As most have read, Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently
charged 13 Russians with attempting to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. According
to The Atlantic, the social media
campaign waged across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter reached over 125
million Americans on Facebook alone, while more than 675,000 people engaged
with Russians on Twitter.
And yet, though the effect was far reaching, Russian trolls didn’t use sophisticated
methods or technology to manipulate the American public via social media. The
tools were already in place thanks to the digital marketing industry. Per a recent
study The Atlantic conducted with Harvard’s
Shorenstein Center:
“The basic idea is for advertisers
to micro-target digital advertising at very specific demographic slices of
social-media users to see how they respond. A disinformation operator could
test hundreds of different messages, often aimed at thousands of different
permutations of demographic groups on the advertising platforms of the most
widely used social-media companies.”
Because digital advertisers and social media companies have
so much data on users, Russians were able to target specific people with
specific political leanings and then optimize their campaigns to grow their
influence. They gamed Facebook and Google’s algorithms to disseminate divisive
content (including “fake news”), spur voter outrage and then generate continued
engagement in their channels.
Of course Russian trolls are far from the first unintended
consequence of technological advancements in this world, but the fact that it happened so easily does raise questions as to what internet users can trust and what internet companies can control.
It’s scary to think about how easy it was for Russians to manipulate the
American public, and we can only hope that digital advertising and social media
companies are working fast, collaboratively and intelligently to try and stop this event from
happening at such scale again.
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