DOCSLIB.ORG

Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics Z

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics Z i Network Propaganda ii iii Network Propaganda Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics z YOCHAI BENKLER ROBERT FARIS HAL ROBERTS Network Propaganda. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. © Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts #$%&. Published #$%& by Oxford University Press. iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press CDE Madison Avenue, New York, NY CIICJ, United States of America. © Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts PICE Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. R is is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives V.I International licence (CC BY-NC-ND V.I), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/V.I/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Benkler, Yochai, author. | Faris, Robert, author. | Roberts, Hal (Harold) author. Title: Network propaganda : manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics / Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, PICE. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identia ers: LCCN PICEIPICPC | ISBN DbEICDIDPcJPV ((hardback) : alk. paper) | ISBN DbEICDIDPcJcC ((pbk.) : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States—Election—PICJ. | Communication in politics—United States. | Political campaigns—United States. | Mass media—Political aspects—United States. | Social media—Political aspects—United States. | Internet in political campaigns—United States. | Disinformation—United States—History— PCst century. | Radicalism—United States. | Political culture—United States. | United States— Politics and government—PIID–PICb. | United States—Politics and government—PICb– Classia cation: LCC JKfPJ PICJ .BVJ PICE | DDC cPV.Dbc/IDcP—dcPc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/PICEIPICPC C c f b D E J V P Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America Note to Readers R is publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is based upon sources believed to be accurate and reliable and is intended to be current as of the time it was written. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Also, to cona rm that the information has not been ag ected or changed by recent developments, traditional legal research techniques should be used, including checking primary sources where appropriate. (Based on the Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations.) You may order this or any other Oxford University Press publication by visiting the Oxford University Press website at www.oup.com . v Contents Acknowledgments vii PART ONE: Mapping Disorder %. Epistemic Crisis ' #. (e Architecture of Our Discontent )* '. (e Propaganda Feedback Loop +* PART TWO: Dynamics of Network Propaganda ). Immigration and Islamophobia: Breitbart and the Trump Party %$* *. (e Fox Diet %)* /. Mainstream Media Failure Modes and Self- Healing in a Propaganda- Rich Environment %&1 PART THREE: !e Usual Suspects +. (e Propaganda Pipeline: Hacking the Core from the Periphery ##* &. Are the Russians Coming? #'* 1. Mammon’s Algorithm: Marketing, Manipulation, and Clickbait on Facebook #/1 vi vi Contents PART FOUR: Can Democracy Survive the Internet? %$. Polarization in American Politics #1* %%. (e Origins of Asymmetry '%% %#. Can the Internet Survive Democracy? ')% %'. What Can Men Do Against Such Reckless Hate? '*% %). Conclusion '&% Notes '&1 Index ))' vii Acknowledgments 3456 7889 ;<=;<6<>@6 an account and update from what has been a long intellectual journey for each of us. For well over a decade, we have collected and used data to study, understand, and describe the impact of newly emerging digital communication on society, politics, and democracy. We have not undertaken this journey alone, and this book has beneGted from the input and support of countless people along the way. We would Grst like to thank Ethan Zuckerman for his decade- long partnership with us to support both the intellectual work of this book and the development of the Media Cloud platform that enabled the core analysis in this book. A decade ago, we began developing the technical infrastructure for the data analysis platform which would eventually take the name Media Cloud. Spurred on by debates within the Berkman Klein Center, where Zuckerman, now Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, co- founder and co- Principal Investigator of the Media Cloud project, was a fellow and senior researcher, and across the broader academic community, we sought to develop better tools to empirically study the structure and function of digital media. At that time, the open web was the core of digital communication. Much of our attention was directed at studying the impact of blogs on public discourse while Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were relatively recent additions to the digital landscape. While we debated whether blogging would democratize media production and strengthen, we set about the many years’ process of building the Media Cloud platform to collect, parse, and analyze digital media. (is book is the result of many months of eJort and has only come to be as a result of the generous input of our friends and colleagues from the Berkman Klein Center and beyond. We are especially indebted to our colleagues Nikki Bourassa, Bruce Etling, and Justin Clark, who have made important substantive contributions to this study, supported the overall viii viii Acknowledgments research enterprise, conducted analysis, gathered data, provided input and feedback on this book, and shaped our understanding of the issues. Kira Tebbe provided crucial assistance in the Gnal editing and production of the book. Rebekah Heacock Jones helped get this research oJ the ground with research into political discourse on Twitter. Daniel Dennis Jones worked tirelessly in the production and publication of this work. We beneGted from the insights and eJorts of Zach Wehrwein and Devin GaJney, who helps us to track and understand the propagation of frames and narratives from Reddit. Brendan Roach and Michael Jasper provided invaluable research assistance. Jonas Kaiser and Paola Villarreal expanded our thinking around methods and interpretation. Alicia Solow- Niederman worked tirelessly to debug early versions of the analytical methods that were used in this book. Urs Gasser and Jonathan Zittrain have extended valuable support that has enabled us to maintain this research for many years. John Palfrey and Colin Maclay provided critical institutional support for Media Cloud in its early stages. We are grateful to our friends and collaborators at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab who have worked with us in the development of the Media Cloud platform and contributed to the applied research it has supported. (is work has built upon and fostered an unusually close and productive collaboration between our two academic centers. Rahul Bhargava, Linas Valiukas, and Cindy Bishop have helped to extend and translate the ideas and concepts of a large-scale media analysis platform into the current functionality of the Media Cloud platform upon which this research relied. Fernando Bermejo has been a valuable supporter and contributor to our collective work in this Geld. Natalie Gyenes and Anushka Shah provided research insights and Media Cloud expertise. (is research has also beneGted from contributions of many outside the Berkman Klein community. John Kelly and Vlad Barash provided important insights into the role of social media in the election, leading us to new hypotheses and ideas that shaped the book’s development. Matt Higgins helped lay a Grm foundation of thought and hypotheses upon which this work was completed. Philipp Nowak provided valuable early research assistance. Participants of Data & Society’s Propaganda & Media Manipulation Workshop in May #$%+ provided valuable feedback and critical cross- examination that helped steer our earlier work toward this Gnal version. We are also indebted to our editors at the Oxford University Press, Alex Flach and Emma Taylor, without whose initiative and support we would not have translated and extended our research into this book. ix Acknowledgments ix (e research on the post- election period and additional research necessary to understand
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Copyrighted Material
    1 The Duality of Peer Production Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free‐Riding Firms Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, and Christian Pentzold 1 Introduction There never was a “tragedy of the commons”: Garrett Hardin’s overgrazing farmers were victims of a tragedy of self‐management, as they failed to collectively regulate, as equals, their common pasture. When Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, the immemorial notion that there are only two types of goods in the world – private and public, coordinated by markets or the state – was finally put to rest. In the most general terms, peer producers are people who create and manage common‐pool resources together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons are non‐rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non‐excludable (no‐one can prevent others from using them, through prop- erty rights for example). So, practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers,” however we argue that peer production has a normative dimension, so that what chiefly char- acterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014, p. 2). Though there are many historical antecedents, the term “peer pro- duction,” as an object of public and scientific interest, is historically situated in the early 2000s.1 The meanings associated with a term that is deeply connected to the Internet as it was 20 years ago are bound to change.
    [Show full text]
  • Fake News in British Politics
    Fake News in British Politics Name: Chris Ruiter Stud. No.: 10463054 Date: 19-07-2018 Research project: European Politics & Policy in Times of Crisis Supervisor: Rosa Sanchez Salgado Second Reader: Dimitris Bouris Institution: University of Amsterdam Thesis is written for the degree of Master of Science (MSc) In political Science: Political Theory (Political Science) 1 Acknowledgements Over the course of my academic career, there have been many people who helped me get to where I am today. First I would like to thank Rosa Sanchez Salgado for supervising this thesis and helping me get to the finish line. The second person I would like to thank Dimitris Bouris, for taking the time to be the second reader of this thesis. Furthermore, I would like to thank all the teachers who helped me gain the knowledge I have today. And last but not least, I would like to thank my friends and family who convinced me to continue working on this project and hopefully bring it to a good end. 2 Table of Content Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 2 List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................. 5 Part 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 6 1.2: Relevance ........................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • What Is Gab? a Bastion of Free Speech Or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?
    What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber? Savvas Zannettou Barry Bradlyn Emiliano De Cristofaro Cyprus University of Technology Princeton Center for Theoretical Science University College London [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Haewoon Kwak Michael Sirivianos Gianluca Stringhini Qatar Computing Research Institute Cyprus University of Technology University College London & Hamad Bin Khalifa University [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Jeremy Blackburn University of Alabama at Birmingham [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn. 2018. What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?. In WWW at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about ’18 Companion: The 2018 Web Conference Companion, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558. recent research has shown that they influence how false informa- 3191531 tion reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web’s information ecosystem. 1 INTRODUCTION In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created The Web’s information ecosystem is composed of multiple com- as an alternative to Twitter.
    [Show full text]
  • FAKE NEWS!”: President Trump’S Campaign Against the Media on @Realdonaldtrump and Reactions to It on Twitter
    “FAKE NEWS!”: President Trump’s Campaign Against the Media on @realdonaldtrump and Reactions To It on Twitter A PEORIA Project White Paper Michael Cornfield GWU Graduate School of Political Management [email protected] April 10, 2019 This report was made possible by a generous grant from William Madway. SUMMARY: This white paper examines President Trump’s campaign to fan distrust of the news media (Fox News excepted) through his tweeting of the phrase “Fake News (Media).” The report identifies and illustrates eight delegitimation techniques found in the twenty-five most retweeted Trump tweets containing that phrase between January 1, 2017 and August 31, 2018. The report also looks at direct responses and public reactions to those tweets, as found respectively on the comment thread at @realdonaldtrump and in random samples (N = 2500) of US computer-based tweets containing the term on the days in that time period of his most retweeted “Fake News” tweets. Along with the high percentage of retweets built into this search, the sample exhibits techniques and patterns of response which are identified and illustrated. The main findings: ● The term “fake news” emerged in public usage in October 2016 to describe hoaxes, rumors, and false alarms, primarily in connection with the Trump-Clinton presidential contest and its electoral result. ● President-elect Trump adopted the term, intensified it into “Fake News,” and directed it at “Fake News Media” starting in December 2016-January 2017. 1 ● Subsequently, the term has been used on Twitter largely in relation to Trump tweets that deploy it. In other words, “Fake News” rarely appears on Twitter referring to something other than what Trump is tweeting about.
    [Show full text]
  • Book Review – Yochai Benkler, the Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
    CLPE Research Paper 6/2007 Vol. 03 No. 02 (2007) James Brink Book Review – Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Keywords: networked economy, internet regulation, peer production JEL Classification: K10, K29, K42 Osgoode Hall Law School, York University 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3 Email: [email protected] Published in (2006) 7 German Law Journal 853, online: http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=765. 967505 CLPE Research Paper 6/2007 Vol. 03 No. 02 (2007) James Brink BOOK REVIEW – YOCHAI BENKLER, THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS: HOW SOCIAL PRODUCTION TRANSFORMS MARKETS AND FREEDOM Benkler argues that the West is engaged in an escalating culture war between the industrial information economy—a one-way, capital- intensive, and professionally-produced model that has held sway for 150 years—and the networked information economy (NIE)—a many- to-many, low-capital, and cooperative model that has been emerging in the last 15 years. The NIE is built on the infrastructure of the internet and is characterized by characterized by (1) non-proprietary strategies, (2) rising non-market production, and (3) more effective, large-scale cooperative efforts; in other words, “peer production of information, knowledge, and culture.” These aspects challenge our economies and our polities, and hold significant promise for enhancing personal autonomy; however, Benkler, in writing what amounts to a manifesto for the internet, pays little attention to the way in which the NIE is vulnerable to technical capture in the same way the industrial information economy is vulnerable to capital capture, taking a “wait-and-see” approach to regulatory intervention.
    [Show full text]
  • Online Media and the 2016 US Presidential Election
    Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Faris, Robert M., Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. 2017. Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33759251 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA AUGUST 2017 PARTISANSHIP, Robert Faris Hal Roberts PROPAGANDA, & Bruce Etling Nikki Bourassa DISINFORMATION Ethan Zuckerman Yochai Benkler Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is the result of months of effort and has only come to be as a result of the generous input of many people from the Berkman Klein Center and beyond. Jonas Kaiser and Paola Villarreal expanded our thinking around methods and interpretation. Brendan Roach provided excellent research assistance. Rebekah Heacock Jones helped get this research off the ground, and Justin Clark helped bring it home. We are grateful to Gretchen Weber, David Talbot, and Daniel Dennis Jones for their assistance in the production and publication of this study. This paper has also benefited from contributions of many outside the Berkman Klein community. The entire Media Cloud team at the Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab has been essential to this research.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikimania 2006 Invited Speaker Biographies
    Wikimania 2006 Invited Speaker has been a forceful advocate for open science and open access scientific publishing - the free release of the Biographies material and intellectual product of the scientific research. He is co-Founder of Public Library of Science Yochai Benkler is Professor of Law at Yale Law (PLoS). He serves on the PLoS board, and is an advisor School. His research focuses on commons-based to Science Commons. approaches to managing resources in networked environments. His publications include “The Wealth of Rishab Aiyer Ghosh first developed and sold free Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets” and software in 1994. He switched from writing in C and “Freedom and Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the assembly to English, and has been writing about the Firm”. economics of free software and collaborative production since 1994. He is the Founding Karen Christensen is the CEO of Berkshire International and Managing Editor of First Monday, the Publishing group, a reference work publisher known for most widely read peer-reviewed on-line journal of the specialty encyclopedias. Her primary responsibility is Internet, and Senior Researcher at the Maastricht bringing together global teams and building Economic Research Institute on Innovation and relationships with experts and organizations around the Technology (MERIT) at the University of Maastricht world. Karen has also served as an encyclopedia editor; and United Nations University, the Netherlands. In as coeditor on the “Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport” 2000 he coordinated the European Union -funded (June 2005) and “Global Perspectives on the United States” FLOSS project, the most comprehensive early study of (three volumes, forthcoming), and as senior editor of free/libre/open source users and developers.
    [Show full text]
  • Peer Production of Survivable Infrastructures
    Peer Production of Survivable Critical Infrastructures The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Yochai Benkler, Peer Production of Survivable Critical Infrastructures, in The Law and Economics of Cybersecurity 73 (Mark F. Grady & Francesco Parisi eds., 2005). Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37078634 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © Yochai Benkler 2004. This version of the work is released under the creative commons noncommercial attribution license. To view a copy of the license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Peer Production of Survivable Critical Infrastructures Yochai Benkler* Abstract The paper describes an approach to provisioning survivable critical communications and computation infrastructures by deploying radically distributed, peer-based systems for communication, computation, and data storage and retrieval. The paper focuses on system survivability as an approach to robustness, rather than on artifact-oriented hardness or impregnability. Based on a survey of experience with ad hoc wireless mesh networks, peer-to-peer storage and retrieval systems, and distributed computing, the paper identifies a class of solutions that mobilize redundant capacity resident in privately owned, extant unlicensed wireless devices, desktops, laptops, and handhelds around the periphery of the network to provide redundant, adaptive, self-healing systems.
    [Show full text]
  • Striking the Right Chord: a Theoretical Approach to Balancing Artists’ Intellectual Property Rights on Remix Audio-Sharing Platforms
    \\jciprod01\productn\C\CRN\102-1\CRN104.txt unknown Seq: 1 8-NOV-16 13:30 NOTE STRIKING THE RIGHT CHORD: A THEORETICAL APPROACH TO BALANCING ARTISTS’ INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS ON REMIX AUDIO-SHARING PLATFORMS Nicole Greenstein† INTRODUCTION ........................................... 212 R I. BACKGROUND ..................................... 216 R A. The Rise of Remix Culture and the Copyright Backlash ..................................... 216 R B. Licensing Sampling-Based Music ............. 218 R C. Remixes and the Fair Use Defense ............ 219 R II. A REMIXER’S LABOR OF LOVE: LOCKEAN THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ............................ 221 R A. An Introduction to Locke’s Labor Theory ...... 221 R B. A Lockean Approach to Intellectual Property and Remix Rights ............................ 223 R C. The Law of Accession and the Improving Remixer ...................................... 226 R III. FOSTERING MUSICAL CREATION: UTILITARIAN THEORIES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ......................... 229 R A. The Tragedy of the Free Rider ................. 229 R B. The Freedom in the Commons ................ 232 R IV. THE SOUL BEHIND THE SONGS: PERSONHOOD THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ......................... 234 R A. An Introduction to Personhood Theory ........ 234 R B. The Personhood Right in Remix Culture ....... 235 R CONCLUSION: SOLVING THE REMIX RIGHTS STALEMATE ........ 237 R † University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 2014; Cornell Law School, Candidate for J.D., 2017; Publishing Editor, Cornell Law Review Volume 102. I would like to thank Professor Gregory Alexander for contributing inspiration and thoughtful comments to this Note, as well as Professors Oskar Liivak and Michael Olivas for their excellent instruction in intellectual property. Thanks also to the members of the Cornell Law Review for their hard work in preparing this Note for publication. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to my family and friends for their endless support throughout law school and all of my endeavors.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019) Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media Benjamin D. Horne,* Jeppe Nørregaard,y Sibel Adalı* Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute*, Technical University of Denmarky [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Vos, and Shoemaker 2009; Allcott and Gentzkow 2017; Mele et al. 2017). Thus, we may have a more diverse set of In this paper, we analyze content sharing between news news to read than in years past, but the standards of quality sources in the alternative and mainstream media using a dataset of 713K articles and 194 sources. We find that content have wavered, creating a new set of concerns. sharing happens in tightly formed communities, and these This rise in low-quality and potentially malicious news communities represent relatively homogeneous portions of producers has been the focus of many recent studies such the media landscape. Through a mix-method analysis, we as those focusing on detecting false content (Potthast et al. find several primary content sharing behaviors. First, we find 2017; Popat et al. 2016; Singhania, Fernandez, and Rao that the vast majority of shared articles are only shared with 2017; Horne et al. 2018; Baly et al. 2018). Some other stud- similar news sources (i.e. same community). Second, we find ies have focused on the tactics used to spread low-quality that despite these echo-chambers of sharing, specific sources, news, such as the use of social bots (Shao et al. 2017) such as The Drudge Report, mix content from both main- stream and conspiracy communities.
    [Show full text]
  • Analysis of Election Fraud in the 2020 US Election
    2020 Analysis of Election Fraud in the 2020 US Election Insights from pressrelations GmbH Analysis period: 08/01/2016 –11/14/2020 2020 REPORTING OVER TIME The Subject of Election Fraud in US Media In 2016, Trump prepares the ground for his current accusations of election fraud by fraud - especially in the last few days. Starting on Election Day, reporting on the topic speaking of "illegal" votes for the first time. This narrative will be carried over one-to- was initially quite hesitant. The topic was mainly picked up by untrustworthy media one to the mail-in ballots in 2020. The narrative that Democrats wanted to "steal" the outlets. Reliable outlets picked up the topic after November 12th, right after Trump's election comes as a consequence of their call for absentee voting due to the tweet about the "deleted votes". coronavirus pandemic. The various allegations related to the technology for voting and counting votes used by Dominion Voting Systems make up a large part of the discussion about election Coverage on the topic of election fraud by number of contributions: August 2016 - November 2020 6.000 US Election 2020: Trump claims the election was stolen by fraud 5.000 Midterms 2018: Trump 4.000 accuses Democratic Party of US Elections 2016: manipulation of ballots by Trump: "Election could be millions of illegal third parties postponed to prevent mail-in 3.000 immigrants vote, election fraud". according to Donald Trump: "Hillary Clinton won 2.000 Trump 'popular vote' thanks to 3-5 million illegal votes" 1.000 0 Apr Apr Apr Apr Jan
    [Show full text]
  • Disinformation, and Influence Campaigns on Twitter 'Fake News'
    Disinformation, ‘Fake News’ and Influence Campaigns on Twitter OCTOBER 2018 Matthew Hindman Vlad Barash George Washington University Graphika Contents Executive Summary . 3 Introduction . 7 A Problem Both Old and New . 9 Defining Fake News Outlets . 13 Bots, Trolls and ‘Cyborgs’ on Twitter . 16 Map Methodology . 19 Election Data and Maps . 22 Election Core Map Election Periphery Map Postelection Map Fake Accounts From Russia’s Most Prominent Troll Farm . 33 Disinformation Campaigns on Twitter: Chronotopes . 34 #NoDAPL #WikiLeaks #SpiritCooking #SyriaHoax #SethRich Conclusion . 43 Bibliography . 45 Notes . 55 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study is one of the largest analyses to date on how fake news spread on Twitter both during and after the 2016 election campaign. Using tools and mapping methods from Graphika, a social media intelligence firm, we study more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter accounts that linked to more than 600 fake and conspiracy news outlets. Crucially, we study fake and con- spiracy news both before and after the election, allowing us to measure how the fake news ecosystem has evolved since November 2016. Much fake news and disinformation is still being spread on Twitter. Consistent with other research, we find more than 6.6 million tweets linking to fake and conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election. Yet disinformation continues to be a substantial problem postelection, with 4.0 million tweets linking to fake and conspiracy news publishers found in a 30-day period from mid-March to mid-April 2017. Contrary to claims that fake news is a game of “whack-a-mole,” more than 80 percent of the disinformation accounts in our election maps are still active as this report goes to press.
    [Show full text]