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"Online manipulation."
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May contain lies : how stories, statistics, and studies exploit our biases - and what we can do about it
\"Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions. In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples--from a wellness guru's tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder's death--Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof. Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics--the science of cause and effect--ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better decisions\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Troll Army
From spreading lies about politicians or business moguls to promoting or slandering a particular celebrity, the ‘Troll Armies’ of The Philippines are hired keyboard warriors working around the clock, furiously posting on thousands of fake social media accounts. Join us as we investigate the people behind the troll armies, how they operate and how they can be stopped.
Streaming Video
Misbelief : what makes rational people believe irrational things
\"Misinformation affects all of us on a daily basis, from social media to larger political challenges, from casual conversations in supermarkets to even our closest relationships. While we recognize the dangers that misinformation poses, the problem is complex, far beyond what policing social media alone can achieve, and too often our limited solutions are shaped by partisan politics and individual interpretations of truth. ... Ariely argues that to understand the irrational appeal of misinformation, we must first understand the behavior of 'misbelief,' the psychological and social journey that leads people to mistrust accepted truths, entertain alternative facts, and even embrace full-blown conspiracy theories. Misinformation, it turns out, appeals to something innate in all of us, ... and it is only by understanding this psychology that we can blunt its effects\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
General international and U.S. Foreign relations law: The Department of State announces initiatives to counter foreign state information manipulation
Identifying \"[f]oreign information manipulation and interference [FIMI] [as] a national security threat,\" the U.S. Department of State has announced two initiatives to counter FIMI. In January 2024, the Department launched a Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation that \"seeks to develop a common understanding of [the] threat [of FIMI] and establish a common set of action areas from which the United States... [and its] allies and partners... can develop coordinated responses... and protect free and open societies.\" Two months later, the Department unveiled a Democratic Roadmap \"for global policymakers, civil society, and the private sector\" that proposes steps to \"tackle the information integrity challenge in ways that are consistent with democratic values, freedom of expression, and international human rights law.\" The Framework and the Democratic Roadmap join existing and planned multinational counter-FIMI projects, including the Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online (GDIIO), the OECD Hub on Information Integrity, and the UN Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms. These efforts aim to fight what the United States and the European Union (obliquely referring to actions by the Chinese and Russian governments) have jointly described as the \"borderless threat [of foreign state information manipulation] that poses a risk to democratic values, processes, and stability.\" The initiatives have taken on particular importance during a year in which there are major elections around the world, including in the European Union, India, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela. In the United States, governmental action to prevent the spread of misinformation on private platforms raises First Amendment concerns.
Journal Article
A History of Fake Things on the Internet
A Next Big Idea Club \"Must Read\" for December 2023 As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is \"real\" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinner—and that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true. Computer scientist Walter J. Scheirer takes a deep dive into the origins of fake news, conspiracy theories, reports of the paranormal, and other deviations from reality that have become part of mainstream culture, from image manipulation in the nineteenth-century darkroom to the literary stylings of large language models like ChatGPT. Scheirer investigates the origins of Internet fakes, from early hoaxes that traversed the globe via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), USENET, and a new messaging technology called email, to today's hyperrealistic, AI-generated Deepfakes. An expert in machine learning and recognition, Scheirer breaks down the technical advances that made new developments in digital deception possible, and shares behind-the-screens details of early Internet-era pranks that have become touchstones of hacker lore. His story introduces us to the visionaries and mischief-makers who first deployed digital fakery and continue to influence how digital manipulation works—and doesn't—today: computer hackers, digital artists, media forensics specialists, and AI researchers. Ultimately, Scheirer argues that problems associated with fake content are not intrinsic properties of the content itself, but rather stem from human behavior, demonstrating our capacity for both creativity and destruction.
eBook
A Closer Look at Online Deception and Disinformation
In the two-plus decades since the creation of the internet, we have seen life for Americans and their families transformed in many positive ways. The internet provides new opportunities for commerce, education, information, and connecting people. However, along with these many new opportunities, we have seen new challenges as well. Bad actors are stocking the online marketplace, using deceptive techniques to influence consumers, deceptive designs to fool them into giving away personal information, stealing their money, and engaging in other unfair practices.
eBook
Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 US election cycle
We collect and analyze a corpus of more than 300,000 political emails sent during the 2020 US election cycle. These emails were sent by over 3000 political campaigns and organizations including federal and state level candidates as well as Political Action Committees. We find that in this corpus, manipulative tactics—techniques using some level of deception or clickbait—are the norm, not the exception. We measure six specific tactics senders use to nudge recipients to open emails. Three of these tactics—“dark patterns”—actively deceive recipients through the email user interface, for example, by formatting “from:” fields so that they create the false impression the message is a continuation of an ongoing conversation. The median active sender uses such tactics 5% of the time. The other three tactics, like sensationalistic clickbait—used by the median active sender 37% of the time—are not directly deceptive, but instead, exploit recipients’ curiosity gap and impose pressure to open emails. This can further expose recipients to deception in the email body, such as misleading claims of matching donations. Furthermore, by collecting emails from different locations in the US, we show that senders refine these tactics through A/B testing. Finally, we document disclosures of email addresses between senders in violation of privacy policies and recipients’ expectations. Cumulatively, these tactics undermine voters’ autonomy and welfare, exacting a particularly acute cost for those with low digital literacy. We offer the complete corpus of emails at https://electionemails2020.org for journalists and academics, which we hope will support future work.
Journal Article
Manufacturing Consensus
An in-depth exploration of social media and emergent technology that details the inner workings of modern propaganda Until recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Samuel Woolley argues that social media has democratized today's propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced influence campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and capacity for automation, allows a wide variety of groups to build the illusion of popularity through computational tools (such as bots) and human-driven efforts (such as sockpuppets-real people assuming false identities online-and partisan influencers). They use these technologies and strategies to create a bandwagon effect by bringing the content into parallel discussions with other legitimate users, or to mold discontent for political purposes. Drawing on eight years of original international ethnographic research among the people who build, combat, and experience these propaganda campaigns, Woolley presents an extensive view of the evolution of computational propaganda, offers a glimpse into the future, and suggests pragmatic responses for policy makers, academics, technologists, and others.
eBook
Cheap speech : how disinformation poisons our politics--and how to cure it
An informed and practical road map for controlling disinformation, embracing free speech, saving American elections, and protecting democracy \"A fresh, persuasive and deeply disturbing overview of the baleful and dangerous impact on the nation of widely disseminated false speech on social media. Richard Hasen, the country's leading expert about election law, has written this book with flair and clarity.\"-Floyd Abrams, author of The Soul of the First Amendment What can be done consistent with the First Amendment to ensure that American voters can make informed election decisions and hold free elections amid a flood of virally spread disinformation and the collapse of local news reporting? How should American society counter the actions of people like former President Donald J. Trump, who used social media to convince millions of his followers to doubt the integrity of U.S. elections and helped foment a violent insurrection? What can we do to minimize disinformation campaigns aimed at suppressing voter turnout? With piercing insight into the current debates over free speech, censorship, and Big Tech's responsibilities, Richard L. Hasen proposes legal and social measures to restore Americans' access to reliable information on which democracy depends. In an era when quack COVID treatments and bizarre QAnon theories have entered mainstream, this book explains how to assure both freedom of ideas and a commitment to truth.
eBook