Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy? ISSUES: Focusing on Six Key Risks Issue Two: Proliferation of several types of misinformation and disinformation The use of false information to change public opinion is at least as old as the newspaper. Ben Franklin used the tactic to generate opposition to Native Americans during the American Revolution. Today, social media acts as an accelerant, and an at-scale content platform and distribution channel, for what is now widely referred to as “fake news.” This much-maligned term actually comprises several types of “dis”-information (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false) and “mis”-information (the inadvertent sharing of false information) (see Figure 1 below). speculation: 4Chan and Reddit pranksterism spread across social media platforms, was picked up by mainstream news, and, ultimately, led to a holdup of a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Some of these types of content present a higher risk to democratic discourse—e.g. it’s clear that ‘fabricated content’ is qualitatively different in intention and potential impact than satire or parody, or, for that matter, false context. These types of information are created and disseminated by a variety of actors—including state and private actors who often use bots — and often to different ends.8,9 Even more troubling are recent killings in South Sudan,10 which some have cited as an extreme example of how fake news and hate speech promoted by social media influencers can be used to incite mass violence against minority groups. Oxford University’s Internet Institute exposed patterns of automated fake news production recently during their real-time investigation of political communication during the Brexit referendum in the UK. A subsequent study of what Twitter users in Michigan were sharing in the week before voting found that the volume of junk news was much greater than that of professionally produced news. Moreover, the level of professionally produced news content shared over Twitter hit an all-time low in the 24 hours before the election.11 Increasingly, such information carries consequences in the “offline” or “real” world. PizzaGate is one example of the dangerous amplification of conspiratorial The low barriers to creation and distribution of online content have facilitated massive growth in “news publishers” whose revenue models maximize attention Figure 1: 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation We speak to the danger inherent in the active manipulation and political capture of information on social media below as part of Issue Three. 9 It is worth underscoring that the motivations for mis-and disinformation can be monetary and/or ideological. Such motivational distinctions might be important to the deployment of viable tactics for tackling the problem. 10 Jason Patinkin, How to Use Facebook and Fake News to Get People to Murder Each Other, BuzzFeed, Updated January 16, 2017, https://www. 8 © Copyright The Omidyar Group 2017. All rights reserved. Source: https://firstdraftnews.com/fake-news-complicated/ buzzfeed.com/jasonpatinkin/how-to-get-people-to-murder-eachother-through-fake-news-and? 11 John Markoff, Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages, Researchers Say, The New York Times, Published November 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/ automated-pro-trump-bots-overwhelmed-pro-clinton-messagesresearchers-say.html PAGE 7