Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy? ISSUES: Focusing on Six Key Risks Issue Four: Political capture of platforms the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while politicalparty-supported campaigns target domestic voters. Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns.”26 Open networks, such as Twitter and YouTube, are particularly vulnerable to political capture by populist leaders—and their armies of trolls and automated bots—for motivated use: e.g. to shut down dissent and minority voices, create the false impression of momentum, intervene across borders, or manipulate public sentiment.24 Of course, it is not just politicians and political parties that can capture platforms—even established democratic governments have spent public money to manipulate opinion over social media. In their recent report from the Oxford Internet Institute, Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard point to the British Army, which announced in January 2015 that one of its brigades would “focus on non-lethal psychological operations using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to fight enemies by gaining control of the narrative in the information age (Solon, 2015).” In other words, “The primary task of this unit is to shape public behavior through the use of ‘dynamic narratives’ to combat the political propaganda disseminated by terrorist organizations.”25 In the same report, Bradshaw and Howard referred to trolls and bots as modern-day cyber troops, saying they are “government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media.” The report also compared such organizations across 28 countries and found: “…Cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon. Many different countries employ significant numbers of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online, sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign publics. Looking across An interesting point about the design of Facebook versus Twitter: the former lets you select your community, does not encourage nonreciprocal following, and the upside is safety and protection from trolls; the downside is self-selection into like-minded groups and echo chambers. Twitter is the converse: open community structure, and encouraging of non-reciprocal following, which makes it better for filtering out fake news, but much more vulnerable to both political capture via trolls and bots, and intimidation. 25,26 Samantha Bradshaw & Philip N. Howard, Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard, Eds. Working Paper 2017.12. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/ 24 © Copyright The Omidyar Group 2017. All rights reserved. In short, trolls and bots disguised as ordinary citizens have become a weapon of choice for governments and political leaders to shape online conversations in many illiberal regimes and movements. Governments in Turkey, China, Israel, and Russia are known to have deployed thousands of hired “social media operatives” who run multiple accounts and manage bots to shift or control public opinion—including by having arguments among their various accounts that are settled in favor of the government. A recent study of the Chinese government’s use of social media revealed that paid government employees generate about 448 million comments every year.27 In Myanmar, several of the government’s official Facebook accounts propagate exclusionary and hateful views about Muslim minorities.28 Second, several political leaders have a direct line to their electorate. Thus, they can share unedited (by media or party), false, or provocative statements, subvert or bypass established communications protocol, normalize hateful or cynical views themselves, or implicitly approve the messages of their social media supporters (this includes A little over half of these comments are made on government sites, albeit pretending to be comments made by ordinary citizens. The rest are made on commercial sites, mixed into streams with family news, dog photos and the like. The result, as Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts describe, is that a “large proportion of government website comments, and about one of every 178 social media posts on commercial sites, are fabricated by the government.” 28 Megha Rajagopalan, Internet Trolls Are Using Facebook To Target Myanmar’s Muslims, BuzzFeed, Published March 18, 2017, https:// www.buzzfeed.com/meghara/how-fake-news-and-online-hate-aremaking-life-hell-for?. 27 PAGE 10