We share a huge amount of information with such platforms. Perhaps the best illustration of just how much data tech companies can collect comes from a 2013 Facebook study.[94] They looked at who had typed comments on the platform but never posted them. The research team noted that the contents of the posts weren’t sent back to Facebook’s servers, just a record of whether someone had started typing. Maybe that was the case for this study. But regardless, it shows the level of detail with which companies can track our online behaviour and interactions. Or even, in this case, a lack of interactions.
Given the power of our social media data, organisations can have a lot to gain by accessing it. According to Carol Davidsen, who worked on the Obama campaign in the 2012 US presidential election, Facebook’s privacy settings at the time made it possible to download the friendship network of everyone who’d agreed to support the campaign on the platform. These friendship connections gave the campaign a huge amount of information. ‘We were actually able to ingest the entire social network of the US that’s on Facebook,’ she later said.[95] Facebook eventually removed this ability to gather friendship data. Davidsen claimed that, because the Republicans had been slow off the mark, the Democrats had information that their opponents didn’t have. Such data analysis didn’t break any rules, but the experience raised questions about how information is collected and who has control of it. ‘Who owns the fact that you and I are friends?’ as Davidsen put it.
At the time, many hailed the Obama campaign’s use of data as innovative.[96] It was a modern method for a new political era. Just as the finance industry had got excited about new mortgage products in the 1990s, social media was seen as something that would change politics for the better. But much like those financial products, it wasn’t an attitude that would last.
‘Hey lovely you gonna vote in the election? & for who?’ In the run up to the 2017 UK general election, thousands of people looking for a date on the Tinder app got a political chat-up line instead. Londoners Charlotte Goodman and Yara Rodrigues Fowler had wanted to encourage their fellow twenty-somethings to vote for Labour, so designed a chatbot to reach a wide audience.
Once a volunteer installed the bot, it automatically set their Tinder location to somewhere in a marginal constituency, swiped ‘yes’ to every person, and started chatting to any matches. If the initial message was well received, volunteers could take over and start talking for real. The bot sent over 30,000 messages in total, reaching people who canvassers might not usually talk to. ‘The occasional match was disappointed to be talking to a bot instead of a human, but there was very little negative feedback,’ Goodman and Rodrigues Fowler later wrote. ‘Tinder is too casual a platform for users to feel hoodwinked by some political conversation.’[97]
Bots make it possible to have a vast number of interactions at the same time. With a linked network of bots, people can perform actions at a scale that simply wouldn’t be feasible if a human had to do it all manually. These botnets can consist of thousands, if not millions of accounts. Like human users, these bots can post content, start conversations, and promote ideas. However, the role of such accounts has come under scrutiny in recent years. In 2016, two votes shook the Western world: in June, Britain voted to leave the eu; in November, Donald Trump won the US presidency. What had caused these events? In the aftermath, speculation grew that false information – much of it created by Russia and far-right groups – had been spread widely during these elections. Vast numbers of people in the UK, and then vast numbers in the US, had been duped by fake stories posted by bots and other questionable accounts.
At first glance, the data seem to support this story. There’s evidence that over 100 million Americans may have seen Facebook posts backed by Russia during the 2016 election. And on Twitter, almost 700,000 people in the US were exposed to Russian-linked propaganda, spread by 50,000 bot accounts.[98] The idea that many voters fell for propaganda posted by fake websites and foreign spies is an appealing narrative, especially for those of us who were politically opposed to Brexit and Trump. But if we look more closely at the evidence, this simple story starts to fall apart.
Despite Russia-linked propaganda circulating during the 2016 US election, Duncan Watts and David Rothschild have pointed out that a lot of other content was as well. Facebook users may have been exposed to Russian content, but during that period American users saw over 11 trillion posts on the platform. For every Russian post people were exposed to, on average there were almost 90,000 other pieces of content. Meanwhile on Twitter, less than 0.75 per cent of election-related tweets came from accounts linked with Russia. ‘In sheer numerical terms, the information to which voters were exposed during the election campaign was overwhelmingly produced not by fake news sites or even by alt-right media sources, but by household names,’ noted Watts and Rothschild.[99] Indeed, it’s been estimated that in the first year of his campaign, Trump gained almost $2bn worth of free mainstream media coverage.[100] The pair highlighted the media focus on the Hillary Clinton email controversy as one example of what outlets chose to inform their readers about. ‘In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.’
Other
