This might seem to suggest that we shouldn’t be concerned about bots and questionable websites, but again it’s not quite that simple. When it comes to online manipulation, it turns out that something much subtler – and far more troubling – has been happening.
Benito mussolini once said ‘it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep’. According to the Twitter user @ilduce2016, though, the quote actually comes from Donald Trump. Originally created by a pair of journalists at Gawker, this Twitter bot has sent thousands of tweets misattributing Mussolini lines to Trump. Eventually one of the posts caught Trump’s attention: on 28 February 2016, just after the fourth Republican primary, he retweeted the lion quote.[102]
Whereas some social media bots target a mass audience, others have a much narrower range. Known as ‘honey pot bots’, they aim to attract the attention of specific users and lure them into responding.[103] Remember how Twitter cascades often rely on a single ‘broadcast’ event? If you want to get a message to spread, it helps if someone high profile can amplify it for you. Because many outbreaks won’t spark, it also helps to have a bot that can repeatedly try: @ilduce2016 posted over two thousand times before Trump finally retweeted a quote. Bot creators seem to be aware of how powerful this approach can be. When Twitter bots posted dubious content during 2016–17, they disproportionately targeted popular users.[104]
It’s not just bots that use this targeting strategy. Following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, there were reports that the shooter had been a member of a small white supremacist group based in the state capital Tallahassee. However, the story was a hoax. It had started with trolls on online forums, who’d managed to persuade curious reporters that it was a genuine claim. ‘All it takes is a single article,’ noted one user. ‘And everyone else picks up the story.’[105]
Although researchers like Watts and Nyhan have suggested that people didn’t get much of their information from dubious online sources in 2016, it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. ‘I think it really matters, but it doesn’t quite matter in the way that people think it does,’ said Watts. When fringe groups post false ideas or stories on Twitter, they aren’t necessarily trying to reach mass audiences. Not initially, at least. Instead, they are often targeting those journalists or politicians who spend a lot of time on social media. The hope is that these people will pick up on the idea and spread it to a wider audience. During 2017, for instance, journalists regularly quoted messages from a Twitter user named @wokeluisa, who appeared to be a young political science graduate from New York. In reality, though, the account was run by a Russian troll group, who were apparently targeting media outlets to build credibility and get messages amplified.[106] This is a common tactic among groups who want ideas to spread. ‘Journalists aren’t just part of the game of media manipulation,’ suggested Whitney Phillips, who researches online media at Syracuse University. ‘They’re the trophy.’[107]
Once a media outlet picks up on a story, it can trigger a feedback effect, with others covering it too. A few years ago, I inadvertently experienced this media feedback first hand. It started when I tipped off a journalist at The Times about a mathematical quirk in the new National Lottery (at the time, I’d just written a book about the science of betting). Two days later the story appeared in print. The morning it was published, I got an 8.30am message from a producer at ITV’s This Morning, who’d seen the story. By 10.30am, I was live on national television. Soon after, I received a message from BBC Radio 4; they’d also read the article, and wanted to get me on their flagship lunchtime show. More coverage would follow. I’d end up reaching an audience of millions, all from that one initial story.
My experience was a harmless, if surreal, accident. But others have made a strategic effort to exploit media feedback effects. This is how false information can spread widely, despite the fact that most of the public avoid fringe websites. In essence, it’s a form of information laundering. Just as drug cartels might funnel their money through legitimate businesses to hide its origins, online manipulators will get credible sources to amplify and spread their message, so the wider population will hear the idea from a familiar personality or outlet rather than an anonymous account.
Such laundering makes it possible to influence debate and coverage surrounding an issue. With careful targeting and amplification, manipulators can create the illusion of widespread popularity for specific policies or political candidates. In marketing, this strategy is known as ‘astroturfing’, because it artificially mimics grassroots support. This makes it harder for journalists and politicians to ignore the story, so eventually it becomes real news.
Of course, media influence isn’t a recent development; it’s long been known that journalists can shape the news cycle. When Evelyn Waugh wrote his 1938 satirical novel Scoop, he included a tale about a star reporter named Wenlock Jakes, who is sent to cover a revolution. Unfortunately, Jakes oversleeps on his train and wakes up in the wrong country. Not realising his mistake, he makes up a story about ‘barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine
