Social Networks and Misinformation: a Threat to Democracy
Social media has gotten a lot of flack for facilitating Russian Interference, fake bots, and propaganda spreading. A large portion of this misinformation is circulated around, and many people trust what they are reading. Due to this, there is a large research effort to fully understand how social networks, “fake news,” and the internet all facilitate potential attacks on democracy.
To illustrate this, in an article published in Nature, the authors carried out a social experiment in which 2,500+ people participated in an online game to further understand how information and social networks can affect their decision making process. Groups of 24 participants were split up into two different teams, and allowed to co-mingle only with 5 others within their group of 24 – thus making 4 distinct sections. The goal was to get a supermajority (>60%) of the vote to receive monetary compensation, if neither team achieved 60%, both sides would get nothing. The incentive here is coming to a compromise. What resulted was what authors coined “information gerrymandering.”
The game designs were one of three for each group: a non-gerrymandered board outcome wherein teams negotiated equally, less likely to end in a deadlock; a highly gerrymandered board wherein one team has an obvious advantage, less likely to end in a deadlock; and a symmetrically gerrymandered board wherein neither team holds any advantage, highly likely to end up in a deadlock.
This phenomena, researchers described, is similar to what is occurring on social media with the spread of information. Similarly to what we discussed in class in one of the first lectures, with both right- and left-leaning media sources tending to link to only similarly aligned resources, the likelihood of any compromise decreases as chance of deadlock increases. Thus, it seems as though this phenomenon of information gerrymandering throughout social networks & media is exacerbating the polarization in today’s political climate. This is an obvious threat to the American Democratic process.