The Philippines social network has been weaponized by bots to spread fake news
Rappler explains how social media in the Philippines is shaping its political climate drastically due to the spread of fake news through the networks on Facebook in order to “Weaponise the Internet”. Specifically, during the election in 2016, President Duterte’s Campaign used fake accounts, trolls and bots to take over the social network of the Philippines and shift the public opinion to favor President Duterte, and to help him win the election. They primarily used Facebook because its algorithms allow for easy spread of news and extension of influence over many networks in order to create echo chambers of information. Rappler uses the example of a campaign on Twitter to show how bots and fake accounts were used to hinder the promotional campaign of the telephone company Smart #SmartFreeInternet. Basically, if the hashtag was used, a bot would message your account with facts and opinions to basically enable fear and doubt to the user, and thus effectively shutting down the campaign.
This relates to the INFO 2040 because the way the Philippines social network was taken advantage of was through the knowledge of how networks work, and how to use bots and fake accounts to enable the spread through these networks. For President Duterte’s campaign, the head of social media managed 500 volunteers that actively campaigned on social media for one of four groups: overseas Filipino workers, Luzon island, The Visayan islands, and Mindanao island. Although it was a decentralized campaign, these four different groups were able to cater information to the specific needs of each group in order to sway them to favor President Duterte. Although the social media manager says all of the accounts used to campaign were real people, it was found that there were at least 26 fake accounts on Facebook that spread fake news to a network of at least 3 million other accounts. This problem of identifying spam accounts and bots is closely tied to what we studied in INFO 2040. The concept of strongly connected components in networks can be used to weed out fake accounts and eliminate fake news from spreading. This story of how the social network was used to drastically change the election results due to the manipulation of people through bots shows the importance of understanding networks, and specifically how fake accounts could be eliminated with the concept of strongly connected components.
https://www.rappler.com/