Needsocialmedia normsinrunupto 2019polls:Study
POLARISATION Says parties are using bots to manipulate voters LONDON:
India needs to introduce guidelines for the use of social media during the 2019 general elections, according to a study by the University of Oxford that explored formally organised social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries.
At a time when readers are increasingly consuming news on digital media, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and ‘blackbox’ algorithms are being leveraged to challenge truth and trust: the cornerstones of democratic society, the study by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) says.
Describing social media manipulation as big business, it says that since 2010, many political parties and governments had spent over half a billion dollars on the research, development, and implementation of psychological operations and public opinion manipulation over the social media.
Philip Howard, OII director and co-author of the study titled ‘Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation’, told Hindustan Times that India is one of the 48 countries where there is evidence of organised social media manipulation.
“Disinformation campaigns flow over every major social media platform used in India”, he said, adding that in each of the 48 countries, there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to manipulate public opinion domestically.
“With a big general election coming early in the new year, it is important that election officials come up with some moderate guidelines for social media use during the campaigns, that the platforms design for healthy public conversation, and that Indian voters learn develop some trusted sources of professional news,” he added.
The study uses the term ‘cyber troops’ to refer to government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online. It encompasses issues to do with ‘fake news’, the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, illegal data harvesting and micro-profiling, the exploitation of social media platforms, the amplification of hate speech or harmful content through fake accounts or political bots, and clickbait content for optimised social media consumption.
“With each passing election, there is a growing body of evidence that national leaders, political parties, and individual political candidates are using social media platforms to spread disinformation,” the study says.
“Although closely related to some of the dirty tricks and negative campaigning we might expect in close races (and which have always played a part in political campaigning), what makes this phenomenon unique is the deliberate use of computational propaganda to manipulate voters and shape the outcome of elections.”
Samantha Bradshaw, co-author of the Oxford Internet Institute study, said,“The number of countries where formally organised social media manipulation occurs has greatly increased, from 28 (in 2017) to 48 countries globally.”
“The majority of growth comes from political parties who spread disinformation and junk news around election periods. There are more political parties learning from the strategies deployed during Brexit and the US 2016 Presidential election: more campaigns are using bots, junk news, and disinformation to polarise and manipulate voters,”Bradshaw added.