Since the first day I meddled in creating online bots I've had the intuition that large scale manipulation was occurring. If a single developer can create a twitter bot in 4 hours that likes posts about a topic, then what could a large company, political party, or entire country do?
I've always thought "Well they're just manipulating online opinions" but the capital and blm riots have shown that online opinions can have real world impacts.
Family and friends often are distressed by the state of the world, where their view of the world is social media. But how much of social media is real? How many of the radical opinions expressed are made by real people? Of those real people, how many of them were influenced by bots or "computational propaganda"?
I believe that we, even really smart engineers, are easier to influence that we want to believe
I've always thought "Well they're just manipulating online opinions" but the capital and blm riots have shown that online opinions can have real world impacts.
Family and friends often are distressed by the state of the world, where their view of the world is social media. But how much of social media is real? How many of the radical opinions expressed are made by real people? Of those real people, how many of them were influenced by bots or "computational propaganda"?
I believe that we, even really smart engineers, are easier to influence that we want to believe