Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media by Nicholas Diakopoulos

Author:Nicholas Diakopoulos
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Computers, Information Technology, Social Aspects, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T01:08:54.263000+00:00

Automated Sociopaths

Bots can be designed for the most benevolent of purposes, to commit genuine acts of journalism in the public interest. But they can just as easily be imbued with more ignoble intentions and values and deployed or hired by governments, corporations, or individuals to reach foul ends. A central concern is a lack of authenticity in which an approachable social persona conceals some unscrupulous goal. Deception as to their nature as bots and to the mal-intent of their designers creates the conditions for the surreptitious manipulation, pollution, and corruption of information. It doesn’t take a terribly smart bot to mimic nasty behavior such as spamming, flaming, stalking, shaming, or bullying.61 Bots can be used as political cogs in a computational propaganda machine that uses automation to shape public opinion. These so-called political bots “mimic real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of social media.”62 Typically they surface as part of botnets—networks of bots controlled and coordinated centrally by some entity such as a state actor—to manipulate discourse. Such bots and botnets are in active use, and have been for several years now. Analyses done on the 2016 US election suggest that perhaps 10–15 percent of the accounts participating on a sampling of election-related hashtags on Twitter were automated.63 During the third presidential debate estimates put the proportion of tweets from automated accounts at 25 percent—fully a quarter of all communications.64 And the attention of the bots was not uniform: they produced seven times as many tweets for Donald Trump as for Hillary Clinton. What liabilities does such activity create for public discourse?

There are at least four mechanisms through which bots hack public media. Bots can (1) manipulate the credibility of people or issues, (2) amplify and spread propaganda or junk news, (3) dampen or suppress opposition and debate, and (4) intimidate or deny access to people wishing to participate in communication. I’ll consider each of these in turn.

Bots influence the credibility and legitimacy of information by manipulating social signals, such as the amount of feedback a message receives. Although their actions are inauthentic—they are coordinated by the agenda of some bot master—the aggregated likes and shares they produce may be perceived as a signal of the genuine activities of independently thinking people. Their deception corrupts the true social signal and reactions of real people. For instance, one pro-Trump bot spewing anti-Clinton conspiracy theories into the Tweet ether had more than 33,000 followers just prior to the election.65 This creates fake social proof people read as indicating that “this source is important because many other people are listening to it.” Bots inflate political figures by following, retweeting, or liking their content, making them appear to have greater support and perhaps more legitimacy than they really do. An estimate published in May 2017 put the number of bots following Donald Trump’s twitter account at more than 15 million—about 49 percent of his following at the time and a huge increase from the 8 percent of bot followers his account recorded in April 2016.

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