User:Jesspowell42/sandbox

Twitter Propaganda

The University of Oxford did a study and discovered that propaganda on social media is “being used to manipulate public opinion around the world”.  In Russia, 45% of Twitter accounts are bots and in Taiwan, a campaign against President Tsai Ing-wen involved thousands of accounts being heavily coordinated and sharing Chinese propaganda.

Techniques to like, share, and post on social networks were used. The bot accounts were used to "game algorithms" to push different content on the platforms. Real content put out by real people can be covered up and bots can make online measures of support, such as the number of likes or retweets something has received, look larger than it should, thus tricking users into thinking that specific piece of content is popular. This technique is known as "manufacturing consensus". Manufacturing Consensus is "creating the illusion of popularity so that a political candidate can have viability where they might not have had it before".

Russian Propaganda on Twitter

During the 2016 presidential election, 200,000 tweets deemed as "malicious activity" from Russia-linked accounts were outed on Twitter. The accounts pushed hundreds of thousands of these tweets claiming that Democrats were practicing witchcraft and posed as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators were able to trace the account to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit. It was founded in 2013 and known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).