Chapter I: Introduction
1.2 Research Background
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1.2 Research Background
Human beings, social animals as we know, need interactions. With the advancement of digital and mobile technologies, social media has obviously become a preferable platform where social needs can be fulfilled without face-to-face communication. The changes brought by social media are unprecedented; it reshaped the way people interact and communicate, and it even challenged the way how information used to be produced and consumed. A survey conducted in 2016 by the Pew Research Center noted that 6 out of 10 American adults absorb news on social media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016). So what would this mean when social media become the hotbeds of fake news?
The case of the 2016 Cambridge Analytica Scandal (CAS) would be perhaps one of the most explicit examples illustrating concerns over the hazards brought by the dissemination of fake news on social media. According to one of the former employees of Cambridge Analytica, Brittany Kaiser, personal data was collected and studied without authorization to identify “swing voters” so that personalized political advertisements could be directed to them.2 Christopher Wylie, another whistleblower, told the press, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”3
Such revelations could be interpreted into a daunting message: Individuals are in high risks of fake news that serves benefits to certain political or ideological purposes,
2 K. Amer and Noujaim J, “The Great Hack,” Netflix, 2019.
3 Carole Cadwalladr, Emma Graham-Harrison, “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach,” The Guardian, March 17, 2018.
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and with the “help” of big data algorithms, it seems fake news is the newly-typed precision missile able to target any mind it wishes to bombard with.
Undeniably, CAS manifested the vulnerabilities of modern democracy in the Internet era when the integrity of the information that voters access online is in question.
In fact, the intent of fake news on public opinions has been confirmed to be not theoretical anymore. The Canadian research center, CitizenLab, has recently published a study on a disinformation campaign (led by pro-Iran activists) against Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel, suggesting that falsehoods have been spread on social media in an attempt to shape individuals’ opinions.4
What is happening in the digital realm is complex, and there are many different actors and tactics involved to manipulate the public internet sphere, particularly around elections. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there have been accusations of Russian hackers distributing sensitive information about the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.5 These Russian hackers have allegedly resulted in creating negative publicity for Hilary Clinton by aggressively sharing stolen emails with contents that may sabotage her reputation. What’s more, messages claiming that Hillary Clinton had died were circulated on social media, and even in some key battlegrounds, Democrat voters were targeted by the messages indicating that the date of the election had changed (Morgan 2018).
4 Gabriel Lim and al., “Burned After Reading, Endless Mayfly’s Ephemeral Disinformation Campaign,” The CitizenLab, May 14, 2019.
5 Luke Hardin, “What we know about Russia's interference in the US election,” The Guardian, December 16, 2017.
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Similarly, in Europe, days before the second round of the French presidential elections, the #Macronleaks, which involved the U.S. alt-right, took place.6 The emails of the candidate Emmanuel Macron were hacked, and fake news suggesting Macron had connections to offshore financial accounts were spread.
These examples of “hacking, leaking and the insertion of fake information into troves of dumped documents online” demonstrate the severity of foreign interference that attempts to compromise voter’s opinions through the propagation of controversial information, and it is very likely that these cross-border manipulations are “not only in state-sponsored efforts but also through motivated individuals and groups wishing to promote a particular world view” (Morgan, 2018).
Whatever causes may serve behind the behaviors to intervene in an election, the fact that generating fake news could be a potential source of income emphasizes how immense the issue could turn out to be. For instance, Macedonian teenagers have made money by creating fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2016). For every “click” on the content, it means a paycheck to the fake news provider. It rounds up, creating an incentive to produce a massive amount of fake news over social media so as to share more to earn more. Even though people might not be motivated by the willingness to influence an election or a referendum, the result of spreading fake news for economic purposes may still be the same menacing.
Overall, the value of data has ushered in a new landscape where most of the power and wealth are concentrated in the few hands of internet tycoons hoarding over zillions of personal data, and their business model is paving the way for fake news providers to
6 Akshat Rathi, “Quelle surprise! Alt-right Americans and internet bots are spreading #MacronLeaks,” QUARTZ, March 7, 2017.
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make advertising revenues (Morgan 2018). Hence, there is more and more pressure on social media to develop solutions to fight against fake news as it has ruined their image and sparked concerns upon their involvement in disinformation campaigns. Facebook, in the wake of CAS, launched a fact-checking program involving non-profitable third parties aiming to mitigate the fallout of fake news.7 These third-party fact-checkers would flag posts and articles once proving the content to be false, and Facebook would then lower its visibility in the News Feed. Likewise, for those tech-giants that accommodate the world’s most personal data, Twitter, YouTube, they are also taking steps to crack down on the distribution of fake news.8