Social Media’s Impact on Elections
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-to-hack-the-midterm-election-with-social-media/
Individuals as well as groups that want to influence foreign affairs are able to via the systematic spread of fake news. This was apparent in 2016 and continues to be an issue today. Since social media is so heavily used in the United States, people seeking to spread their ideals and views are able to rapidly reach a large audience; an audience large enough such that a non insignificant portion would likely believe or support these potentially unfounded views. The article found that the interference, although intended to cause people to adopt specific ideas that would further divide Americans and view Russia favorably, had the additional effect of sowing confusion regarding important topics that require clarity. Similarly, other countries have since adopted social media propaganda tactics in order to incite discord in enemy states while bolstering their own image.
In this course, we have studied the effects of weak vs. strong ties, and found that the addition of certain ties can cause instability. For example, the vast majority of fake bot-ties can be seen as weak ties. The addition of such weak ties into the existing network of an individual caused instability; a number of Americans that interacted with the fake bots became confused. For the individuals that experienced a stronger tie, such as accepting the misinformation, the effect is even more apparent, these individuals believed facts that were in reality, lies and thus these fake bots caused a rift between reality and illusion for these individuals, or more instability. Another interesting connection was from the last problem from Problem Set 1 in which fake accounts were “found” by looking at the closed ties of an individual, however the article mentioned the addition of real accounts owned by real people that would further spread the fake news. This coupled with the multitude of fake accounts make targeting and eliminating fake news more difficult by simply looking at the connections of a network.