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MartinMcSherryFirstPaper 2 - 12 Mar 2020 - Main.MartinMcSherry
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< | Assessing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Fight Digital Misinformation | | | -- By MartinMcSherry - 12 Mar 2020 | |
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< | Section I: How Social Media Threatens Democracy | >
> | I. How Social Media Threatens Democracy
A: The "Post-Truth" Era
The Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year for 2016, defining it as, “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” 2016 was the year an outsider candidate from reality television, armed with traditional and modern tools of communication, capitalized on anti-elite fervor to fuel a successful White House run built on a foundation of falsehoods. Outgoing President Barack Obama reflected on the campaign and its results, saying, “Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter.” Social media defines that ecosystem and is central to the undermining of truth in journalism and politics.
The democratization of information on the internet has empowered individuals to seek out content that reaffirms their own views. Social media users, including leaders at the highest levels, can directly communicate to millions, bypassing legacy media organizations that once served as gatekeepers. On social media, a trained journalist or climate scientist is not at the ready on a split screen to challenge a politician who makes grossly untrue statements. An established, credentialed editor-in-chief is not overseeing everything that is published on Facebook or Twitter. Instead of preventing falsehoods from entering the national conversation or presenting newsworthy statements through a critical lens, gatekeepers find themselves defending facts from a popular revolt. The result is an environment Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus described as “the conjunction of a president unconstrained by facts with a media environment both siloed into partisan echo chambers and polluted by fake news.”
According to a BuzzFeed News analysis, in the final months of the 2016 election, hoax election stories -- almost entirely supporting Donald Trump and opposing Hillary Clinton -- outperformed actual news on social media. The 20 top-performing false election stories generated nearly 9 million engagements, far more than the 7.3 million earned by actual news. The top stories fabricated Pope Francis’ endorsement of Donald Trump and the sale of weapons from Hillary Clinton to the Islamic State. | | | | |
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< | Subsection A: The "Post-Truth" Era | >
> | The viral spread of such stories would be impossible without “retweet” or “share” buttons, reflecting Trump’s own strategy of bypassing traditional arbiters of truth. However, false stories, memes, and ads can be weaponized even further by leveraging the vast amount of personal data social media companies mine from their users. | | | | |
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< | Subsection B: Cambridge Analytica and the Power of Microtargeting | >
> | B: Cambridge Analytica and the Power of Microtargeting | | | | |
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> | In 2018, it was https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/convenience-vs-freedom-facebook-cambridge-analytica-debacle-shows-how-social-media-companies-imperil-democracy/ that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm hired by the Trump campaign, had harvested the personal data of 50 million Americans without their consent to build psychological profiles used to effectively microtarget political propaganda to individuals. Cambridge said it had as many as three to five thousand data points on each individual, including age, income, debt, hobbies, criminal histories, purchase histories, religious leanings, health concerns, gun ownership, homeownership, and more. It used this data to create so-called “dark posts,” or messages seen only by the users predisposed to its content. | | | | |
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> | In addition to swiping data from companies like Facebook, data companies can and often do use the practice of geofencing, defined as “technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area”. For example, one group, Catholic Vote, used geofencing to identify over 90 thousand Catholics not registered to vote in Wisconsin, a key battleground state, based on their mass attendance. The group has used this information in the past to target Catholic voters with ads on Facebook claiming Democrats are “opposed to Catholic judicial nominees because of their religious beliefs.” | | | | |
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> | Digital advertising of this kind allows candidates and organizations to run highly effective, personalized, and cost-efficient shadow campaigns on social media using highly sensitive and private information. In doing so, they avoid fact-checking, standards of decency, and government oversight. In the 2020 Democratic primary, one candidate proposed a plan to address digital misinformation and hold social media companies accountable. | | | | |
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> | Section II. Assessing Senator Warren's Plan to Fight Digital Misinformation | | | | |
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> | A. The Plan | | | | |
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< | Section II: Senator Warren's Plan to Fight Digital Misinformation | >
> | B. First Amendment Concerns | | | | |
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< | Subsection A: | >
> | C. | | | | |
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< | Subsection B | | |
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MartinMcSherryFirstPaper 1 - 12 Mar 2020 - Main.MartinMcSherry
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
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Assessing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Fight Digital Misinformation
-- By MartinMcSherry - 12 Mar 2020
Section I: How Social Media Threatens Democracy
Subsection A: The "Post-Truth" Era
Subsub 1
Subsection B: Cambridge Analytica and the Power of Microtargeting
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II: Senator Warren's Plan to Fight Digital Misinformation
Subsection A:
Subsection B
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