Analysis – Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia
Analysis – Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia
by Antone Christianson-Galina
The article states that Facebook, Twitter, and Google testify during the Senate Intelligence Hearing on fake news, free speech, and Russia. Our Political Analyst Antone Christianson-Galina examines the algorithms that have huge factors of politics through social networks. Democratic senators argued that these companies allowed the Russian government to influence the 2016 election by purchasing advertisements on social networks.
However, the Republicans argued that these big companies hampered their campaign by banning Marsha Blackburn’s advertisement on Twitter. Due to this political entanglement, the Senate Intelligence Hearing brought Colin Stretch, Legal Counsel of Facebook, Richard Salgado, Law Enforcement and Information Security Director of Google and General Counsel Kent Walker, and Sean Edgett, Twitter’s acting general counsel to Capitol Hill.
During the hearings, the tech companies were asked about their screening process. While Colin Stretch of Facebook defended himself that they use algorithms to filter out hate speech and stop bots, Senator Mark Warner challenged his argument. How are you going to sort this out, consistent with the basic values of this country? And how do the mysterious algorithms work?
We first start off with the basic network theory in order to understand how the algorithms work. The groups that we are looking in are homogenous groups that information cascades happen. Information cascade is a phenomenon described in behavioral economics and network theory where people make the same decision in a sequential fashion. Thus, it can be referred to as a situation where similar things or processes connected after the other. The structure of social networks creates information cascades and echo chambers. We have to be aware that echo chambers show only one perspective of opinions and they block out the other perspectives. Thus, this causes a homogenous group of people to have biased opinions. For this instance, these companies have to come up with other solutions in order to solve the problem of fake news and advertisements.