Black-market bots, duped humans are responsible for derailing elections with fake news

[turbinetree]

Source: Think Progress

After combing through 17 million tweets in the 10 days leading up to the French presidential election, a new study was able to determine exactly when and how Twitter bots fueled a disinformation campaign against now-elected French President Emmanuel Macron, Venture Beat reported.

The study, led by computer science researcher Emilio Ferrara at the University of Southern California, discovered a subset of those 17 million tweets from more than 2 million Twitter users dedicated to spreading false documents dubbed the Macron Leaks that discussing the election.


The online campaign against Macron started on the afternoon of April 30, peaking at nearly 300 tweets per minute in the days leading up to the election, the study found. Of the 17 million tweets evaluated, a small batch of 350,000 was dedicated to the MacronLeaks — a trove of falsified and doctored documents, photos, and correspondence that purportedly came from Macron and his campaign staff.


The false documents made news headlines but did little to sway French voters, which overwhelmingly elected Macron over nationalist opponent Marine Le Pen. However, Ferrara’s study highlights how influential bots can be when humans get duped by fake news.

Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/black-market-bots-used-in-french-and-us-elections-a06d77f0b465

[maxsolomon]

1. USC should do this for Uh Murka

it will be a fuck ton more than 350K bot tweets.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. If I wanted to do such a study on 2016 election, I do a smaller test on something like Macron.

Maybe he is doing such a study now. Carefully. The alt-right would explode and retaliate.

[Igel]

3. And yet a major and necessary point is still there.

Tell me something ludicrous and I have two choices: Accept it or not.

We keep pushing responsibility off on others to make us infantile while assuming others will take care of us: But if I swallow a foolish lie it's because I'm foolish. We can dispute where "foolish lie" becomes "fiendishly clever and plausible" later.

To some extent, the French government wisely protect their charges from themselves--hardly a resounding note of praise--by establishing a press blackout. (It also serves, more importantly, to protect the front runner from disparaging, although possibly true, accusations at the last minute.)

Relieve the populace of responsibility is a winning idea, as long as they don't realize what they've lost: in other words, feed them, entertain them, and convince them they do not bear responsibility for their own mistakes, but do so in a way that protects their innate dignity and authority. (They're typically predisposed to exaggerate the later, so it's easy enough to do.) Not my idea--Teddy D's idea, put in the mouth of a fictional Catholic in talking to a unwanted Jew.