Are Google, Twitter and Facebook doing enough to protect the 2020 election?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/google-twitter-facebook-protect-2020-election-age-information/story?id=66527631
It is widely known that the 2016 United States Presidential Election was the victim of major interference from foreign governments, especially the Russian government. This interference was primarily in the form of influencing the voters through strategic targeted advertising and the propagation of fake news on social media. Consequently, the major players in the social media industry, namely Facebook, Twitter, and Google, have been trying their best to curb this foreign influence from affecting the 2020 United States Presidential Election. However, to determine whether they have done enough in this regard, we must first take a look at how ideas spread through a network.
Two major factors that affect the spread of an idea through a network are centralized hubs and the network effect. Centralized hubs are nodes that have a large number of other nodes connected directly to them, which gives these centralized hubs a large amount of power and influence in the network. This makes centralized hubs key enablers to the diffusion process. Network effects are positive feedback loops that cause the spread of an idea in a network to increase exponentially. Network effects occur when people in the network gain value from other people adopting the same idea. These network effects usually give the diffusion process a strong tipping point, which is a point at which the spread of an idea goes from being sublinear to superlinear. Therefore, the amount and power of the centralized hubs in a network and the strength and tipping point of the network effect greatly impact how an idea spreads through a network.
We can now begin to understand how targeted advertising and fake news affects the opinions of people on a social network such as Facebook or Twitter. Due to the presence of strong centralized hubs in these networks such major news outlets and popular social media influencers, any entity wanting to spread fake news needs only to influence these centralized hubs in order to spread their ideas to a large number of people in a short amount of time. Foreign governments wanting to affect public opinion can either plant their fake news in the centralized hubs themselves or use techniques such as targeted advertising to influence these hubs, which in turn will influence their connected nodes. Additionally, the use of artificial intelligence to tailor a user’s news feed based on their previous activity leads to a high degree of clustering in such social media networks. This essentially causes echo chambers where people are surrounded by only those people in the same circle of influence, thus reaffirming their beliefs and rejecting any newer ones, which enhances the power of the network effect.
Getting back to our initial point of discussion, websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have taken some steps to curb the spread of fake news, or as they call it, “information disorder”. These steps include making political advertising more transparent by making advertisers provide identifying documentation and declare who is paying for the spot, or in the case of Twitter, banning political advertising outright. However, these changes are not enough as they do not deal with the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph. In my opinion, the two most effective ways for these websites to tackle the fake news problem is to better police the centralized hubs and to reduce the amount of clustering in the network. The centralized hubs must be policed more closely than regular users due to the high amount of power these hubs hold in the network. This policing could include things like rigorously fact-checking the posts made by these hubs as well as increasing the transparency behind their posts. To reduce the amount of clustering in the network, and thus the strength of the network effect, these websites should modify their news feeds so that users are exposed to information from all different ends of the political spectrum, which would enable them to consider differing viewpoints instead of being stuck in the echo chamber described above.
These changes are definitely not simple to implement, but if the most popular social media platforms of today are truly dedicated to achieving their goal of preventing foreign interference in the 2020 United States Presidential Election, such drastic actions must be taken.