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Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia

Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia

 

This article is extremely interesting since it is very relevant to today’s social media and brings light to many topics we learn in Networks. In this article, the author analyzes Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s role in politics and the elections. The Democrats are upset that Facebook was able to let Ads be bought in Russia to influence elections. Republicans are upset that these companies seem to be infringing on free speech by trying to repress conservative views. One thing that came into question was the algorithms used on these sites that filter what content is available. While Facebook in theory connects all people from all over the world, in reality, these algorithms tend to only show content that agrees with the user’s beliefs and values, as this will entice users to use the site as much as possible and therefore, these companies are able to maximize their profits. Since these algorithms seem to bring together already similar people, information cascades are formed as prior people’s decisions influence how others decide. This just continues the trend of bringing same-minded people together and create an echo chamber.

By bringing like-minded people even closer together through political affiliations, people are even less likely to be welcome to other views which continues to further polarize politics. This should be the opposite effect that social media forums have on society as it tends to break people apart rather than bring them together. This is relevant to our coursework because of network theory and the role information cascades play in this current issue. As we learned in class, information cascades can spread unreliable information if the people who start the cascade are influenced by this information. Then before we know it, a whole string of people are deciding the same thing as they are all getting influenced by each other, rather than looking at the big picture and the facts on both sides. In society today, we want to prevent escalation of further closed-mindedness and the current algorithms in place on social media sites need to be altered to meet these needs.

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