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My new book, Social Media and International Relations, is now available through @CambridgeUP. It’s free to download for the next two weeks! https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/342545BA6FCD67BC8A5BE03B321D95C5/9781108826815AR.pdf/social_media_and_international_relations.pdf
Some of the themes of the book (w/ shameless self-promotion of my other work & cites to excellent work of others).
Some of the themes of the book (w/ shameless self-promotion of my other work & cites to excellent work of others).
For years, democracies were thought to have advantages when it comes to war/peace. Their militaries tend to be better professionalized and the marketplace of ideas allows for debates that can ferret out the misguided foreign policies https://www.amazon.com/Democracies-at-War-Dan-Reiter/dp/0691089493
New/social media undermines these advantages: Few gatekeepers/fact-checkers, anyone can post, fake news has longer legs than real news, corrections often don't work so conspiracies persist ( @brendannyhan and @jasonreifler): https://www.jstor.org/stable/40587320?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
In this context, foreign influence in a democratic political landscape is easy, easier bc of polarization. E.g., Russia’s Internet Research Agency can craft and amplify messages sure to further divide the electorate. Or just create confusion and chaos. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/politics/russia-hacking-disinformation-election.html
In 2016, the use of big data and machine learning meant that actors could hyper-target segments of the population, a form of digital personalization that tailors messages in ways meant to psychologically manipulate the target:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-role-of-technology-in-online-misinformation.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-role-of-technology-in-online-misinformation.pdf
Sen Mark Warner (VA), Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that “bad actors will continue to try to weaponize the scale and reach of social media platforms to erode public confidence and foster chaos…their techniques will only get more sophisticated.”
Five years ago, Russian content could be easily ID’ed bc of bad English. Then to avoid detection they used content from blogs/Wikipedia, insipid content that did not draw a large following, definitely not a + if you’re in the foreign influence business. https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ira-bypass-facebook-disinfo-defenses/
Technology can help. Natural language models like GPT-2 and the gigantic GPT-3 can produce unlimited synthetic content that won’t be flagged as plagiarized or recycled. And the outputs are convincing! https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/taking-gpt-2-head-to-head-with-the-new-york-times/
Notwithstanding some of the social media firms’ decisions to label executive content as misleading, and impose stringent guidelines on Covid-19 misinformation, content flows fairly freely online. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-03-30/coronavirus-fake-news-isnt-other-fake-news
At least in democracies. Hence the capacity for foreign meddling (enabled by democratic society’s many unforced errors): https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/
Autocracies have comparative advantages. They can cut, censor, or counter messages that interfere with their domestic politics. The Chinese employ 2m people to generate pro-regime content, approximately 448m social media comments/yr (see @kinggary et al: https://gking.harvard.edu/50c
The answer is not for democracies to adopt autocratic ways! Churchill was right, "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It’s to enact policies like internet literacy interventions along the lines of those discussed in @andyguess et al https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15536.short
Even if malicious actors lean on AI-generated text & tell-tale signs of bad English are no longer flags, these generative models aren’t perfect: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1284960652918841344?s=20
My research with @milesmccain and @Miles_Brundage shows that readers pick up on factual errors yet will say the material is credible. They should trust their judgments!
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3525002
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3525002
Still though, whether on Covid-19 misinformation or the upcoming election, democracies have vulnerabilities that are hard to patch. This book at least frames the problems by way of identifying policy solutions.
