disinformation ecosystem is to picture it as
a kind of gastrointestinal tract.
At the top end — the mouth, let’s call it — enter the raw materials of
propaganda: the memes cooked up by anyone who wants to manipulate what
the media covers, whether political campaigns, terrorist groups,
state-sponsored trolls or the homegrown provocateurs who hang out at
extremist online communities.
Then, way down at what we will politely call the “other end,” emerge the
packaged narratives primed for widespread dissemination to you and
everyone you know. These are the hot takes that dominate talk radio and
prime-time cable news, as well as the viral Facebook posts warning you
about this or that latest outrage committed by Hillary Clinton.
How do the raw materials become the culturewide narratives and
conspiracy theories? The path is variegated and flexible and often
stretches across multiple media platforms. Yet in many of the biggest
misinformation campaigns of the past year, Twitter played a key role.
Specifically, Twitter often acts as the small bowel of digital news.
It’s where political messaging and disinformation get digested, packaged
and widely picked up for mass distribution to cable, Facebook and the
rest of the world.
This role for Twitter has seemed to grow more intense during (and since)
the 2016 campaign. Twitter now functions as a clubhouse for much of the
news. It’s where journalists pick up stories, meet sources, promote
their work, criticize competitors’ work and workshop takes. In a more
subtle way, Twitter has become a place where many journalists
unconsciously build and gut-check a worldview — where they develop a
sense of what’s important and merits coverage, and what doesn’t.
This makes Twitter a prime target for manipulators: If you can get
something big on Twitter, you’re almost guaranteed coverage everywhere.
“When journalists see a story getting big on Twitter, they consider it a
kind of responsibility to cover it, even if the story may be an
alternate frame or a conspiracy theory,” said Alice Marwick, who was
co-author of a recent report on the mechanics of media manipulation for
the Data & Society Research Institute. “That’s because if they don’t,
they may get accused of bias.”
Twitter is clogged with fake people.
For determined media manipulators, getting something big on Twitter
isn’t all that difficult. Unlike Facebook, which requires people to use
their real names, Twitter offers users essentially full anonymity, and
it makes many of its functions accessible to outside programmers,
allowing people to automate their actions on the service.
As a result, numerous cheap and easy-to-use online tools let people
quickly create thousands of Twitter bots — accounts that look real, but
that are controlled by a puppet master.
Twitter’s design also promotes a slavish devotion to metrics: Every
tweet comes with a counter of Likes and Retweets, and users come to
internalize these metrics as proxies for real-world popularity.
Yet these metrics can be gamed. Because a single Twitter user can create
lots of accounts and run them all in a coordinated way, Twitter lets
relatively small groups masquerade as far larger ones. If Facebook’s
primary danger is its dissemination of fake stories, then Twitter’s is a
ginning up of fake people.
“Bots allow groups to speak much more loudly than they would be able to
on any other social media platforms — it lets them use Twitter as a
megaphone,” said Samuel Woolley, the director for research at Oxford
University’s Computational Propaganda Project. “It’s doing something
that I call ‘manufacturing consensus,’ or building the illusion of
popularity for a candidate or a particular idea.”
How this works for conspiracy theories is relatively straightforward.
Outside of Twitter — in message boards or Facebook groups — a group will
decide on a particular message to push. Then the deluge begins. Bots
flood the network, tweeting and retweeting thousands or hundreds of
thousands of messages in support of the story, often accompanied by a
branding hashtag — #pizzagate, or, a few weeks ago, #sethrich.
The initial aim isn’t to convince or persuade, but simply to overwhelm —
to so completely saturate the network that it seems as if people are
talking about a particular story. The biggest prize is to get on
Twitter’s Trending Topics list, which is often used as an assignment
sheet for the rest of the internet.
I witnessed this in mid-May, just after the Fox affiliate in Washington
reported that a private investigator for Mr. Rich’s family had bombshell
evidence in the case. The story later fell apart, but that night,
Twitter bots went with it.
Hundreds of accounts with few or no followers began tweeting links to
the story. By the next morning, #SethRich was trending nationally on
Twitter — and the conspiracy theory was getting wide coverage across the
right, including, in time, Mr. Hannity.
They may ruin democracy.
A Twitter spokesman said the company took bots seriously; it has a
dedicated spam-detection team that looks out for bot-based manipulation,
and it is constantly improving its tools to spot and shut down bots.
What’s more, because the media is large and chaotic, it is often unclear
what role, exactly, bots play in ginning up interest in a story.
Conspiracy theories went big long before Twitter was around. If you
removed Twitter from the equation, wouldn’t Sean Hannity have picked up
the Seth Rich rumor anyway?
Yet the more I spoke to experts, the more convinced I became that
propaganda bots on Twitter might be a growing and terrifying scourge on
democracy. Research suggests that bots are ubiquitous on Twitter. Emilio
Ferrara and Alessandro Bessi, researchers at the University of Southern
California, found that about a fifth of the election-related
conversation on Twitter last year was generated by bots. Most users were
blind to them; they treated the bots the same way they treated other users.
“Human users didn’t do a good job of separating bots from other humans,”
Mr. Ferrara said.
Because they operate unseen, bots catalyze the news: They speed up the
process of discovery and dissemination of particular stories, turning an
unknown hashtag into the next big thing. A trending hashtag creates a
trap for journalists who cover the internet: Even if they cover a
conspiracy theory only to debunk it, they’re most likely playing into
what the propagandists’ want.
Finally, in a more pernicious way, bots give us an easy way to doubt
everything we see online. In the same way that the rise of “fake news”
gives the president cover to label everything “fake news,” the rise of
bots might soon allow us to dismiss any online enthusiasm as driven by
automation. Anyone you don’t like could be a bot; any highly retweeted
post could be puffed up by bots.
“If you can make something trend, you can almost make it come true,”
said Renee DiResta, a technologist who studies bots.
And if that’s the case, why believe anything?
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