tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/2016-us-presidential-election-23653/articles2016 US presidential election – The Conversation2023-04-10T12:06:29Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2025972023-04-10T12:06:29Z2023-04-10T12:06:29ZDitching a friend who is not like you can deepen social inequality<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519916/original/file-20230406-18-dau8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=90%2C27%2C5894%2C3965&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Newly released research of residents in northern California suggests that since the 2016 presidential election, some friendship groups have become more homogeneous.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/friends-enjoy-a-birthday-party-picnic-experience-provided-news-photo/1331980463?adppopup=true">Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the 2016 presidential election, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/political-divide-splits-relationships-and-thanksgiving-too.html">news accounts</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa101">scientific research</a> have illustrated how defriending, a term originally associated with dropping Facebook friends, echoes in our broader, offline social lives. And what may seem like a simple decision to cut off a difficult relationship may actually deepen divisions in society.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4XB29NcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">social scientists</a> who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W4qseSgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">study social networks</a>, we were keen to take a closer look at defriending beyond social media and the internet, particularly as the U.S. approaches what is likely to be another contentious presidential election. </p>
<p>Some relationships are difficult to keep going because of conflicts, disagreements, life changes or busy schedules. Those things make defriending practical and reasonable. After all, cutting social ties isn’t new. The practice has likely been around <a href="https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/19245">as long as relationships have existed</a>. But we wondered if relationships across racial, political or religious boundaries are more at risk of being severed during highly charged political times than other relationships.</p>
<p><a href="https://ucnets.berkeley.edu/">Newly available data</a>, gathered from northern California residents between April 2015 and May 2017, gave us a chance to look at relationships during a critical turning point in the United States. The study – comprised of 1,159 respondents – was a representative sampling of the six counties that make up the San Francisco Bay area. Researchers measured whether ties were family or nonfamily, close or not close, difficult or not difficult.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A white woman reaches in to hug a Black woman." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519919/original/file-20230407-26-v7k7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Two friends celebrate finishing a half-marathon. A new study suggests more people in California ended interracial friendships since the 2016 presidential election.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/susan-lear-at-left-and-her-friend-of-37-years-tina-lee-vogt-news-photo/1033450244?adppopup=true">Photo by Mindy Schauer/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Cutting interracial ties</h2>
<p>In an analysis of the data, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2023.01.006">we found that</a> people were 2.5 times more likely to cut interracial friendship ties, which are often weaker than same-race ties, after the 2016 presidential election. We also found that participants were 2.3 times more likely to cut ties with people of another religion. Importantly, a subgroup of study participants, the 21- to 30-year-olds, was almost two times more likely to drop weaker ties across the political divide due to disagreements.</p>
<p>In other words, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/659100">people were self-segregating</a>, and younger people, in particular, were distancing themselves from exposure to people who were different from them. </p>
<p>In practice, defriending can range from silently <a href="https://time.com/4779713/friendship-ghosting">ghosting</a> old friends to more overt acts, such as Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/dilbert-newspapers-racism.html">racist diatribe</a> exhorting white Americans to defriend Black Americans.</p>
<p>American history is replete with examples of people being excluded from certain segments of society because of race, politics or religion. But voluntary segregation is different, and social scientists didn’t begin <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122414531776">formally measuring the extent across the country</a> until the 1985 <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/2095397">General Social Survey</a>, a biennial, nationally representative survey of the attitudes and behaviors of American adults.</p>
<p>Our findings from California point to how defriending plays out in a specific state.</p>
<h2>Vulnerable weak ties</h2>
<p>One clear takeaway from our study is that people were more likely to drop <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/225469">weaker ties</a> to people unlike them than they were to drop strong family ties. In other words, they weren’t willing to cut off the uncle who says offensive things under his breath at every family gathering, but they did easily cut off casual acquaintances from the gym or grocery store.</p>
<p>Despite their seeming fragility, weak ties – which can range from the relationships <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/upshot/when-chance-encounters-at-the-water-cooler-are-most-useful.html">developed during short, water cooler conversations</a> at work to connections forged from interactions with strangers during the daily commute – are critically important to our lives. </p>
<p>They create <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abl4476">job opportunities</a>, facilitate <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04996-4">social mobility</a> and promote <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120668119">well-being</a>.</p>
<p>Weak ties can also <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/11.3.427">foster creativity and innovation</a> and lead to new opportunities across social boundaries, defined by race, politics and religion. One example of that is the <a href="https://people.com/movies/what-michelle-yeoh-learned-from-jamie-lee-curtis-exclusive/">new BFF</a> relationship between actors Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Though longtime acquaintances, they had never worked together until recently. The chance to collaborate <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/awards/jamie-lee-curtis-everything-everywhere-oscar-nomination-1235517306/">led to a much closer relationship and a pair of Oscar wins</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Male and female clergy of different faiths hold candles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519918/original/file-20230407-28-98748f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">After the 2016 presidential election, fewer people in northern California have been interested in participating in gatherings like this interfaith protest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/clergy-members-gather-at-city-hall-in-long-beach-ca-on-news-photo/1034898964?adppopup=true">Scott Varley/Digital First Media/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>The price of insularity</h2>
<p>Regardless of how it happens, when people segregate into groups that look or think like them, there are significant consequences for society. In addition to losing resources such as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa026">job opportunities</a> that are controlled by someone to whom they were formerly associated, people may lose opportunities for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381611000533">building successful, inclusive political coalitions</a>. Others may not recognize challenges that people in a different group face. And because of an inability to understand someone else’s problems, people may be <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0221-2">less willing to help</a>.</p>
<p>These imbalances have long been difficult to reconcile, as pointed out in 1903 by pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. He famously drew attention to “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Souls-of-Black-Folk/Bois-Marable/p/book/9781594510052">the problem of the color line</a>” in American life. Radically for the time, he researched race relations and social interactions, <a href="https://papress.com/products/w-e-b-du-boiss-data-portraits-visualizing-black-america">showing how race symbolically and physically divided</a> the country. This perspective resonates in <a href="https://1619education.org/">modern-day racial disparities in American life</a>, such as <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo119245209.html">how Black Americans are expected to navigate white social spaces</a> and that Black and white workers <a href="https://www.russellsage.org/publications/work-black-and-white">think about inequality and economic security in different ways</a>.</p>
<h2>Segregation then, now and in the future</h2>
<p>Some of the most heinous epochs in American history have occurred when a dominant group has failed to recognize a common humanity. Vestiges of slavery, for instance, lingered in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/701020">Jim Crow laws</a>. And remnants of Jim Crow are present in our <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/new-jim-crow">system of mass incarceration</a>, which legal scholar and author Michelle Alexander has described as <a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/145175694">a system of racialized social control</a> that disproportionately affects Black men.</p>
<p>Even though modern American social segregation now emerges from a mix of voluntary choices to defriend and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/506415">residential segregation by race</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-019-09280-1">class</a>, the net result can be the same as enforced segregation.</p>
<p>Social boundaries can lead to population-wide inequalities because <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2006.07.003">segregation leads to differential opportunities</a> for different groups. These <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/6.3.217">inequalities are unjust, preventable</a> and, it turns out, very difficult to get rid of. </p>
<p>Fewer cross-group connections makes meaningful political conversation <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/">more challenging</a> when neither group has a meaningful grasp of, or a willingness to engage with, another group’s perspectives. </p>
<p>Self-segregation by defriending denies us the opportunity to learn from differences and to discover commonalities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark C. Pachucki has received funding to study social networks from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a member of Heterodox Academy, a higher education professional association whose mission is to improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony Paik receives funding from the National Science Foundation to study social networks in higher education. He previously received research grants to study social networks from the AccessLex Institute and the National Institute of Justice.</span></em></p>When people cut personal, interracial or interreligious ties because of political differences, the societal impact can be the same as forced segregation.Mark C. Pachucki, Associate Professor of Sociology, UMass AmherstAnthony Paik, Professor of Sociology, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1875792022-08-10T12:18:45Z2022-08-10T12:18:45ZDon’t be too quick to blame social media for America’s polarization – cable news has a bigger effect, study finds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478366/original/file-20220809-16320-by0k6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C4000%2C2644&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Joe Biden and Donald Trump supporters, like these two, are more likely to be polarized by TV news than online echo chambers.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/BidenInaugurationTwoWorlds/7e1e25cd3f574ef98153395f38d5672b/photo">AP Photo/Allen G. Breed</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The past two election cycles have seen an <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xnhtd">explosion of attention given</a> to “echo chambers,” or communities where a narrow set of views makes people less likely to challenge their own opinions. Much of this concern has focused on the rise of social media, which has <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671987">radically transformed the information ecosystem</a>.</p>
<p>However, when scientists investigated social media echo chambers, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1428656">they found surprisingly little evidence</a> of them on a large scale – or at least none on a scale large enough to warrant the growing concerns. And yet, selective exposure to news <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x">does increase polarization</a>. This suggested that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2158244019832705">these studies</a> missed part of the picture of Americans’ news consumption patterns. Crucially, they did not factor in a major component of the average American’s experience of news: television.</p>
<p>To fill in this gap, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Zb68N-kAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate">I</a> and a group of researchers from <a href="https://datascience.stanford.edu/people/daniel-muise">Stanford University</a>, the <a href="https://pikprofessors.upenn.edu/meet-the-professors/duncan-watts">University of Pennsylvania</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/davidmr/">Microsoft Research</a> tracked the TV news consumption habits of tens of thousands of American adults each month from 2016 through 2019. We discovered <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn0083">four aspects of news consumption</a> that, when taken together, paint an unsettling picture of the TV news ecosystem.</p>
<h2>TV trumps online</h2>
<p>We first measured just how politically siloed American news consumers really are across TV and the web. Averaging over the four years of our observations, we found that roughly 17% of Americans are politically polarized – 8.7% to the left and 8.4% to the right – based on their TV news consumption. That’s three to four times higher than the average percentage of Americans polarized by online news.</p>
<p>Moreover, the percentage of Americans polarized via TV ranged as high as 23% at its peak in November 2016, the month in which Donald Trump was elected president. A second spike occurred in the months leading into December 2018, following the “blue wave” midterm elections in which a <a href="https://politicalsciencenow.com/the-blue-wave-assessing-political-advertising-trends-and-democratic-advantages-in-2018/">record number of Democratic campaign ads</a> were aired on TV. The timing of these two spikes suggests a clear connection between content choices and events in the political arena.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yN_Mp9ZsVXA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The 2018 midterm elections saw campaign ads reach new levels of partisanship.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Staying in TV echo chambers</h2>
<p>Besides being more politically siloed on average, our research found that TV news consumers are much more likely than web consumers to maintain the same partisan news diets over time: after six months, left-leaning TV audiences are 10 times more likely to remain segregated than left-leaning online audiences, and right-leaning audiences are 4.5 times more likely than their online counterparts.</p>
<p>While these figures may seem intimidating, it is important to keep in mind that even among TV viewers, about 70% of right-leaning viewers and about 80% of left-leaning viewers do switch their news diets within six months. To the extent that long-lasting echo chambers do exist, then, they include only about 4% of the population.</p>
<h2>Narrow TV diets</h2>
<p>Partisan segregation among TV audiences goes even further than left- and right-leaning sources, we found. We identified seven broad buckets of TV news sources, then used these archetypes to determine what a typical unvaried TV news diet really looks like.</p>
<p>We found that, compared to online audiences, partisan TV news consumers tend not to stray too far from their narrow sets of preferred news sources. For example, most Americans who consume mostly MSNBC rarely consume news from any other source besides CNN. Similarly, most Americans who consume mostly Fox News Channel do not venture beyond that network at all. This finding contrasts with data from online news consumers, who still receive sizable amounts of news from outside their main archetype.</p>
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<span class="caption">People who get their news from MSNBC rarely stray beyond MSNBC and CNN for their news consumption.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RichardLuiOnSetMSNBC.jpg">Mikeblog/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<h2>Distilling partisanship</h2>
<p>Finally, we found an imbalance between partisan TV news channels and the broader TV news environment. Our observations revealed that Americans are turning away from national TV news generally in substantial numbers – and crucially, this exodus is more from centrist news buckets than from left- or right-leaning ones. Within the remaining TV news audience, we found movement from broadcast news to cable news, trending toward MSNBC and Fox News.</p>
<p>Together, these trends reveal a counterintuitive finding: Although the overall TV news audience is shrinking, the partisan TV news audience is growing. This means that the audience as a whole is in the process of being “distilled” – remaining TV viewers are growing increasingly partisan, and the partisan proportion of TV news consumers is on the rise.</p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>Exposure to opposing views is <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/12/09/political-polarization-and-its-echo-chambers-surprising-new-cross-disciplinary">critical for functional democratic processes</a>. It allows for self-reflection and <a href="https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/10127">tempers hostility toward political outgroups</a>, whereas only interacting with similar views in political echo chambers makes people more entrenched in their own opinions. If echo chambers truly are as widespread as <a href="https://rcommunicationr.org/index.php/rcr/article/view/94">recent attention</a> has made them out to be, it can have major consequences for the health of democracy.</p>
<p>Our findings suggest that television – not the web – is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans. It is important to note that the vast majority of Americans still consume relatively balanced news diets. </p>
<p>However, given that the partisan TV news audience alone <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539">consumes more minutes of news than the entire online news audience</a>, it may be worth devoting more attention to this huge and increasingly politicized part of the information ecosystem.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/social-media-and-society-125586" target="_blank"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479539/original/file-20220817-20-g5jxhm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=144&fit=crop&dpr=1" width="100%"></a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187579/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Homa Hosseinmardi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Studies of online echo chambers don’t paint the full picture of Americans’ political segregation. New research shows that the problem is more Fox News Channel and MSNBC than Facebook and Twitter.Homa Hosseinmardi, Associate Research Scientist in Computational Social Science, University of PennsylvaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1802022022-03-30T14:47:38Z2022-03-30T14:47:38ZHow Russia’s unanswered propaganda led to the war in Ukraine<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455022/original/file-20220329-17-qjcayi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C20%2C6720%2C3812&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A few visitors and staff at a Moscow bar watch the broadcast of Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing Russian citizens on a state television channel in March 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A lot has been written about <a href="https://www.state.gov/russias-top-five-persistent-disinformation-narratives/">Russia’s disinformation campaigns and efforts to spread fake news</a>, which flooded western countries in the past decade and had different effects around the globe.</p>
<p>But many failed to see, or perhaps ignored, what all of this meticulously planned propaganda might lead to.</p>
<p>The world was shocked by Russia’s attempts to get its favoured candidate elected in the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download">2016 United States presidential election</a> by unleashing all of its propaganda forces. Its <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1718257">troll factory</a>, operated out of St. Petersburg, worked 24/7 spreading fake news on social media. </p>
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<img alt="A man sits in front of a microphone with a screen behind him that says Russia interfered in the U.S. presidential election." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455060/original/file-20220329-23-1oh4qqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former special counsel Robert Mueller listens as he testifies before a congressional committee on his report on Russian election interference on Capitol Hill in July 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Jonathan Ernst/Pool via AP)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Russia’s hacker groups targeted the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3766950-NSA-Report-on-Russia-Spearphishing">U.S. election system</a> and other infrastructure. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-the-russians-hacked-the-dnc-and-passed-its-emails-to-wikileaks/2018/07/13/af19a828-86c3-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html">Democratic National Committee documents were leaked, some distorted</a> to enhance the alternative facts that Russia was promoting.</p>
<p><a href="https://intelligence.house.gov/russiainvestigation/">These efforts</a> helped Donald Trump become president while Hillary Clinton, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/clinton-putin-226153">whom Vladimir Putin openly disliked</a>, lost the campaign. </p>
<h2>Exploiting turmoil</h2>
<p>In other countries where it was not feasible to get its favoured candidate elected, Russia exploited <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/uk-russia-report-brexit-interference.html">existing political turmoil or created new chaos and social problems</a> to diminish democratic development. </p>
<p>In Europe, where many countries rely on Russia’s energy resources, Russia conducted aggressive information campaigns that in many cases even <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EXPO_STU(2018)603868">increased European dependency on its gas supplies</a>. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/68455">Nordstream-2 pipeline</a> is the most notorious example: it was contracted at the same time Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk regions, effectively launching a war in those areas of Ukraine. </p>
<p>The signs that Russia’s atrocities would escalate have always been here. Russian propaganda has expanded its capabilities for years, <a href="https://www.accessnow.org/digital-rights-ukraine-russia-conflict/">laying the groundwork</a> for the massive invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. </p>
<p>Russia has also worked to discredit the image of Ukraine among its western partners. Special vocabulary was even promoted to portray Ukraine negatively. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TxPXqOszVuk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A round-table discussion on the use of language to minimize Russia’s actions in Ukraine, hosted by Petro Jacyk Education Foundation, St. Thomas More College and the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The war in the Donbas was referred to by many experts as the Ukrainian “crisis,” distracting attention from the real problem — Russia’s occupation of those territories. Ukraine was also depicted as a <a href="https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/ukraine-became-a-poor-corrupt-failed-state-controlled-by-the-west">failed state</a>. </p>
<p>The fact that the country has been at war for eight years has been often diminished or even ignored as the war was presented as an <a href="https://www.e-ir.info/2020/11/27/russian-military-aggression-or-civil-war-in-ukraine/">internal problem</a>. </p>
<h2>Priming for war</h2>
<p>Russia’s propaganda has a number of different strategic dimensions and targeted consumers. Within Ukraine, it tries to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/11/ukraine-russian-propaganda-and-three-disaster-scenarios/">sow divisive narratives</a> and promote misleading interpretations and causes.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a woman with dark hair holds up a smartphone" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455049/original/file-20220329-21-2lj5ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this 2017 photo, Ukrainian television journalist Julia Kirienko holds up her smartphone to show a text message reading ‘Ukrainian soldiers, they’ll find your bodies when the snow melts’ in Kyiv, Ukraine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Raphael Satter)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the decisions for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a belief that its propaganda had succeeded in building a base of supporters in Ukraine. Nonetheless, Russian troops <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/28/stop-overestimating-russian-military-and-underestimating-ukrainians-one-month-war/">aren’t welcome in Ukraine and have faced fearless resistance from ordinary citizens in every corner of the country</a>.</p>
<p>A massive propaganda campaign has also been <a href="https://imrussia.org/en/analysis/3410-how-kremlin-propaganda-distorts-reality-inside-russia">conducted within Russia</a>, fuelled by unprecedented resources and substantial amounts of content produced for internal consumption. For the past several years, Russian citizens <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russian-government-propaganda-stokes-anti-west-sentiment-1.2944274">have been deliberately inundated</a> with information that was propagating the inevitability of war with NATO and Ukraine. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-putin-used-propaganda-to-deftly-turn-russians-against-ukrainians-81376">How Putin used propaganda to deftly turn Russians against Ukrainians</a>
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<p>Both NATO and Ukraine have been depicted as aggressive foes that want to destroy Russia. On the other hand, Russia positioned itself as the last bastion and defender of the true pure values of Orthodoxy and the <a href="https://uacrisis.org/en/russkiy-mir-as-the-kremlin-s-quasi-ideology">Russkiy mir</a> (Russian world), which are threatened by the corrupt liberal West.</p>
<p>For years, demonizing the enemy was the primary goal of <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253629/Putins-Propaganda-Machine-Soft-Power-and-Russian-Foreign-Policy">Russia’s propaganda</a> machine, which was working non-stop to this end. </p>
<p>State-owned television channels and outlets have devoted substantial airtime, online and newspaper coverage every day to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/20/world/asia/russia-putin-propaganda-media.html">vilifying Ukraine, the U.S., the EU and NATO</a>. Ukraine has been the main topic of all talk shows and news. </p>
<h2>Radicalizing Russians on Ukraine</h2>
<p>All the justifications that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24">Putin outlined in his notorious early-morning speech</a> on Feb. 24, 2022 — proclaiming a war against Ukraine <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/2/do-not-call-ukraine-invasion-a-war-russia-tells-media-schools">that in Russia may only be referred to as a “special military operation”</a> — were intensively discussed in a confrontational manner <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/03/how-russian-tv-portrays-war-ukraine/627010/">by hosts and guests of prime-time TV shows.</a></p>
<p>This is how Russia deliberately radicalized Russian society on the question of Ukraine and Ukrainians.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man and woman sit in a dark room watching a balding man on a television set." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455058/original/file-20220329-17-qxokes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People from Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia watch Vladimir Putin’s address at their temporary residence in Rostov-on-Don region, Russia, on Feb. 21, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Denis Kaminev)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Russian propaganda also trumpeted the superiority of its conventional army over any army in the world, including its nuclear capabilities. Threats to turn the U.S. and its allies in Europe into <a href="https://www.svoboda.org/a/v-radioaktivnyy-pepel-chem-i-kogda-zakonchitsya-novaya-holodnaya-voyna/31386334.html">radioactive ashes</a> have been made openly numerous times. Russia’s army even has its own <a href="https://www.stopfake.org/en/dependent-media-russia-s-military-tv-zvezda/">highly popular TV channel</a> that works 24/7 to promote war and aggression. </p>
<p>Russian propaganda has grown bolder and unanswered for years, leading to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine while serving to mislead and deceive Russians.</p>
<p>The democratic world now appears to have united and become more cohesive in its support of Ukrainians, strengthening Ukraine. Russia, meantime, is weakened. But the war could have been avoided altogether if the West had taken more decisive action much earlier.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180202/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>President of the Alberta Society for the Advancement of Ukrainian Studies</span></em></p>Russia’s propaganda signalled a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a long time ago.Oleksandr Pankieiev, Editor-in-Chief of the Forum for Ukrainian Studies, Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of AlbertaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1497152020-11-08T09:17:50Z2020-11-08T09:17:50ZView from The Hill: Morrison urges Biden to visit in 2021, as US result injects new force into Australia’s climate debate<p>Scott Morrison has lost no time pivoting to the incoming US administration, declaring on Sunday he hopes Joe Biden and his wife Jill will visit Australia for next year’s 70th anniversary of ANZUS.</p>
<p>“This is a profound time, not just for the United States, but for our partnership and the world more broadly,” Morrison told a news conference.</p>
<p>“And I look forward to forging a great partnership in the spirit of the relationships that has always existed between prime ministers of Australia and presidents of the United States.”</p>
<p>Those around Morrison say the government is already familiar with many figures in the Biden firmament, who were players in the Obama years.</p>
<p>Morrison also thanked Donald Trump and his cabinet “with whom we have had a very, very good working relationship over the years of the Trump administration and, of course, that will continue through the transition period.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese retrospectively sought to put a less controversial gloss on his Friday comment, when he said Morrison should contact Trump and convey “Australia’s strong view that democratic processes must be respected”.</p>
<p>On Sunday Albanese said: “What I suggested was that Scott Morrison needed to stand up for democracy. He’s done that in acknowledging the election of President-elect Biden”. </p>
<p>Within Australia political attention is quickly turning to what a Biden administration will mean for the Morrison government’s climate change policies, and how Biden will handle China.</p>
<p>With an activist climate policy a central feature of Biden’s agenda, including a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 (which Australia has refused to embrace), Australia faces an increased risk of becoming isolated internationally on the issue. </p>
<p>That could have trade and investment implications, something of concern to the business community.</p>
<p>Morrison sought to highlight a common Australian-US commitment to technology.</p>
<p>He said he particularly welcomed campaign comments Biden made “when he showed a lot of similarity to Australia’s views on how technology can be used to address the lower emissions challenge.</p>
<p>"We want to see global emissions fall and it’s not enough for us to meet our commitments,” Morrison said. </p>
<p>“We need to have the transformational technologies that are scalable and affordable for the developing world as well, because that is where all the emissions increases are coming from … in the next 20 years,” he said.</p>
<p>“I believe we will have a very positive discussion about partnerships we can have with the United States about furthering those technological developments that will see a lower emissions future for the world but a stronger economy as well where we don’t say goodbye to jobs,” Morrison said.</p>
<p>Labor will use the Biden win as a springboard to ramp up its attack on the government over climate policy, including in parliament this week.</p>
<p>Albanese said Biden would reject “accounting tricks” like the government’s argument to be allowed to use carryover credits to reach emission reduction targets.</p>
<p>Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told the ABC the US result gave Morrison the opportunity to pivot on climate policy. Now was the time for him to say, “I don’t have to go on with all of the BS about a gas-led recovery, which is political piffle,” Turnbull said.</p>
<p>Chief of the Australian Industry Group Innes Willox said the Biden administration would place much more emphasis on climate change and energy policy. </p>
<p>“The commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 will encourage other economies to move down this path. We are already seeing significant steps in recent times from other major trading partners such as Japan, South Korea, the UK and the European Union.</p>
<p>"Australia, led by industry and investor action, is already headed this way without making a formal target commitment,” Willox said. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-a-biden-presidency-would-put-pressure-on-scott-morrison-over-climate-change-149548">Grattan on Friday: A Biden presidency would put pressure on Scott Morrison over climate change</a>
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<p>Willox said independent Zali Steggall’s climate change bill – with a pathway to a 2050 target – provided an immediate opportunity to move the debate forward. The bill will be introduced on Monday.</p>
<p>“The Bill is non-partisan. 2050 is many changes of government away, but for some industries it’s just a couple of investment cycles,” Willox said. The Steggall bill is receiving considerable business support. </p>
<p>Willox said the other shift of importance for Australian industry from a Biden administration would be “the opportunity for the US to re-engage with China on trade and broader economic issues. </p>
<p>"Efforts to take the heat out of differences on global trade through a change in tone will be welcomed but there should be no illusion that a Biden administration would seek to markedly soften the US’s stance on key issues,” Willox said.</p>
<p>“The risk for Australia until now has been that we have been caught up as collateral damage in the US-China trade dispute.</p>
<p>"The future risk is that China may seek to substitute Australian exports in key sectors with goods from the US in an effort to reset their economic relationship,” Willox said.</p>
<p>Asked about the prospect of the US rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Morrison said, “I think it would be very early days to speculate on those matters. I would simply say to the United States, the door has always remained open on the TPP. It is open now. It will be open in the future and you are welcome any time.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149715/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Scott Morrison has lost no time pivoting to the incoming US presidency, declaring on Sunday he hopes Joe Biden and his wife Jill will visit Australia for next year’s 70th anniversary of ANZUS.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1495792020-11-06T10:14:51Z2020-11-06T10:14:51ZExperts: Biden is preferred over Trump for Indonesia’s economy growth<p>Indonesia prefers Joe Biden, currently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/nov/05/us-election-2020-live-results-donald-trump-joe-biden-presidential-votes-arizona-nevada-pennsylvania-georgia">leading the US election</a>, over incumbent Donald Trump, according to experts. </p>
<p>“If Biden is elected, then the tension in the trade war will decrease, demand for Indonesian good will increase and also capital or investment that flows into the country,” said Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, a researcher at the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF).</p>
<p>Having a president that creates a favourable trade policy towards Indonesia is important, according to Bhima, as the United States’ contribution to the Indonesian economy is quite significant. </p>
<p>In September, the US was the second-largest contributor for exports of goods and services from Indonesia sold abroad with <a href="https://www.bps.go.id/pressrelease/2020/10/15/1683/ekspor-september-2020-mencapai-us-14-01-miliar-dan-impor-september-2020-sebesar-us-11-57-miliar.html">a total of US$ 1.69 billion</a>. </p>
<p>This amount is equivalent to <a href="https://www.bps.go.id/pressrelease/2020/10/15/1683/ekspor-september-2020-mencapai-us-14-01-miliar-dan-impor-september-2020-sebesar-us-11-57-miliar.html">12.68% of Indonesia’s total exports or around US$14 billion </a> in September this year. The US came second after China, which contributed nearly 20% of Indonesia’s exports at US$ 2.63 billion.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367754/original/file-20201105-21-hn75yq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Joe Biden press conference.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/190887385@N06/50555606063/in/photolist-2k2qGmp-2jc8tpc-2iHzCAX-2iHzCSZ-2jNcwzY-2jkeLzE-2iBtWdg-B3RX59-2k2WB2M-2inc64h-2iytzHN-2ihymhg-2ihAHSe-2ihBTi2-2ihAKof-2ihAJBf-2ihyixd-2ihAN4F-2iL8C7p-2iHDX25-2iHCmW7-2iBm1PS-2iHCn1W-2ihAGxL-2ihAJeB-2ihAHu5-2ihAPQm-2ihAPvd-2ihBSbN-2ihAMhq-2jYHLj7-2iHzD3U-2iHzCPC-2iHCmT6-2iHCmQ5-2iBqa57-2jEcyYt-2iHDWDB-2iw6Ywp-2iHCn34-2iytzHh-2k36yDC-2k31GFh-2k32edR-2k36yQz-RK4jg4-2jjkyw5-2iLbJG1-2jjmLZW-2k31Dw6">photonews/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Biden has more positive sentiments than Trump</h2>
<p>Bhima argued that Biden is the better candidate. He said Biden has experience in establishing more productive relations between countries, such as during his time as vice president to Barack Obama.</p>
<p>Fithra Faisal Hastiadi, a researcher and lecturer in economics at the University of Indonesia, also projects that Biden will prefer multilateral or several countries partnership compared to Trump that prefers bilateral agreements.</p>
<p>Obama and Biden were the initiators of the <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp">Trans-Pacific Partnership</a> (TPP) cooperation framework in 2008, which is a trade agreement containing 12 countries. However, Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/13/a-timeline-of-trumps-complicated-relationship-with-the-tpp/">withdrew from TPP in 2018</a> and is more focused on bilateral discussions.</p>
<p>Both Biden and Trump, however, have a similar perspective on China’s influence on Asia. If Obama and Biden use the TPP as a way to reduce China’s dominance in Asia as well as efforts to penetrate the market, Trump is far more aggressive in taking a more direct approach by using trade wars.</p>
<p>“With Biden, although it looks like Indonesia is about to start over from scratch, the potential for reinforcing commitments between America and Indonesia also seems wide open,” Fithra said.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Bhima also sees that the economic stimulus policy in the democratic party will encourage the recovery of the middle-class purchasing power in the US with Biden’s agenda to increase the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-15-minimum-wage-election-economy-paychecks-low-workers-2020-10">federal minimum wage up to US$ 15/hour</a>.</p>
<p>“The impact is the demand for goods from Indonesia will be even greater if the purchasing power in the US increases,” Bhima added.</p>
<p>Bhima also emphasises about the impact on Indonesia’s financial markets, Biden will provide a breath of fresh air to foreign capital flows if elected. US investors who have been playing it safe by buying gold, dollars and Japanese yen will begin to venture into emerging markets like Indonesia.</p>
<p>The Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) or Indonesia’s stock exchange <a href="https://market.bisnis.com/read/20201102/7/1312610/kinerja-ihsg-membaik-reksa-dana-saham-jadi-jawara">increased by 4.72% last month to reach the level of 5,159</a>. </p>
<p>One of the things that investors will be looking for is Indonesian government bonds because they offer high-interest rates to investors. Investment from the US will also increase in size if trade relations improve, according to Bhima.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/367749/original/file-20201105-17-1rlpad4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/iip-photo-archive/50558394573/in/photolist-2k2EZha-2jFPbqG-2jimM5W-2izrCXB-2iqwHkD-2ihAMAb-2ihyfpE-2ihBLEC-2ihALWA-2k2qGmp-2jc8tpc-2iHzCAX-2iHzCSZ-2jNcwzY-2jkeLzE-2iBtWdg-B3RX59-2k2WB2M-2inc64h-2iytzHN-2ihymhg-2ihAHSe-2ihBTi2-2ihAKof-2ihAJBf-2ihyixd-2ihAN4F-2iL8C7p-2iHDX25-2iHCmW7-2iBm1PS-2iHCn1W-2ihAGxL-2ihAJeB-2ihAHu5-2ihAPQm-2ihAPvd-2ihBSbN-2ihAMhq-2jYHLj7-2iHzD3U-2iHzCPC-2iHCmT6-2iHCmQ5-2iBqa57-2jEcyYt-2iHDWDB-2iw6Ywp-2iHCn34-2iytzHh">gageskidmore/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Trump surrounded by controversies that impact Indonesia’s economy</h2>
<p>According to Fithra, with Trump elected, Indonesia’s cooperation with the United States will still grow. </p>
<p>One of the recent positive sentiments coming from Trump administration is the extension of the <a href="https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/11/01/us-extends-gsp-status-for-indonesia.html">general system of preferences (GSP) facility</a>. GSP is a free import duty program for several imported products from Indonesia. </p>
<p>The extension of the program is a sign of a strategic partnership between Indonesia and the US, as previously it has discontinued the GSP program for other countries such as <a href="https://www.orfonline.org/research/understanding-the-impact-of-gsp-withdrawal-on-indias-top-exports-to-the-us/">India</a> and <a href="https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30386896">Thailand</a>.</p>
<p>The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo visit to extend the GSP program also explored the possibility of opening other limited trade agreements; Indonesia could reap more significant results in the future.</p>
<p>However, there are also Trump’s controversies that will continue to create negative sentiments for Indonesia.</p>
<p>According to Bhima, Trump’s policy of protectionism or tightening trade from other countries has harmed Indonesia’s economic interests. This is evident from the sluggish performance of Indonesia’s exports even before the pandemic due to the low demand for raw materials to China and direct export to the US.</p>
<p>Since 2018 Trump has carried out a <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-trade-war-what-was-it-good-for-not-much-147247">trade war with China</a>, Indonesia’s biggest importer, by raising taxes on imported goods originating from China</p>
<p>Indonesia’s exports throughout 2019 only reached <a href="https://www.bps.go.id/pressrelease/2020/01/15/1734/ekspor-desember-2019-mencapai-us-14-47-miliar--sedangkan-nilai-impor-mencapai-us-14-50-miliar.html">US$ 167.53 billion</a>, this figure fell sharply by 6.94% compared to the previous year’s achievement of US$ 180.01 billion.</p>
<p>Bhima also predicts that if Trump wins then the stimulus will be more focusing on reducing taxes for the wealthy individuals. Hence the demands for goods from the US may not be as high as compared if Biden win.</p>
<h2>Positive trend going forward</h2>
<p>Fithra projected after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, the United States will aim to reduce its dependence on production from China and look for alternative places. This trend has at least been seen in the last few months when Indonesia’s exports to the United States have grown. </p>
<p>Some of the products such as raw materials for drug manufacturing previously imported from China <a href="https://jakartaglobe.id/business/us-pharma-company-to-relocate-plant-to-central-java-from-china/">were diverted to Indonesia</a>. This phenomenon is the first phase of relocation by the United States to alternative markets. The second stage is the transfer of its strategic industries from China to ASEAN. Indonesia should be able to seize these opportunities, according to Fithra.</p>
<p>“Armed with improved negotiation skills, Indonesia will increasingly get positive results going forward,” Fithra concluded.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149579/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Indonesia is a strategic country for the United States and the cooperation between the two countries will only grow.Yessar Rosendar, Business + Economy (Indonesian edition)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1496252020-11-06T01:41:06Z2020-11-06T01:41:06ZVIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the Queensland election, the US election, and the reserve bank<p>University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.</p>
<p>This week the pair discuss the outcome of the Queensland election, the likely outcome and repercussions of the US election, as well as Christine Holgate’s resignation as CEO of Australia post, and the government’s securing of additional possible vaccination distribution agreements.</p>
<p><em>Correction from Michelle Grattan: Speaking about the Queensland election, I misspoke, saying the LNP preferenced Jackie Trad over Labor, when I meant to say preferenced the Greens candidate over Labor, enabling that candidate to get across the line</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1467112020-09-29T21:18:53Z2020-09-29T21:18:53ZFact check US: What is the impact of Russian interference in the US presidential election?<p><em>This article looks at the Russian’s contribution to the spread of fake news about the US elections.</em></p>
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<p>To understand concerns about the upcoming 2020 US elections, it is crucial to look back at the 2016 electoral cycle. As early as January 2017, a <a href="https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/national/read-the-declassified-report-on-russian-interference-in-the-us-election/2433/">joint report by the CIA, FBI and NSA</a> confirmed that there had been Russian interference in the 2016 election.</p>
<p>Russia’s objective, according to this document, was to undermine the confidence of Americans in their electoral system and to denigrate Hillary Clinton. In the run-up to the 2020 election, <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/511078-top-intelligence-official-warns-of-foreign-influence-ahead-of-2020">William Evanina</a>, director of the National Counter-intelligence and Security Center, accused China, Iran and Russia of posing a threat to the US election next November. He stated that China does not want Trump to be re-elected because it considers him “unpredictable”, Russia is wants to see him elected. One way to try to influence the US electoral process is to interfere with the information circulating about the campaign, and its an art at which the Russians have become experts.</p>
<p>Between January 2015 and August 2017, Facebook linked <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg27398/pdf/CHRG-115shrg27398.pdf">80,000</a> publications to the Russian company Internet Research Agency through more than 470 different accounts. At the same time, a total of <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html">50,258 Twitter accounts</a> were linked to <a href="https://theconversation.com/russian-disinformation-in-the-time-of-covid-19-142309">Russian bots</a> – fake accounts programmed to share false information – during the 2016 election period. The bots are responsible for more than <a href="https://firstmonday.org/article/view/7090/5653">3.8 million tweets</a>, about 19% of the total tweets related to the 2016 US presidential election. Approximately <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/20/2020-russian-trolls-disrupt-social-media-how-to-fight-back-column/4749642002/">80% of these bots behaved in a way that supported Donald Trump</a>, mostly using the hashtags #donaldtrump, #trump2016, #neverhillary and #trumppence16.</p>
<p>Why might Russia have worked to support Donald Trump in 2016? One of the hypotheses is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for Hillary Clinton, which dates back to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia/putin-says-u-s-stoked-russian-protests-idUSTRE7B610S20111208">December 2011</a>, when riots took place in Moscow following the announcement of Putin’s candidacy for the Russian presidency in March 2012. The Kremlin accused the then Secretary of State of encouraging the protests and interfering in the Russian electoral process.</p>
<h2>Russia’s interests in 2020</h2>
<p>For the 2020 election, Russia appears to be once again favouring the election of Trump, this time over <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/17/politics/trump-retweets-known-russian-disinformation-biden-derkach/index.html">Joe Biden and the Democratic party</a>, which it perceives as being unfriendly to Russian interests. It should be remembered that as vice president, Biden played a role in the <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10779.pdf">policy of sanctions against Russia in 2014</a> following the annexation of the <a href="https://corpus.ulaval.ca/jspui/handle/20.500.11794/27745">Crimea</a>.</p>
<p>In light of this information, what is awaiting the United States in this new electoral cycle? At the end of August 2020, Facebook has already dismantled <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/august-2020-cib-report/">three botnets propagating false information</a>. Two were Russian and one Pakistani. Since 2017, Facebook has dismantled a dozen of these networks linked to the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf">Internet Research Agency</a>, which recently created a new site, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russia-leverages-fake-personas-u-s-writers-to-spread-disinformation">Peace Data</a>, which claims to be a global press organization. On their site one finds <a href="https://journalism.wisc.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/41/files/2018/09/Uncover.Kim_.v.5.0905181.pdf">false information</a> about both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the main objective being to <a href="https://www-tandfonline-com.acces.bibl.ulaval.ca/doi/full/10.1080/09546553.2018.1555996">further divide Americans</a>.</p>
<p>In addition to closing five accounts related to Russia, <a href="https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1300848632120242181">Twitter</a> announced that Peace Data would be banned from its platform. On September 10, Microsoft alerted Joe Biden’s campaign that Russian hackers tried to access the servers of the American communication agency <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-cyber-biden-exclusive/exclusive-russian-state-hackers-suspected-in-targeting-biden-campaign-firm-sources-idUSKBN2610I4">SKDKnickerbocker</a>, hired by many Democratic candidates. It was through a similar ploy that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails were made public during the 2016 campaign. But while the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/03/politics/democrats-sanctions-russian-meddling/index.html">Democrats</a> urge the White House to acknowledge Russian interference and impose sanctions, Trump turns away from the issue and <a href="https://www.kten.com/story/42599156/trump-pushes-misleading-claim-china-is-stoking-protests-to-help-biden-win-election">accuses</a> China of encouraging demonstrations and racial divisions.</p>
<p>While we do not yet have sufficient data and hindsight to fully analyse this presidential campaign, the threat posed by the bots must be seriously considered. According to Harvard sociologist <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/ideas-social-cybersecurity/research/coronavirus.html">Kathleen M. Carley</a>, a fake news story travels six times faster on social media than a verified story. Fake news are being shared quickly and <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html">continuously</a> through a network of fake accounts programmed for this purpose. Quantity is more important than the quality of the message conveyed, because one of the objectives is to drown the real news in a constant stream of fake news.</p>
<p>If individuals do not subscribe to a false story, the bots stop sharing it. However, if <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html">community members share and strongly adhere to a fake news story</a>, the bots will make sure to relay it as often as possible in a short period of time to multiply its reach across social media’s networks. At the same time, if a fake account is deactivated, another one will be created to replace it. It is therefore an endemic movement that is regenerated even as the platforms try to eradicate them.</p>
<p>In the current political context, where <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/13/president-trump-has-made-more-than-20000-false-or-misleading-claims/">President Trump himself frequently shares fake news</a>, the work of the bots is made easier. As <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/joshua-yaffa">Joshua Yaffa</a> explains, the Russian bots did not need to create the polemic surrounding the mail-in vote or the Black Lives Matter protests: they only had to massively share the news exacerbating tensions created by the Americans themselves.</p>
<p>In April 2018, <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-04-russia-spam-account-problem-reddit-propaganda.html">Reddit</a> banned nearly 1,000 Russian bots. Meanwhile, <a href="https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-68-a-new-tool-to-track-russian-disinformation-on-twitter/">the Hamilton 68 Project</a> was set up to identify and list bots and fake accounts, and to teach citizens how to spot these fake accounts. The topics usually covered by Russian bots are listed on their website so that the general public can better understand how they work.</p>
<h2>The multiple relays of fake news</h2>
<p>Bots are however not limited to social media discussions. <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/ideas-social-cybersecurity/research/coronavirus.html">YouTube</a> videos can also be used as propagation vectors, as well as humorous images commonly called <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/ideas-social-cybersecurity/research/coronavirus.html">memes</a>.</p>
<p>In 2018, Russia went even further in the presidential election in <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2020-08-11/putin-kremlins-plot-against-democracy">Madagascar</a>. Russian agents created a new newspaper there and hired students to write articles in favour of the outgoing president. They bought advertising inserts, paid people to go to demonstrations and paid journalists to cover the demonstrations.</p>
<p>Currently, there is no evidence that these more advanced methods are being used in the United States. However, there is evidence that the Russians have become masters in the art of creating bots dedicated to spreading false information.</p>
<p>In this way, Russian interference continues to fuel tensions among Americans, adding uncertainty and undermining public confidence in the democratic electoral process.</p>
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<p><em>Fact check US is supported by <a href="https://craignewmarkphilanthropies.org/about-us/">Craig Newmark Philanthropies</a>, which promotes trustworthy journalism.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Marineau ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>Russian interference deeply marked the 2016 American presidential election. Four years later, let’s analyze the form and impact of disinformation coming from Russia.Sophie Marineau, Doctorante en histoire des relations internationales / phD candidate History, International relations, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1351772020-08-13T12:09:57Z2020-08-13T12:09:57ZPolitical trolls adapt, create material to deceive and confuse the public<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/352054/original/file-20200810-18-1pbnooe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C17%2C5808%2C4384&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Trolls get creative when looking to deceive.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/troll-writing-fake-comments-royalty-free-illustration/943783548">Planet Flem/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Russian-sponsored Twitter trolls, who so <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326016">aggressively exploited social media</a> to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, didn’t stop when Donald Trump was elected president.</p>
<p>Even after the election, they remained active and adapted their methods, including using images – among them, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3278532.3278550">easy-to-digest meme images</a> such as Hillary Clinton appearing to run away from police – to spread their views. As part of our study to understand how these trolls operate, we analyzed <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.05997">1.8 million images posted on Twitter by 3,600 accounts</a> identified by Twitter itself as being part of Russian government-sponsored disinformation campaigns, from before the 2016 election through 2018, when those accounts were shut down by Twitter. </p>
<p>While our study focused on those specific accounts, it’s reasonable to assume that others exist and are still active. Until they were blocked by Twitter, the accounts we studied were sharing images about events in Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. – including divisive political events like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The images Russian government-backed trolls posted on Twitter appeared on other social networks, including Reddit, 4chan and Gab.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Sample memes including " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324141/original/file-20200330-173884-b60o7k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Examples of memes shared online by Russian government-sponsored trolls.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.05997">Zannettou et al., 2019.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<h2>Changing focus</h2>
<p>What they posted shifted over time. We analyzed the actual images themselves, to identify the topics of the posts, and even depictions of public figures and specific locations. In 2014, most of these accounts began posting images related to Russia and Ukraine, but gradually transitioned to posting images about U.S. politics, including material about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. </p>
<p>This is consistent with some of our <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.03130.pdf">previous analysis of the text posts of these accounts</a>, which showed they had changed their focus from Russian foreign policy to U.S. domestic issues. </p>
<p><iframe id="xHqDE" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xHqDE/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dot plot showing how often different topics were posted about." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324144/original/file-20200330-159520-v2pie3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Topics of posts from Russian-sponsored trolls on Twitter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.05997">Zannettou et al., 2019.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<h2>Spreading their ideas, and others’</h2>
<p>We found that the Russian-backed accounts were both creating new propaganda and amplifying messages created by others. About 30% of the images they tweeted had not appeared on other social media or elsewhere on Twitter and were therefore likely created by the Russians behind the accounts. The remaining 70% had appeared elsewhere. </p>
<p>By analyzing how their posts spread across different social networks <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.02822.pdf">over time</a>, we were able to estimate how much influence these accounts had on the discussions on other online services like Reddit and Gab.</p>
<p>We found that the accounts’ ability to spread political images varied by the social network. For instance, Russian-sponsored tweets about both parties were equally influential on Twitter, but on Gab their influence was mainly on spreading images of Democratic politicians. On Reddit, by contrast, the troll accounts were more influential at spreading images about Republican politicians.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-favorite">Weekly on Wednesdays</a>.]</p>
<h2>Looking ahead</h2>
<p>This research is an early step toward understanding how disinformation campaigns use images. Our research provides a look at the past, but from what we have learned, we expect that information warriors will create more content themselves, and take advantage of material others create, to improve their strategies and effectiveness.</p>
<p>As the 2020 presidential election approaches, Americans should remain aware that Russians and others are still continuing their increasingly sophisticated efforts to mislead, confuse and spread social discord in the public.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135177/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gianluca Stringhini receives funding from the National Science Foundation and Facebook. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Savvas Zannettou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Russian-affiliated Twitter accounts changed what they posted about, and used both text and images in ways that shed light on how these information warriors work.Gianluca Stringhini, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston UniversitySavvas Zannettou, Postdoctoral Researcher, Max Planck Institute of GeoanthropologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1266582019-12-02T03:27:09Z2019-12-02T03:27:09ZCurious Kids: How come Donald Trump won if Hillary Clinton got more votes?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302022/original/file-20191115-66971-12ll0zo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/new-york-city-april-4-2016-401778634?src=290086c7-18e9-4c8f-aea7-271f3b21220e-1-40">a katz/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281719/original/file-20190628-76743-26slbc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>How come Donald Trump won if Hillary Clinton got more votes? Ellen T., 8, Cambridge, Massachusetts</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>Many Americans wonder why <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/how-donald-trump-became-president-elect">Donald Trump became president</a> after the 2016 election, since <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-officially-wins-popular-vote-29-million/story?id=44354341">Hillary Clinton got more votes</a> overall.</p>
<p>In fact, Clinton got <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-election-final-20161209-story.html">as many votes in 2016 as Barack Obama did</a> in 2012. Hers were concentrated in fewer states, however, which makes all the difference in the American political system.</p>
<p>I’m <a href="http://rit.academia.edu/SarahBurns">a professor</a> who studies the presidency. To explain why Trump won we have to go back to the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/">founding of the United States</a>. </p>
<h2>What is the Electoral College?</h2>
<p>In the United States, something called the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html">Electoral College</a> determines how many votes a presidential candidate gets in an election.</p>
<p>Each state has <a href="https://www.gallopade.com/client/electionsForKids/ElectoralCollege.html">a certain number of votes</a> for presidential candidates roughly tied to the population of the state. This number is equal to the number of representatives and senators the state sends to Congress.</p>
<p>For example, New York, the state where I live, has <a href="https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/allocation.html">27 representatives</a> and therefore 29 Electoral College votes. Washington, D.C. — which doesn’t have any members of Congress — has three Electoral College votes.</p>
<p>But the rules also say <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-House-of-Representatives-Seats-by-State-1787120">each state must have at least one representative</a> and there can only be <a href="https://www.house.gov/the-house-explained">435 members of the House</a>. Because of the way those available seats are divided up, certain states have fewer representatives per person than in other states.</p>
<p>For example, each of the 53 representatives in the House from California represents roughly 746,415 people. In Wyoming, that number drops to 577,737 for their one representative.</p>
<p>This means the <a href="https://www.dictionary.com/browse/popular-vote">national popular vote</a> – which goes to the candidate who won the most individual votes – can be somewhat different than the Electoral College vote.</p>
<p>That’s what happened in the 2016 election. Large portions of city-dwellers in blue states voted for Clinton, giving her <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-popular-vote-final-count/index.html">the most votes nationally</a>.</p>
<p>But Trump had an advantage in states with smaller populations and an advantage in the Electoral College. This is in part because <a href="https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/faq.html#wtapv">48 states and the District of Columbia give all of the electoral votes</a> from the state to the candidate who wins the majority of the votes. Only Maine and Nebraska don’t follow this ‘winner takes all’ approach.</p>
<h2>Where did it come from?</h2>
<p>The Electoral College is part of the U.S. Constitution.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302023/original/file-20191115-66917-va2tjn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler voted for the state of Louisiana in 1876.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#/media/File:A_certificate_for_the_electoral_vote_for_Rutherford_B._Hayes_and_William_A._Wheeler_for_the_State_of_Louisiana_dated_1876_part_6.jpg">The Library of Congress</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In 1787, the Founding Fathers worried that the people might elect a demagogue, or <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/">someone who would appeal to their emotions</a> and facilitate the creation and <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed01.asp">execution of laws based on fear or anger</a>. The founders assumed the electors in the Electoral College would just be “unfaithful” to the voters if they voted for someone unqualified.</p>
<p>In modern times, people in all 50 states vote in November and those decisions are conveyed to the electors. The electors <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-is-the-electoral-college_n_2078970">meet in mid-December</a> to cast the official ballot for president.</p>
<p>Almost always, they adhere to the votes of the people, but every so often an <a href="https://bensguide.gpo.gov/election-of-the-president-vice-president-electoral-college">unfaithful elector votes for a different candidate</a>. Electors are generally chosen by the party – Republicans and Democrats – but <a href="https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/electors.html#selection.">each state determines for itself how it chooses electors</a>.</p>
<p>In the case of the 2016 election, electors largely voted with their states, electing Trump president.</p>
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<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">curiouskidsus@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
<p><em>And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Burns is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute. </span></em></p>Hillary Clinton got the most individual votes from US citizens in 2016, but Donald Trump won the most electoral votes.Sarah Burns, Associate Professor of Political Science, Rochester Institute of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1250542019-10-20T19:05:48Z2019-10-20T19:05:48ZThe Trump presidency should not be shocking. It’s a symptom of our cultural malaise<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297033/original/file-20191015-98657-1kbbxd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's a mistake to see Trump as unique or his success as something that could only occur in America.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pete Marovich/Pool/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the 2016 US presidential campaign, people around the world were regularly reassured by election experts that Donald Trump was too outrageous to be elected president. </p>
<p>Reflecting this conventional wisdom, Hilary Clinton campaign’s central message seemed to be: “seriously?”. </p>
<p>In other words, we were constantly told that Trump was too offensive, ignorant and dangerous to be chosen to lead the US. But this political interpretation tended to miss how American popular culture had created the conditions for a character like Trump to upend the mannered and formulaic presidential selection process. </p>
<p>In many ways, the Trump campaign was politics catching up with popular culture.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297785/original/file-20191019-56228-5w3chj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump told a rally in Dallas last week: ‘It’s much easier being presidential … All you have to do is act like a stiff.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Larry W. Smith/EPA</span></span>
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<h2>Trump’s embrace of the worst parts of pop culture</h2>
<p>In my new book, <a href="https://gleebooks.worldsecuresystems.com/BookingRetrieve.aspx?ID=318620">Anti-Americanism and American Exceptionalism</a>, I argue that it is a mistake to see Trump as unique or his success as something that could only occur in America. </p>
<p>Trump-like behaviour is all around us. His narcissism, bullying, misogyny, racism, populism and tendency to play the victim is all too commonplace – and these are certainly not just American problems. </p>
<p>What is exceptional is that American politics tends to be more pretentious and has a greater sense of self-importance than politics elsewhere. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-impeachment-inquiry-might-affect-trumps-2020-re-election-chances-124424">How the impeachment inquiry might affect Trump's 2020 re-election chances</a>
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<p>Trump snubbed the pretentiousness and faux politeness of the US political system with a devil-may-care attitude, and in so doing made presidential politics more like Westminster parliamentary politics with its name-calling and bravado. </p>
<p>Trump has also taken the worst lessons from popular culture and used them to his advantage. </p>
<p>He turned the second presidential debate, for instance, into a version of The Jerry Springer Show by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/10/us/politics/bill-clinton-accusers.html">inviting three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault</a> to sit in the audience. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297036/original/file-20191015-98653-n5dyq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Trump attempted to deflect attention from the Access Hollywood tapes with an attention-grabbing stunt at his second debate with Hillary Clinton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Gombert/EPA</span></span>
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<p>Over <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/06/20/jerry-springer-show-exit/720075002/">4,000 episodes</a>, Springer had used traumatic cases like these to entertain and distract daytime television viewers. This is far from just an American ploy as radio shock-jocks like Alan Jones in Australia are well-practised at using victims for their own purposes.</p>
<p>In the wake of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html">Access Hollywood tapes</a>, Trump drew from Springer’s playbook and turned one of the most important testing grounds in American politics into a crass reality television drama. By inviting Clinton’s accusers, his intention was to make this claim: Hillary’s husband is worse than I am. </p>
<p>Hardly caring to answer the serious questions posed during the debate, Trump also ventured that <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2016-presidential-debates/4">Hillary Clinton “would be in jail”</a> if he was president, echoing the notorious “lock her up” chants at his rallies.</p>
<p>This mocking campaign style – which has continued throughout his presidency – has had real and grave consequences. However, it was far more in touch with the spirit of the times than is usually admitted.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/8-reasons-why-impeaching-donald-trump-is-a-big-risk-for-the-democrats-and-3-reasons-why-its-not-124154">8 reasons why impeaching Donald Trump is a big risk for the Democrats (and 3 reasons why it's not)</a>
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<h2>A symptom of widespread cultural malaise</h2>
<p>Trump’s constant self-promotion and trolling of opponents is not only utterly familiar, it’s emblematic of narcissistic 21st century culture. He is certainly more culturally familiar than Hillary Clinton with her lifelong dedication to public service and understanding of complex public policy issues. </p>
<p>The Trump phenomenon is politics subsumed by popular culture. During the 2016 campaign, he lived by the entertainment industry maxim that you can get away with almost anything as long as you’re not boring. </p>
<p>Part of the media’s watchdog role relies on accountability, ethics and the law being central to politics. However, this understanding is undermined when politics is reduced to a popularity contest and increasingly resembles the anything-goes ethos of popular culture.</p>
<p>If we view Trump as a product of popular culture, then he is clearly a symptom of a cultural malaise rather than a radical departure from it. </p>
<p>Given this, it has been intriguing to watch The New York Times, CNN and other traditional media outlets react with endless shock and horror to Trump, as if they had never seen anything like him.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1185387696883142656"}"></div></p>
<p>One of the other many curiosities of the Trump era is that <a href="https://www.potus.com/presidential-facts/age-at-inauguration/">the oldest person ever to be elected US president</a> quickly mastered the dark arts of Twitter and has strong appeal with a tech-savvy male youth subculture, which has made shock, conspiracies, misogyny, racism, trolling and bullying supposedly funny and transgressive. </p>
<p>New information technologies haven’t just fuelled greater understanding in the world – as some of the utopian founders of the internet had hoped – they have also given more power to the obnoxious and ill-informed. </p>
<p>Once you engage with this online culture, it is clear that Trump is part of a disturbingly widespread cultural backlash rather than being a unique phenomenon.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-united-states-on-the-brink-of-a-revolution-123244">Is the United States on the brink of a revolution?</a>
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<p>One sign of this is how much less critical Trump has been of white nationalists than any president in the post-civil rights era. By <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/">delaying and obfuscating his criticisms</a>, he has encouraged those on the alt-right to believe their voices are being heard.</p>
<p>How we got to this sorry place is that the shock culture that pervades right-wing talk radio hosts, Fox News and 4Chan all made Trump’s alt-right presidency possible. </p>
<p>With the next presidential election looming, it is time to take these popular but often insensitive cultural and political developments that helped Trump come to power very seriously. These cultural trends are on the rise and require resistance as they degrade our personal lives and political culture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125054/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brendon O'Connor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Trump lives by the maxim that you can get away with almost anything as long as you’re not boring. This doesn’t make him an outlier – he’s emblematic of our contemporary pop culture.Brendon O'Connor, Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1194462019-07-24T11:07:27Z2019-07-24T11:07:27ZFacebook algorithm changes suppressed journalism and meddled with democracy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/284794/original/file-20190718-116590-13ckvtp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3099%2C995&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How do you feel about Facebook?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kiev-ukraine-may-24-2019-new-1416299054">fyv6561/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Facebook’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/1155510281178725">News Feed algorithm</a> determines <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html">what users see</a> on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company <a href="http://www.ktvu.com/business/facebook-to-downgrade-posts-on-newsfeed-touting-miracle-cures">regularly</a> <a href="https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/">updates</a> this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.</p>
<p>As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-congress-collins/house-judiciarys-top-republican-urges-hearings-into-russian-election-meddling-idUSKCN1T52B1">Russian meddling</a>” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-russian-government-used-disinformation-and-cyber-warfare-in-2016-election-an-ethical-hacker-explains-99989">intentionally or not</a>, in that kind of meddling.</p>
<p>A key counterpoint to the Russian misinformation campaign was factual journalism from reputable sources – which <a href="https://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/">reached many of their readers on Facebook and other social media platforms</a>. As a <a href="https://newhouse.syr.edu/faculty-staff/jennifer-grygiel">social media researcher and educator</a>, I see evidence that changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm suppressed users’ access to credible journalism in the run-up to Trump’s election. </p>
<p>Political operatives know Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/facebook-earnings-q4-2015/">more than 200 million Americans</a> and 2 billion users worldwide. Actions and abuse by others on the platforms have generated much concern and public discussion, including about how much <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/house-democrats-release-all-known-russian-troll-farm-facebook-ads-and-twitter-accounts">disinformation and propaganda Americans saw</a> before the election. What has not been talked about enough is the effect that Facebook’s algorithmic shifts have had on access to news and democracy.</p>
<h2>Changing the system</h2>
<p><a href="http://fortune.com/2015/07/09/facebook-see-first-launch/">In mid-2015</a>, Facebook introduced a major algorithm change that pivoted readers <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/03/24/facebook-news/">away from journalism and news</a>, to deliver more updates from their friends and family. The change was couched in friendly language suggesting Facebook was trying to make sure users <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-to-prioritise-posts-from-people-rather-than-brands">didn’t miss stories from friends</a>. But social media data shows that one effect of the change was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.</p>
<p>A few months before the 2016 election, an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/technology/facebook-to-change-news-feed-to-focus-on-friends-and-family.html">even bigger algorithm change toward friends and family posts</a> took a second toll on publisher traffic. A <a href="https://digiday.com/media/publishers-just-saw-decline-facebook-traffic/">wide range of news publishers</a> found that their content was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-news-feed-algorithm-change-traffic-publishing">significantly less visible</a> to Facebook users.</p>
<h2>Examining the numbers</h2>
<p>In my research, I looked at Facebook engagement for mainstream news outlets surrounding the 2016 election. My findings support others’ conclusions that Facebook’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/06/29/facebook-tweaks-news-feed-algorithm-to-prioritize-posts-from-friends-you-care-about/#1467cf4bda2e">algorithm greatly suppressed public engagement with these publishers</a>.</p>
<p>Data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring company, shows that Facebook traffic dropped noticeably at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post after the company updated its algorithms to <a href="https://wallaroomedia.com/facebook-newsfeed-algorithm-history/#six">favor friends and family</a> in June 2016. </p>
<p>That proves the algorithm worked the way it was designed to work, but I am concerned that major U.S. publishers were suppressed in this way. Voter interest in the presidential election was <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2016/07/07/1-campaign-engagement-and-interest/">higher in 2016 than in the previous two decades</a>, and misinformation was rampant. Facebook’s changes meant that key news organizations across the political spectrum had a harder time getting the word out about credible election news and reporting. </p>
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<h2>Alarm bells</h2>
<p>Facebook was aware of concerns about its algorithm even before the election happened. One of <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/how-people-inside-facebook-are-reacting-to-the-companys">Facebook’s own engineers flagged these potential effects</a> of Facebook’s algorithm changes in July 2015. In 2016, Zuckerberg’s mentor, Roger McNamee, also <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/10/10/if-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-wants-forgiveness-hes-going-need-come-clean-first-roger-ncmanee-column/744520001/">attempted to alert Zuckerberg and Facebook executives</a> that the platform was being used to manipulate information about the election.</p>
<p>Just after the election, reporter Craig Silverman’s research at BuzzFeed showed that fake election news had outperformed “<a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook">real news</a>.” In late 2018, Facebook’s own company statement revealed issues with how its algorithm rewarded “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634/">borderline content</a>” that was sensational and provocative, like much of the hyperpartisan news that trended in advance of the election.</p>
<p>More recent research by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center shows that Facebook traffic <a href="https://shorensteincenter.org/facebook-friends/">continued to decrease significantly for publishers</a> after a further Facebook algorithm change in January 2018. </p>
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<p><em>Prof. Grygiel calls for algorithmic transparency on MSNBC.</em></p>
<h2>Algorithmic transparency</h2>
<p>To date, research on how Facebook’s algorithm works has been limited by the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1178592">lack of access</a> to its proprietary inner workings. It’s not enough to investigate the <a href="https://www.cjr.org/special_report/facebook-media-buzzfeed.php">effects of the changes</a> in Facebook’s News Feed. I believe it’s important to understand why they happened, too, and consider Facebook’s business decisions more directly and how they affect democracy.</p>
<p>Recent insight into the company’s internal processes suggest that Facebook is beginning to understand its power. In July 2019, Bloomberg News revealed that the company had deployed software on its own platform to <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-08/how-facebook-fought-fake-news-about-facebook">look out for posts that portrayed Facebook itself in potentially misleading ways</a>, reducing their visibility to safeguard the company’s reputation.</p>
<p>Some international legal scholars have begun to call for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X17730192">laws to protect democracies</a> against the possibility that algorithmic manipulation could deliver electoral gain. There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to. </p>
<p>To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “<a href="https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersquiethtm.html">quiet periods</a>” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices.</p>
<p>Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that <a href="https://gizmodo.com/facebook-board-member-peter-thiel-calls-google-treasono-1836370398">politically active</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-cryptocurrency-launch-facebook-sets-its-path-toward-becoming-an-independent-nation-118987">power-seeking Facebook executives</a> – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.</p>
<p><em>Correction: This article has been updated to correct the description of the timing of Roger McNamee’s warning.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119446/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Grygiel owns a small number of shares in the following social media companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn, YY and Snap. Grygiel also owns nominal amounts of the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.</span></em></p>Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of more than 200 million Americans and 2 billion users worldwide.Jennifer Grygiel, Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1188842019-06-20T11:21:42Z2019-06-20T11:21:42ZMath explains why the Democrats may have trouble picking a candidate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/316931/original/file-20200224-24685-1aohtz8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Democratic field started with more than two dozen candidates.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Election-2020-Immigration/86e621f21689497e9e6d84c4c46f0015/9/0">AP Photo/John Locher</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/politics/2020-presidential-candidates.html">From 28 declared candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination</a> down to just eight, many Americans are likely wondering how the party will ultimately make up its mind and settle on the best candidate.</p>
<p><a href="https://mathstats.case.edu/student/alexander-strang/">As</a> <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5ctD7qIAAAAJ&hl=en">mathematicians</a>, we wondered whether there might not even be a best candidate. In fact, this is an established mathematical paradox. The more candidates there are, the greater the chance there is no clear favorite. </p>
<p>Here’s what we mean.</p>
<p>Suppose there were only two candidates for some office, and that each voter preferred one or the other. Barring a perfect tie, one candidate will end up with the most votes. Ignoring complications like the Electoral College or voter turnout, the election process provides a way to measure the “will of the people.”</p>
<p>Now imagine there were three candidates instead of just two.</p>
<p>Three friends and a pollster walk into a bar and discuss the upcoming election. The first friend thinks that candidate A is better than B, and that C is the worst of all. The next agrees that B is better than C, but she thinks that B and C are both better than A. The final friend partially agrees with both of them: He thinks C is the best candidate, followed by A and then B.</p>
<p>The pollster cannot say which is the best candidate, since, for these voters, there is no best candidate! Their ranked preferences are inconsistent with each other.</p>
<p>This situation is an example of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257651659_Condorcet's_Paradox_and_the_Condorcet_Efficiency_of_Voting_Rules">Condorcet’s paradox</a>. It was named for the French Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis of Condorcet, an advocate of democratic reforms who perished in 1794, a victim of the French Revolution.</p>
<p>To Condorcet, a winner is a candidate who would win a one-on-one election against any other candidate. But, a paradox arises when there is no candidate who wins head-to-head against all opponents – which implies that voters’ ranked preferences contradict one another.</p>
<p>How likely is a situation like Condorcet’s paradox to arise in practice? It depends on how many candidates there are, and how evenly distributed the voters’ preferences are.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0133-3">Relatively few</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0133-3">studies</a> have shown conclusive evidence for the Condorcet paradox in real life. But it has been <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257651659_Condorcet's_Paradox_and_the_Condorcet_Efficiency_of_Voting_Rules">observed in a number of elections</a>, including <a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010304729545">the 2006 Danish elections for prime minister</a>.</p>
<p>The possibility is not as abstract as it may seem. For example, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html">some Americans</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sanders-says-he-would-have-beaten-trump-in-2016-if-hed-been-the-nominee">including Bernie Sanders</a>, believe that, had Sanders won the Democratic primary in 2016, he would have beaten Trump in the general election. This implies an underlying rock/paper/scissors inconsistency: Trump beats Clinton; Clinton beats Sanders; but, somehow, Sanders beats Trump.</p>
<p>In a three-candidate race, there are six possible ways of ranking them. There is about a 9% chance the electorate as a whole has no clear preference. </p>
<p>With 24 different candidates running, there are 620 billion trillion possible rankings. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257651659_Condorcet%27s_Paradox_and_the_Condorcet_Efficiency_of_Voting_Rules">A study by</a> University of Delaware researcher William V. Gehrlein calculated the probability that there is no Condorcet winner, a candidate who would win a one-on-one election against any other candidate. With two dozen candidates, there will be no Condorcet winner 70% of the time. </p>
<p>That means that, about two-thirds of the time, there will be at least three candidates who end up in a winnerless rock-paper-scissors situation. </p>
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<p>Condorcet’s paradox assumes a worst-case scenario, where the candidates are statistically indistinguishable from one another. In this situation, each voter arrives at their rank order randomly and independently – as if each voter secretly rolls the dice to rank the candidates. </p>
<p>It is unlikely that voters’ preferences are actually chosen in this random way. For example, Joe Biden might take affront to the notion that he is equally likely to be ranked first or last across all Democrats’ ballots.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, if Democrats appear to be having difficulty making up their collective mind this election season, it is possible that this apparent indecision is because there is no well-defined will of the people to be discerned at all.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of a story that originally ran on June 20, 2019.</em></p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118884/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Strang receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Thomas receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>The more candidates that there are, the likelier it is that voters cannot come to a consensus on the best candidate.Alexander Strang, Ph.D Candidate in Mathematics, Case Western Reserve UniversityPeter Thomas, Professor of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1158722019-05-02T10:44:05Z2019-05-02T10:44:05ZTrump’s dirty tricks: Unethical, even illegal campaign tactics are an American tradition<p>Donald Trump pulled some pretty unseemly stunts to win the 2016 United States presidential election. </p>
<p>He threatened to put his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in jail and publicly asked Russia to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/trump-russia-emails-joke-cpac-speech">hack her emails</a>. After Russian operatives did something similar – stealing <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mueller-report-shows-russians-trump-camp-were-friends-benefits-collusion-n996101">emails from Democratic National Committee servers</a> – the Trump campaign publicized the hacked emails, which were published on WikiLeaks. Trump aides also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/mueller-trump-campaign-russia-conpiracy-.html">met with Russian spies</a> who promised information damaging to Clinton.</p>
<p>Some of these activities, which special counsel Robert Mueller <a href="https://graphics.axios.com/docs/mueller-report.pdf">uncovered</a> in his 22-month investigation into Trump, may have been illegal. </p>
<p>Other Trump attacks on Clinton were tawdry, unethical and, according to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/video/barr-to-graham-no-underlying-crime-by-trump-in-mueller-report-1515519043849">Attorney General William Barr</a> in his May 1 testimony to Congress, technically lawful. </p>
<p>The attacks were, for the Justice Department at least, dirty tricks.</p>
<p>Students of American history – including those who’ve read the college U.S. politics textbook <a href="http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ngsp/americangovernment/">I co-authored</a> – will know that Trump has a lot of company in the dirty tricks department: Elections have always been nasty. </p>
<p>Since the earliest years of the republic, candidates have used <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/151920">deceptive, underhanded and dubiously legal tactics</a> to discredit their opponents.</p>
<h2>1800: Jefferson vs. Adams</h2>
<p>The 1800 race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373588.Adams_vs_Jefferson">lowly beginning for the new American democracy</a>. </p>
<p>Jefferson was Adams’ vice president from 1797 to 1801. To defeat his boss without personally maligning the president of the United States, Jefferson let a journalist, <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/james-callender">James Callender</a>, do his dirty work.</p>
<p>Callender wrote rapidly partisan articles for the Richmond Reporter newspaper and in a self-published 1800 anti-Federalist pamphlet called “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Prospect_Before_Us.html?id=HLhEnQEACAAJ">The Prospect Before Us</a>.” One of his more creative attacks was to <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/John-Adams/David-McCullough/9780743223133">question Adams’ masculinity</a>. He accused Adams of being a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”</p>
<p>Callender’s anti-Federalist publications during the campaign led to his prosecution under the Sedition Act, according to the <a href="https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/james-callender#footnote5_3u77848">Thomas Jefferson Foundation</a>. In May 1800, he was sentenced to nine months in jail and a US$200 fine.</p>
<p>This bitter contest between president and vice president occurred because President Adams and Vice President Jefferson came from different political party. Back then, voters picked two candidates for president. The top vote-getter became president, the second-place finisher became vice president.</p>
<p>Congress changed this system changed after the dirty 1800 election, passing the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-xii">12th Amendment</a>, which established <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Origins_of_the_Twelfth_Amendment.html?id=3n6GAAAAMAAJ">the current running mate system</a>. </p>
<h2>1828: Adultery, murder and pimping</h2>
<p>That didn’t make electoral politics any kinder. The 1828 race between President John Quincy Adams and the southern statesman Andrew Jackson was the United States’ <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/jqadams/campaigns-and-elections">nastiest and most personal election yet</a>.</p>
<p>Democratic President John Quincy Adams lost badly – but not before he did some serious damage to Jackson’s reputation. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=811&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272056/original/file-20190501-113864-1czatif.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was labeled an ‘American Jezebel’ in the 1828 election.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rachel_Jackson.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Adam’s campaign surrogates <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/jqadams/campaigns-and-elections">accused Jackson of murder</a> and spread rumors that Jackson’s wife, Rachel – who had previously been married to another man – had never really divorced. </p>
<p>“As a result,” political commentator Rick Unger wrote <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/08/20/the-dirtiest-presidential-campaign-ever-not-even-close/">in Forbes magazine in 2012</a>, “the Democratic candidate was accused of being an adulterer and running away with another man’s wife, while Mrs. Jackson was labeled a bigamist.” </p>
<p>Jackson’s team retaliated by accusing Adams, a former ambassador to Russia, of having provided Russian Czar Alexander I up with young American virgins for his sexual pleasure.</p>
<p>These tactics probably amounted to <a href="https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/defamation-law-made-simple-29718.html">criminal defamation</a>. In the United States, it is unlawful to tarnish a person’s reputation by spreading false information. But there is <a href="https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/facpubs/69/">no evidence that either camp sued</a>. </p>
<h2>Kennedy’s dirty tricks</h2>
<p>In the modern era, John F. Kennedy found subtler ways to discredit his opponents.</p>
<p>When running for Congress in 1946, Kennedy’s competitors in the Democratic primary included a Boston city councilman named <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKOH/Russo%2C%20Joseph/JFKOH-JUR-01/JFKOH-JUR-01">Joseph Russo</a>. Kennedy’s father, the formidable and ambitious Joseph Kennedy, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2893826-the-kennedy-menv">paid a janitor</a> named Joseph Russo to run for Congress as well. </p>
<p>In the confusion over which Russo was the legitimate politician, votes were split. Kennedy won his seat. </p>
<p>Later, when Kennedy was a presidential candidate in 1960, his aides raised the temperature in the TV studio where he would soon face off against Vice President Richard Nixon in the nation’s first-ever televised debate. The Kennedy campaign <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010027716">knew</a> that Nixon suffered from hyperhidrosis, a medical condition that causes a person to easily sweat. </p>
<p>As Nixon perspired and struggled under the bright lights and high heat, Kennedy looked <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/kennedy-nixon-debates">cool, calm and sweat-free</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272044/original/file-20190501-113839-1bg31l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John F. Kennedy’s team turned up the heat in the TV studio before a televised 1960 debate with Richard Nixon, knowing he would sweat heavily.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Campaign-Great-Gaffes/c27f9e6f68df44aca79bc9fc3219e701/5/0">AP Images, File</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nixon had been politically pranked before. </p>
<p>Dick Tuck, a notorious Democratic Party trickster, was “known to pose as a fire marshal at Nixon appearances and give reporters low estimates for the size of the crowds,” according to his <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-dicktuck/political-prankster-and-nixon-nemesis-dick-tuck-dead-at-age-94-idUSKCN1IV257">obituary by Reuters</a>.</p>
<h2>Party infighting</h2>
<p>As president, Nixon’s team would excel at much dirtier tricks.</p>
<p>To defeat Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the 1972 election, Nixon operatives <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/22/archives/dirty-tricks.html">caused trouble for his campaign</a> in ingenious ways. </p>
<p>At a fancy fundraising dinner for Democratic vice presidential candidate Edmund Muskie, Republican tricksters ordered the delivery of $300 in liquor, 200 pizzas and even a couple magicians – much to the dismay of organizers and the shock of the 1,300 very proper attendees.</p>
<p>The dirty tricks tradition continued into the 21st century, sometimes within the same party.</p>
<p>During the 2000 Republican presidential primary, George W. Bush’s campaign strategist Karl Rove spread rumors in South Carolina that John McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/dirty-tricks-south-carolina-and-john-mccain/">his “illegitimate black child.”</a> </p>
<p>In 2010, an Arizona Republican political operative named Steve May <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/us/politics/07candidates.html">recruited homeless people to run for several offices</a> on the Green Party ticket, hoping to split the liberal vote. Angry Democrats said that nominating “sham” candidates violated state and federal election laws. </p>
<p>That case didn’t go to trial, but some dirty campaign tricks have spurred legal action. </p>
<p>After the Democratic-aligned <a href="https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2019/04/disbarred-lawyer-garve-ivey-jr-sentenced-to-12-months-behind-bars.html">Alabama lawyer Garve Ivey Jr.</a> in 1998 allegedly paid a call girl to file a false rape claim against the GOP’s candidate for lieutenant governor, Steve Windom, Ivey was charged with criminal defamation, bribery and witness tampering. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000. </p>
<p>While that misdemeanor conviction was later overturned, Ivey was disbarred in 2011 and later <a href="https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2019/02/disbarred-lawyer-garve-ivey-jr-convicted-on-felony-theft-charges-ordered-to-pay-38151520-in-restitution.html">jailed on unrelated charges of misusing client funds</a>.</p>
<p>The lesson here? </p>
<p>The ethical standard for election campaigns in the United States has always been low. Modern techniques like email hacking may be new, but using surrogates to trash your opponent is an electoral strategy as old as the republic itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115872/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steffen W. Schmidt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Amid all the Mueller report uncertainty, one thing is clear: Donald Trump did some wildly improper things to win the presidency. So did Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, JFK and George W. Bush.Steffen W. Schmidt, Lucken Endowed Professor of Political Science, Iowa State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1151882019-04-10T13:46:11Z2019-04-10T13:46:11ZTrump supporters on Twitter during 2016 US election show little evidence of Russian infiltration – new research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268416/original/file-20190409-2921-gcp0kq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The biggest little bird in the nest. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/donald-trump-social-media-communication-vector-656904574?src=idm7TVmH8D1Idr_BCQ0V9g-1-16">doamama</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/president">meteoric rise</a> from political outsider to president of the United States surprised nearly everyone – not least political analysts and scientists. Many are hoping for an easy explanation from the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-mueller-probe-kenneth-starr-sees-eerie-echoes-of-his-1990s-clinton-investigation-113509">Mueller report</a>, including evidence of heavy Russian interference in the campaign. Mueller <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/robert-mueller-investigation-what-we-know.html">has indicted</a> numerous Russians in this regard, though more details will emerge when the report is published in the coming days. </p>
<p>In our <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214854">new paper</a>, which has been published in the PLoS One journal, we have covered similar ground via Trump’s stronghold: Twitter. By sampling some 250,000 accounts, we found a powerful new group of Trump supporters emerged during the election and effectively usurped the Republican Party on the social network. But very much to our surprise, very few bots or Russian accounts were involved. This suggests that if the Russians were acting to influence the election, the effect at least on Twitter may have been much more limited than <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump">has been claimed</a>. </p>
<p>We identified three kinds of Twitter accounts that were particularly relevant to the election: a Republican Party group; a Trump group; and a group of more extreme <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/alt-right/549242/">alt-right</a> adherents. We classified accounts into these groups based on who they followed and the hashtags and other words that they used in posts. The Trump group often used #maga, for instance, as in “make America great again”, and also “Trump supporter”. Mainstream Republicans often used #tcot or #tgdn, respectively “top conservatives on Twitter” and “Twitter gulag defence network”; while the far right used the #altright hashtag and words like “white” and “nationalist”. </p>
<h2>What happened on Twitter</h2>
<p>When we looked at how these three groups had developed over time, we found the Republican accounts mainly dated from the <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tea-party-protesters-march-washington/story?id=8557120">Tea Party marches</a> following Barack Obama’s first election victory in 2008, and also the 2012 Obama vs Romney <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20216038">campaign</a>. Conversely, the Trump and alt-right groups had largely emerged during the 2016 election campaign. </p>
<p>By late 2016, very few new accounts were being opened that fit the characteristics of our Republican Twitter group. We found a big shift in following behaviour as well, with existing Republican accounts becoming more likely to follow accounts in our Trump group rather than other mainstream Republicans. This reflects the way in which Trump suddenly jumped ahead of a crowded field in the Republican primaries. When you combine the followers of the three Twitter groups, they amount to some 57m unique users: this almost certainly made the difference in an election where the margin of victory was so tight – remember Trump <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/us2016/results">beat</a> Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, but without winning the popular vote, winning key marginal states by only a few tens of thousands of votes. </p>
<p>But what drove support for this shift? Staying with following behaviour, we found that members of all three groups tended to follow people who came under the same group, while those that we identified within the Trump and Republican groups frequently followed one another. But while members of the alt-right group followed those in the Trump group, this was not reciprocated to the same degree. This suggests that the widely held idea that the far right were very influential in the growth of support for Trump may be an exaggeration. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/268418/original/file-20190409-2912-smj0ue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rarer than you’d think.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/donald-trump-social-media-communication-vector-656904574?src=idm7TVmH8D1Idr_BCQ0V9g-1-16">PP77LSK</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To estimate Twitter bots, we used a US tool called <a href="https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu">Botometer</a>, which scores each account on the likelihood that it is automated. We concluded that Twitter bots and <a href="https://www.recode.net/2017/11/2/16598312/russia-twitter-trump-twitter-deactivated-handle-list">foreign accounts</a> were certainly part of Trump’s Twitter community, and <a href="http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/politicalbots/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2016/11/Data-Memo-US-Election.pdf">played a role</a> in spreading his message, but were vastly outnumbered by the massive groups of real-life supporters who suddenly started joining Twitter and following one another after Trump announced his election campaign. In fact, we found more automated accounts in the Republican Party’s group than in Trump’s group. Our findings match <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-were-not-exposed-fake-news-2016-us-election-twitter-study-suggests">other recent research</a>, which found that fake news was not nearly as pervasive on Twitter and Facebook as previously feared; in the case of Twitter, for instance, 80% of fake news appeared on only 1.1% of users’ newsfeeds.</p>
<p>Our point is not that foreign-owned bots generating fake news didn’t interfere with the election, but rather that they probably had less influence than various other factors – particularly Trump himself, his group of highly motivated supporters and the US media. Trump’s supporters did not coalesce around an army of bots – they do appear to have been a grassroots movement of previously disengaged voters.
Trump’s victory seems more driven by his own particular style of campaigning, galvanising his followers into a political backlash against “Washington elites”. </p>
<p>These kinds of movements certainly aren’t unknown. Political analysts are very familiar with the concept of the <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/what-overton-window">Overton Window</a>, in which the political centre ground shifts in response to pressure from disenfranchised and frustrated groups on the fringes. In Trump’s case, the shift was surprisingly rapid. In only a few months, a relatively small group had grown to the point it was able to subsume the traditional Republican Party. </p>
<h2>Predicting the future</h2>
<p>Our era will long be remembered for the populist swings that took place in politics – not only Trump but elections in the likes of Hungary and Japan, and also the UK’s Brexit referendum. These results frequently surprised politicians and the media, prompting <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/03/opinion-polls-missed-trump-and-brexit-this-french-newspaper-says-it-has-the-solution/">much</a> discussion <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/macron-won-but-the-french-polls-were-way-off/">about</a> problems with the tools with which we have tracked people’s voting intentions. </p>
<p>We think that our method, or one derived from it, can be a valuable addition to the toolbox in future. By following the development of political groups on Twitter, you can observe what is happening in real time. In future, this could help identify disenfranchised voter groups amenable to populist candidates and better understand their behaviour and the issues that motivate them. Our method might also make it easier to determine when extremist political minorities, massively amplified by the global reach of Twitter, might be exerting a disproportionate level of influence. </p>
<p>Studying Twitter allows you to observe these things at a speed that traditional polling and analysis can’t match. Hopefully by studying the world of online political discourse in a more rigorous and systematic way like this, we can finally start to catch up with the breakneck speed of modern political change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Bryden receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eric Silverman receives funding from the Medical Research Council and the Chief Scientist Office as a member of the University of Glasgow's MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. </span></em></p>On the back of the Mueller investigation’s apparent exoneration of the POTUS, here’s another surprise.John Bryden, Research Fellow, Royal Holloway University of LondonEric Silverman, Research Fellow, Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1079452018-12-20T11:36:59Z2018-12-20T11:36:59ZHow Trump and Brexit united Europe<p>Europeans across the English Channel are nervously watching Britain’s debate over Brexit, fearful of what the United Kingdom’s divorce from the European Union will mean for their decades-old economic and political bloc.</p>
<p>British Prime Minister Theresa May on Dec. 11 <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/theresa-may-delays-brexit-withdrawal-vote-avoiding-defeat-1.4938972">delayed</a> a parliamentary vote on her Brexit plan, saying it would not pass. So Britain’s withdrawal from the EU remains a work in progress, two years after <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32810887">Britons in June 2016</a> voted to sever economic and political ties.</p>
<p>Back then, many EU observers feared other countries would follow Britain’s lead and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12579">exit</a> the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2016.1225785">European Union</a>, weakening the bloc to the point of collapse. And while the financial consequences of Brexit – whenever it happens – will surely be <a href="https://blogs.imf.org/2018/08/10/the-long-term-impact-of-brexit-on-the-european-union/">felt across the continent</a>, popular support for the European Union may be more resilient than it once seemed.</p>
<h2>How Brexit united Europe</h2>
<p>New <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12579">research</a> shows that the 2016 Brexit vote actually had a positive effect on European integration, boosting the EU’s popularity. Paradoxically, so did the election of Donald Trump as United States president, our <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592718003262">polling analysis shows</a>. </p>
<p>Both cataclysmic events were widely expected to increase political divisions within Europe by empowering the EU’s nationalist critics.</p>
<p>Instead, after Brexit, Europeans’ feelings toward the EU became more favorable, surveys from the <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/15/post-brexit-europeans-more-favorable-toward-eu/">Pew Research Center</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12579">Bertelsmann Foundation</a> and the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-brexit-european-union-citizens-feel-like-eurobarometer-survey-results-a7872916.html">European Commission</a> show. </p>
<p>According to the European Commission’s Eurobarometer surveys, for example, only 32 percent of Europeans in autumn 2015 said they “trusted” the EU. One year later, after the Brexit referendum, the number <a href="http://www.ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/83548">had increased</a> by 4 percentage points. Six months after that, fully 42 percent of Europeans said they trusted the EU. </p>
<p>The other two sets of surveys showed similarly positive effects of Brexit on EU support.</p>
<p>Catherine De Vries, author of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s study, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12579">believes</a> that the the EU’s increased popularity may be a rational response to the perceived economic and political costs of exiting the union. </p>
<p>Recent figures suggest that Britain’s gross domestic product may shrink by up to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-economic-cost-of-brexit-is-unavoidable-but-that-doesnt-mean-its-not-worth-it-107913">4 percent over the next 15 years</a>, which would result in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/28/bank-of-england-says-no-deal-brexit-would-be-worse-than-2008-crisis">job loss</a> across the U.K.</p>
<p>The U.K. will also lose any say in EU political affairs – decisions that will nonetheless effect the country because Britain remains part of Europe even if it’s not an EU member. How to secure Ireland’s border with Northern Ireland, for example, is now a subject of testy negotiation.</p>
<h2>The Trump effect</h2>
<p>Trump’s unexpected electoral victory had a similarly positive impact on EU support, our <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/trump-effect-on-the-eus-popularity-the-us-presidential-election-as-a-natural-experiment/F0CAF801C9CB7D6CB72610FD7932C943/core-reader">new study of polling data from the continent reveals</a>.</p>
<p>Comparing a <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm#p=1&instruments=STANDARD">Eurobarometer survey</a> conducted in all EU member states in the four days leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and again during the six days after it, we found that Europeans felt better about the EU after Trump’s election. </p>
<p>More than 27,000 people across 28 countries were asked whether and how strongly they agreed with the idea that “the EU is modern,” “the EU is efficient,” “the EU creates jobs” and other similar statements. </p>
<p>More Europeans replied positively to these questions or felt more strongly about their pro-EU stance after Trump’s election. </p>
<p>Before the U.S. presidential election, the Eurobarometer shows, support for the European Union was strongest among people who identified as political centrists, middling among leftists and dismal among rightists.</p>
<p><iframe id="xcZxW" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xcZxW/3/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>After the election, right-wing support for the EU jumped way up. In fact, conservatives in Europe rallied around the EU so hard after Trump won that they actually feel more positively now about the union than the left does, almost on par with centrists.</p>
<h2>A right-wing defense of European unity</h2>
<p>This is a remarkable shift in the EU’s political landscape. </p>
<p>Prior to 2016, European integration was predominantly a “cosmopolitan” <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1465116514562918">or elite liberal position</a>. Indeed, that is one of the arguments pro-Brexit campaigners in the U.K. and right-wing European populists use to criticize the bloc.</p>
<p>Though we cannot say with certainty what rationale underpins the new right-wing support for the EU, our analysis indicates that European conservatives did not <a href="https://static.cambridge.org/resource/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20181029085551978-0250:S1537592718003262:S1537592718003262sup002.pdf">suddenly take a hard leftward turn after Trump’s election</a>.</p>
<p>More plausibly, European conservatives may be rallying around the European Union in response to a perceived external threat: a new U.S. president who puts “America first.” </p>
<p>Trump’s <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/13/politics/donald-trump-emmanuel-macron-nationalism/index.html">attacks on the EU and European leaders</a> could have shifted the “us versus them” categories in the minds of Europe’s right-wingers, such that Europe now feels like the community – or “nation” – that needs defending. </p>
<p>Perhaps conservatives envision reshaping the bloc in the Trump or Brexit model – as a closed, inward-looking power that can compete with Trump’s America and other world powers. </p>
<h2>Europe will survive Brexit</h2>
<p>Did Trump and Brexit engender some new brand of “European nationalism”? Or did they simply bring the financial and economic benefits of EU membership into clearer focus? </p>
<p>We don’t know, exactly. Perhaps both reactions combined to expand and reshape European unity. How that happened would be a fruitful subject for future research by both psychologists and political scientists.</p>
<p>Though nascent, our conclusions should hearten those who fear that Brexit will unravel the European Union. If and when Britain does exit the EU, a similar rally effect is likely to occur. </p>
<p>Whether the good feelings about European integration will last – and what they mean for the future of the union – is not yet clear.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107945/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emanuel Deutschmann was an unpaid visiting scientist at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Autumn 2018.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lara Minkus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Back in 2016, the Brexit vote and US presidential election seemed like a nationalist one-two punch that could knock out the European Union. Instead, EU support actually rose, new research shows.Emanuel Deutschmann, Postdoctoral Researcher, European University InstituteLara Minkus, Research fellow, Universität BremenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1038232018-10-16T10:39:48Z2018-10-16T10:39:48ZHow the polls could have caught ‘surprise’ victories like Trump’s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/239921/original/file-20181009-72110-3w4eaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many pollsters have been asked to explain why they didn't better predict the 2016 election. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/vote-election-badge-button-2016-background-376847752?src=eCAQB1jVtG18JB6wYG3KOA-1-36">3dfoto/shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency surprised almost everyone, including apparently <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-wisconsin-232605">Trump himself</a>. </p>
<p>On the morning after the 2016 election, my teenage son made snarky comments about the state of polling and statistical science. As a trained statistician, I took offense. However, I had no background in political science and really no idea what had gone “wrong.” </p>
<p>So I decided to put him to work, gathering and entering vote totals and poll data from 2016 and past elections, to judge for ourselves. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2018.05.001">In our analysis</a>, we examined the performance of presidential poll-based predictions and proposed a new, improved model.</p>
<p>The 2016 election caused considerable hand-wringing over the state of opinion polling. However, the best evidence is that current polling is generally sound, but tune-ups to one particular aspect of how polls are collected – notably the practice of aggregating poll data – would be helpful.</p>
<h2>Polling versus prediction</h2>
<p>After the unexpected election outcome, most observers concluded that the polls, on average, underestimated support for Trump. Such a systematic error is known as “polling bias.” Numerous <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/what-went-wrong-polling-clinton-trump/507188/">reports</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study">think pieces</a> have tried to explain the bias, pinpointing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/upshot/a-2016-review-why-key-state-polls-were-wrong-about-trump.html">specific problems</a> in how polls assessed likely voters and were weighted by voters’ education levels. Public misunderstanding of the concept of uncertainty also <a href="https://theconversation.com/you-can-trust-the-polls-in-2018-if-you-read-them-carefully-101424">played a role</a>.</p>
<p>To understand the issues, it’s important to recognize the distinction between polls, which represent samples of individuals at a particular time using a particular methodology, and poll aggregation. </p>
<p>Poll results can vary greatly, depending on who is sampled and what methods the pollsters use to <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/For-Researchers/Poll-Survey-FAQ/Weighting.aspx">weight respondents</a> to account for nonrepresentative sampling, or <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/2012/08/29/ask-the-expert-determining-who-is-a-likely-voter/">assess who is likely to vote</a>. <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/21/the-challenges-of-polling-when-fewer-people-are-available-to-be-polled/">With more and more people not answering pollsters</a> and <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/08/how-todays-political-polling-works">using cellphones</a>, it’s an amazing testament to the field that opinion polling still works as well as it does. </p>
<p>When it comes to predicting an election, one must reconcile the often disparate poll results. That’s the role of poll aggregation sites, such as <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/">FiveThirtyEight</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html">The Upshot</a> and <a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/forecast/president">HuffPost</a>, which average recent polls to produce a consensus. </p>
<p>For presidential elections, the sites go further and make predictions for each state, to tally a final electoral college outcome. Flashy graphics and accessible content make the sites hugely popular, driving public perception of the likely outcome.</p>
<h2>Did the poll aggregators really miss?</h2>
<p>Our own research suggests that the polling bias was actually not very large – that is, pollsters may have underestimated the support for Trump but not to a large degree. However, due to a statistical quirk, the prediction models were unable to recognize the dropping support for Hillary Clinton just prior to the election. </p>
<p>We examined the state-level predictions across all 50 states, plus D.C., in 2016, as well as their stated uncertainty. </p>
<p>We found that FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot showed statistical bias and overestimated support for Clinton, but with enough uncertainty that their probabilities left room for a Trump victory. HuffPost had similar state-level predictions, but was overconfident in these predictions, markedly overestimating the chance of a Clinton victory.</p>
<p>When the polling data up the eve of the election were fully taken into account, we estimated the chance of a Trump victory as at least 47 percent. The main novelty in our approach was to use polling data from multiple states to “fill in” the sparse information from state-level polling.
In contrast, the popular poll aggregation sites gave much lower chances, ranging from 2 percent on HuffPost to about 29 percent on FiveThirtyEight.</p>
<h2>An alternate explanation</h2>
<p>But why would the polls have biased against Trump in the first place? An extensive <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluation-of-2016-Election-Polls-in-the-U-S.aspx">report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)</a>, an association for public opinion and survey research professionals, examined a number of possibilities, dismissing some <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/13/why-the-polls-missed-in-2016-was-it-shy-trump-supporters-after-all/">popular theories</a>.</p>
<p>Our own analysis suggests an additional possibility, hinted at in the AAPOR report: The polls weren’t highly biased and were roughly correct at the time. However, pollsters conducted too few state-level polls just prior to the election. </p>
<p>Remember, poll aggregators must average several polls to make a good prediction. Due to sparse state-level polling, predictions were “stuck” on values from about two weeks prior to the election, when support for Clinton had been higher. </p>
<p>Note that this sparse polling scenario indicates that polling methods are generally sound, although more frequent polling of swing states would be helpful.</p>
<p>Our rationale also explains why the estimate of the popular vote – 3.3 percent estimated margin for Clinton versus 2.1 percent actual – was largely accurate. <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html">National polls</a> were conducted more frequently, and so the national averaging could include polls closer to the election. </p>
<h2>Can pollsters do better?</h2>
<p>The voter environment in 2016 election was unusual, with a sharp drop in support for the leading candidate prior to the election. Although it’s tempting to attribute the drop to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/comey-letter/562889/">then-FBI Director James Comey’s letter</a> regarding an investigation into Clinton’s email server, we and others have noted that the drop in support for Clinton started in mid-October.</p>
<p>Although the 2016 experience was unusual, we proposed a statistical model designed to be sensitive to a national trend. The model combines information across numerous states, instead of relying only on polling within each state. The model estimates of the Democratic-Republican vote spread and overall win probabilities for the 90 days leading to an election.</p>
<p><iframe id="1jWWw" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/1jWWw/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Although our analysis was conducted after the election, we plan to try it out in 2020 in real time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103823/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fred Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When political polls are aggregated together, that can make the results misleading.Fred Wright, Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center, North Carolina State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1014242018-09-26T10:20:37Z2018-09-26T10:20:37ZYou can trust the polls in 2018, if you read them carefully<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235640/original/file-20180910-123125-4v5a1d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Michigan township collects votes in 2016.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/brownstown-twp-miusa-sept-29-2016-490929688">Barbara Kalbfleisch/shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the morning of Nov. 8, 2016, many Americans went to bed confident that Hillary Clinton would be elected the nation’s first female president. </p>
<p>Their confidence was driven, in no small part, by a pervasive message that Clinton was ahead in the polls and forecasts leading up to the election. Polling aggregation sites, such as <a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/forecast/president">Huffington Post’s Pollster</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html">The New York Times Upshot blog</a>, reported that Clinton was virtually certain to win. It soon became clear that these models were off the mark. </p>
<p>Since then, forecasters and media prognosticators have <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-real-story-of-2016/">dissected what</a> <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluation-of-2016-Election-Polls-in-the-U-S.aspx">went wrong</a>. The finger-pointing almost inevitably landed on public opinion polling, especially at the state level. The polls, critics argued, led modelers and the public to vastly overestimate the likelihood of a Clinton win.</p>
<p>With the 2018 elections coming up, many in the public have <a href="https://www.masslive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2018/05/can_anybody_trust_the_polls_an.html">expressed their skepticism</a> that public opinion polls can be trusted this time around. Indeed, in an era where a majority of American adults <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201712.pdf">no longer even have landline telephones</a>, where many people answer only when calls originate from a known number, and where pollsters’ calls are sometimes <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/Spam-Flagging-and-Call-Blocking-and-Its-Impact-on.aspx">flagged as likely spam</a>, there are lots of reasons to worry. </p>
<p>But polling firms seem to be going about their business as usual, and those of us who do research on the quality of public opinion research are not particularly alarmed about what’s going on. </p>
<h2>Looking back</h2>
<p>One might be tempted to think that those of us in the polling community <a href="https://andrewgelman.com/2014/08/06/president-american-association-buggy-whip-manufacturers-takes-strong-stand-internal-combustion-engine-argues-called-automobile-little-grounding-theory/">are simply out to lunch</a>. But the data from 2016 tell a distinctly different story. </p>
<p>The national polls were fairly accurate <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0315-6">both in their national estimate of the popular vote in 2016 and in historical perspective</a>. In the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html">average preelection national poll</a>, Clinton was ahead of Donald Trump by 3.3 percentage points. She proceeded to win the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. Pollsters missed the mark by a mere 1.2 percentage points on average. </p>
<p>The polls in the Upper Midwest states missed by larger margins. These polls were conducted in ways that pollsters <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-pollsters-to-trust-in-2018/">widely know to be suboptimal</a>. They relied heavily on robocalls; on surveys of people who volunteer to take <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/whats-the-matter-with-polling.html">surveys on the internet</a>; and on samples of respondents from voter files with <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluation-of-2016-Election-Polls-in-the-U-S.aspx">incomplete information</a>.</p>
<h2>What went wrong</h2>
<p>So why was the 2016 election so shocking? The big reason wasn’t the polls, it was our expectations.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In the last few years, members of the public have come to expect that a series of highly confident models can tell us exactly what is going to happen in the future. But in the runup to the 2016 election, <a href="http://election.princeton.edu/2016/11/08/final-mode-projections-clinton-323-ev-51-di-senate-seats-gop-house/">these</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html">models</a> made a few big, problematic assumptions.</p>
<p>For one, they largely assumed that the different errors that different polls had were independent of one another. But the challenges that face contemporary polling, such as the difficulty of reaching potential respondents, can induce small but consistent errors across almost all polls. </p>
<p>When modelers treat errors as independent of one another, they make conclusions that are <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-model-is-more-bullish-than-others-on-trump/">far more precise than they should be</a>. The average poll is indeed the best guess at the outcome of an election, but national polling averages are often off by around 2 percentage points. State polls can be off by even more at times.</p>
<p>In addition, polling aggregators and public polling information have been flooded by a deluge of lower-quality surveys based on suboptimal methods. These methods can <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2014.06.001">sometimes produce accurate estimates</a>, but the processes by which they do so is <a href="https://www.aapor.org/AAPOR_Main/media/MainSiteFiles/NPS_TF_Report_Final_7_revised_FNL_6_22_13.pdf">not well-understood</a> on theoretical grounds. There are lots of reasons to think that these methods may not produce consistently accurate results in the future. Unfortunately, there will likely continue to be lots of low-quality polls, because they are so much less expensive to conduct.</p>
<p>Research out of our lab suggests yet another reason that the polls were shocking to so many: When ordinary people look at the evidence from polling, just as with other sources of information, they tend to see the results they desire. </p>
<p>During the 2016 election campaign, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/05/if-my-candidate-is-behind-the-poll-must-be-biased/?utm_term=.588c93fbc8f0">we asked Americans to compare two preelection polls</a> – one where Clinton was leading and one where Trump was ahead. Across the board, Clinton supporters told us that the Clinton-leading poll was more accurate than the Trump-leading poll. Trump supporters reported exactly the opposite perceptions. In other studies, we saw the same phenomenon when people were exposed to poll results showing majorities in favor of or opposed to their own views <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx018">on policy issues such as gun control or abortion</a>. </p>
<h2>What polls really say</h2>
<p>So, what does this all mean for someone reading the polls in 2018?</p>
<p>You don’t have to ignore the results – just recognize that all polling has some error. While even the experts may not know quite which way that error is going to point, we do have a sense of the size of that error. Error is likely to be smaller when considering a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfu060">polling average instead of an individual poll</a>. </p>
<p>It’s also a good bet that the actual result will be within 3 percentage points for an averaging of high-quality national polls. For similarly high-quality state polls, it will likely be within more like 5 percentage points, because these polls usually have smaller sample sizes. </p>
<p>What makes a high-quality poll? It will either use live interviewers with both landlines and cellphones or recruit respondents using offline methods to take surveys online. Look for polls conducted around the same time to see whether they got the same result. If not, see whether they sampled the same kind of people, used the same interviewing technique or used a similar question wording. This is often the explanation for reported differences.</p>
<p>The good news is that news consumers can easily find out about a poll’s quality. This information is regularly included in news stories and is shown by many poll aggregators. What’s more, pollsters are <a href="https://www.aapor.org/Transparency_Initiative.htm">increasingly transparent</a> about the methods they use. </p>
<p>Polls that don’t use these methods should be taken with a big grain of salt. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfr020">We simply don’t know enough</a> about when they will succeed and when they will fail.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101424/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Traugott receives funding from National Science Foundation, University of Michigan. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Josh Pasek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How do you know whether to trust a poll? Look carefully at how it was conducted – and examine your own biases.Josh Pasek, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, University of MichiganMichael Traugott, Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1008622018-08-27T23:14:11Z2018-08-27T23:14:11ZThe ruthless pursuit of online ‘likes’ gives you nothing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233317/original/file-20180823-149487-ci2sar.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Hannah Shaw (Kitten Lady), with Instagram influencer BriAnne Wills (@girlsandtheircats) at a marketing event in New York, Feb. 2018</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Loren Wohl for Fresh Step/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Imagine a popular social media channel that did not display the number of “likes,” mentions, impressions, followers, engagements or any other metric to show how many times one’s content has been viewed, by whom and when.</p>
<p>A flourishing <a href="https://www.postplanner.com/get-more-likes-fans-facebook-page/">“how-to” industry has arisen</a> dedicated to increasing “counts” on social media, while also claiming this is the silver bullet to becoming more popular, rich and famous. </p>
<p>You can purchase the services of click-farms to artificially increase your like-counters. This potentially increases your content’s chances of being cross-syndicated, appearing higher up in newsfeeds and possibly meaning the ability to <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/small-business/convert-facebook-likes-and-social-media-fans-into-real-money/news-story/5df9046f830511be7d71923a117bee17">convert “online social wealth” into material wealth</a>. </p>
<p>In other cases, approbation markers such as likes can be used to generate popularity or condemnation of a group, politician or policy through the artful use of bots and astroturfing. For example, the work of the Russia-based Internet Research Agency has been implicated <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/what-we-know-about-the-internet-research-agency-and-how-it-meddled-in-the-2016-election.html">for swaying public opinion and altering the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election</a>. </p>
<p>The increasing concern over the spread of fake news and alleged political interference waged in sophisticated campaigns are examples that may come readily to mind, but the danger also includes the efforts of more local coordinated campaigns by political action groups to <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-donald-trump-the-secret-twitter-rooms-of-trump-nation/">flood, troll and overwhelm the newsfeeds of popular social media using invite-only Twitter rooms</a>. </p>
<h2>‘Likes’ equals wins for market capitalism</h2>
<p>When social sharing buttons and counters were introduced on popular social media platforms over a decade ago, it could be said that it changed the character of social media. It also changed the motives for engaging with it. </p>
<p>Seeing numbers rise seems somewhat hardwired into us now, and provides incentive to contribute, and to contribute often, for the promise of this token digital reward. We spend long hours on these sites seeking to drive up numbers that are largely devoid of any context or direct transferable value. </p>
<p>Somehow we feel we will be magically validated for posting more of the extraordinary (and mundane) moments of our lives. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233321/original/file-20180823-149475-dyfmzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Getting online ‘likes’ is a competition that may lead nowhere.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elijah O'Donell/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What is troubling is that this ruthless behaviour to get more likes seems to undermine the social aspect of social media. Instead of truly being social, we are making it more of a competitive endeavour to accumulate more likes. </p>
<p>Measuring the value of other human beings on the basis of how high their “score” is on social media seems less social, and more like <a href="https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book16/">trying to “win” at social media in ways that resemble market capitalism</a>. </p>
<p>Indeed, the main beneficiaries of our addictive and competitive behaviour are the social media companies who get more eyeballs on ads. </p>
<h2>Ruthless competition</h2>
<p>One can imagine the absurdity of the situation if we applied the idea of likes to our offline social interactions where we would engage in a strange kind of jockeying for social points among our friends and family. But competitive behaviour has a very long precedent in terms of accumulating wealth in any of its forms (material or otherwise). </p>
<p>As human beings, we do engage in competitive games in a social context. From board games, sports and online gaming. For those of us old enough to remember pinball machines at the arcade, there might have been a fleeting sense of satisfaction in earning the top score. But these were localized; today, with the ubiquity of social media and the proliferation of global leaderboards on multiplayer games, even the social succumbs to ruthless competition. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233314/original/file-20180823-149469-3wz98.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Social media is seen as a tool to connect communities and create relationships.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The obsessive competitive drive in accumulating ever higher scores on social media via counters seems to deviate from all the extolled virtues of social media as a tool for connectivity, deepening relationships, transcending geographical barriers or organizing and mobilizing on the basis of speaking truth to power. </p>
<p>Although examples of these virtues are still evident on social media, we ought to call into question the value of these social metrics. Instead of a <a href="http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/3/3/4/7/p433474_index.html">global village, as Marshall McLuhan prophesied</a>, we are presented with a digital Potemkin village, a constructed sham, where sharing and being social is secondary to numerical proof of social interactions.</p>
<p>For younger generations who have grown up with web 2.0 social media, such status-chasing and social validation behaviours reduced to numerical outputs might be of concern. This model sets up situations for creating an easy tabulation of winners and losers. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233319/original/file-20180823-149487-a7kd55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Some social media influencers have been able to monetize their influence: Instagram influencer Kelly Eden and friend pose at the Kingdom Hearts III premiere on Friday, May 18, 2018, in Santa Monica, Calif.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Colin Young-Wolff for Square Inix/AP)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cue the more acute instances of self-esteem collapse, the pressure to sexualize the self in images to garner more attention and other risk-taking behaviours. The race to share also highlights widening class divisions as those without the means to go on lavish vacations or purchase and display luxury products are made to feel of lesser value. </p>
<p>In this way, we have found a convenient, visible, automated means of evaluating other humans. </p>
<h2>Status-chasing</h2>
<p>Before social media, a person of means may have wished to flaunt their “value” through conspicuous consumption, being seen driving an expensive vehicle, going about town in designer clothing and having their name appear in the society pages. Now, all who have online access can compete in these games of numerical value, and can receive near-instant gratification for their efforts. Social media counters have regrettably “democratized” status-chasing competition.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233322/original/file-20180823-149490-8ux5ud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Can we convert our likes to mortgage payments? Or a job?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Callie Morgan/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One might ask what exactly it is that we are accumulating, why and for what purpose? Some savvy social media users are able to leverage their enormous follower counts to become online celebrities and make a living (for a time). Yet, what of others who do not have such aspirations? </p>
<p>Do they consider their informative post on their poetic reflections on a warm spring day of lesser value if it does not garner a certain number of likes? Can we take our numbers of followers, retweets and likes to the bank as security on a mortgage? Can we convert likes into some form of currency? Before we say, “That is absurd!”, there are sites that actually do peg a dollar value on a like or tell us the monetary value of an account.</p>
<p>Is this a form of “video game” capitalism? Not quite, as there is no reliable way of converting like capital into, say, more equipment or software (fixed capital). It is, at bottom, primitive accumulation. It may not, in itself, be meaningful any more than — as the late economist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thorstein-Veblen">Thorstein Veblen</a> pointed out — buying silver rather than steel spoons. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233323/original/file-20180823-149478-1n1hkid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The need to demonstrate the luxury of your life puts undue pressure on our lives.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sebastien Gabriel / Unsplash</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Let’s use an absurd example to illustrate the point. If I get 10,000 upvotes on a piece of content, what does that say about the content? Not much, at least any more than me saving kittens from a burning house will mean 10,000 people will hop on one foot for 76.4 seconds. There is simply not much substantial connection between the two events.</p>
<p>Pity instead those whose jobs require them to boost those metrics for a business, political party or political candidate. They have no choice but to employ tactics designed to increase apparent engagement. While those of us not under such conditions have the luxury of ignoring or turning up our noses at such pursuits, others may find this to be one of the key duties of their job. </p>
<p>Human beings will always find some means to evaluate and judge one another, be it in terms of wealth, education, power or ability. However, the steady conversion of social media into an eerie parallel of a market economy is concerning, perhaps drawing us further away from what may have been intended by users to be a truly open, global social space. </p>
<p>Perhaps it is of some benefit to recall <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=I6JIAAAAMAAJ&q=%22counted+counts%22&redir_esc=y#search_anchor">William Bruce Cameron’s pithy adage</a>: “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100862/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kane X. Faucher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Although some social media users are able to monetize their social media “likes,” much of the pursuit of popularity amounts to nothing and instead turns us into pawns for political and commercial usesKane X. Faucher, Assistant Professor - Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1019732018-08-22T02:48:52Z2018-08-22T02:48:52ZWith Cohen and Manafort both guilty, the pressure on Trump is rising<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233017/original/file-20180822-149493-1242pry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A protestor outside the Virginia courtroom where Paul Manafort was convicted of fraud on Tuesday.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Reynolds/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/nyregion/michael-cohen-plea-deal-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news">guilty pleas</a> by Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/paul-manafort-trial-verdict.html">conviction</a> of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, this week no doubt deepen the US president’s legal problems.</p>
<p>Occurring nearly simultaneously in separate courtrooms, the developments were the most dramatic yet in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-a-special-counsel-and-what-will-he-investigate-in-the-trump-administration-77952">ongoing investigation</a> into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.</p>
<p>But do they pose an existential risk to Trump’s presidency? This obviously depends how special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation continues to develop in Washington. But in terms of how damaging Tuesday’s events are for Trump, there are competing schools of thought. </p>
<h2>Things are looking bad for Trump</h2>
<p>The Manafort verdict was the first time Mueller’s investigation has been tested in court. Trump has spent months deriding this “witch-hunt” against him, but even witches get a trial and Manafort largely, though not completely, lost his. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1030940529037651968"}"></div></p>
<p>Manafort was convicted of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-manafort-jury-trial-verdict-day4-1534861860">eight of the 18 charges</a> he faced relating to tax and bank fraud with his personal finances. Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, though his crimes largely predate that three-month tenure. While Manafort’s convictions are not directly related to Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the impression the Trump campaign was staffed by white-collar criminals is now much stronger.</p>
<p>Manafort <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/19/paul-manaforts-complicated-ties-to-ukraine-explained/?utm_term=.948ee997072f">was also in the pay</a> of a Russian-backed leader in Ukraine, former President Viktor Yanukovych. When Yanukovych was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraines-yanukovych-missing-as-protesters-take-control-of-presidential-residence-in-kiev/2014/02/22/802f7c6c-9bd2-11e3-ad71-e03637a299c0_story.html?utm_term=.b96f4a248d02">ousted from office</a> in 2014, that source of income dried up, forcing Manafort to find new and nefarious ways to support his lavish lifestyle. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/q-a-why-is-paul-manafort-on-trial-and-what-does-it-mean-for-donald-trump-100399">Q+A: Why is Paul Manafort on trial and what does it mean for Donald Trump?</a>
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<p>The problem for Trump is the possible nexus between himself, Manafort and Putin that Manafort’s guilty verdicts could expose. That will likely be tested when the former campaign chair <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/16/app-politics-section/mueller-manafort-evidence-next-trial/index.html">goes on trial in Washington</a> next month for his alleged crimes linked to his Ukraine consultancy.</p>
<p>Cohen’s plea bargain also makes a possible charge against Trump more stickable. Importantly, Cohen has gone further than anyone else in <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/current/jon-ossoff-on-how-to-talk-about-special-elections-and-the-ohio-twelfth">directly implicating</a> Trump as a co-conspirator in some of his actions. If Trump did authorise his former personal lawyer to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45265546">pay off women</a> with whom he had had extramarital affairs and told him to do so in order not to derail his 2016 presidential campaign, he may be guilty of campaign finance violations, at the very least.</p>
<p>Together, the legal travails of Manafort and Cohen bring the Mueller investigation into the White House. It has so far just been banging on the windows. Trump has been able to skirt the malfeasance of his former advisors through the court of public opinion. The problem is that the United States is a government of laws and of actual courts that <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">bully-pulpit tweets</a> cannot indefinitely protect him from.</p>
<h2>This won’t hurt Trump that much (at least, not yet)</h2>
<p>Trump has earned a sort of immunity by profusion. He commits so many <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/19/very-aggressive-trump-suggests-montenegro-could-cause-world-war-three">faux pas</a>, is <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-blame-sides-charlottesville-now-anniversary-puts-spot/story?id=57141612">politically incorrect</a> so often, skirts potential legal issues so frequently, that no one transgression ever seems to stick. </p>
<p>Former President Richard Nixon committed one clear crime and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/watergate-nixon-impeached/">paid the price</a>. But what is Trump actually guilty of? Having dubious business and political associates? What president hasn’t had those? </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-friendly-reminder-impeaching-donald-trump-will-not-remove-him-from-office-94369">A friendly reminder: impeaching Donald Trump will not remove him from office</a>
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<p>Sexual relations with women other than his wife? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_misconduct_allegations">Bill Clinton did as much</a> and is regarded as one of the most successful presidents of recent years.</p>
<p>Trump’s supporters also don’t care about any of this. Many see the trials of Manafort and Cohen as the elite going after Trumps’s associates because they can’t land a glove on their hero. </p>
<p>This popular sentiment is a vital currency for the Trump administration. He has thus far <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/24/why-is-trump-so-much-more-popular-with-republicans-than-past-presidents/?utm_term=.ba9392100d8e">remained enormously popular</a> with his base, despite the gathering legal clouds. He is particularly adept at exploiting his victim-in-chief status. The most powerful man in the world is protected in the court of public opinion by his victimhood – a remarkable state of affairs.</p>
<p>And another important point: there is still <a href="https://apnews.com/ea3e3e6b24034a88b3f397e77028c73e/Q&A:-What-Cohen's-plea,-Manafort's-verdict-mean-for-Trump">no clear crime</a> that would make Trump impeachable. There is still not enough in the Manafort verdict and Cohen plea bargain to force Republicans to desert the man on whom their <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-republicans/its-trumps-party-now-and-us-republicans-could-pay-in-november-idUSKBN1J937X">fortunes</a> in the November midterm elections (and beyond) depend.</p>
<p>American politics is about to become even more partisan and personal because the legal stakes have just gotten higher. Are they high enough to end the Trump presidency, though? Probably not. There is some way to go and many more days in court before we can answer that with any confidence.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101973/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy J. Lynch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The legal travails of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen bring the Mueller investigation into the White House.Timothy J. Lynch, Associate Professor in American Politics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/968402018-05-29T22:58:44Z2018-05-29T22:58:44ZTwitter’s struggle to thwart threats to democracy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220781/original/file-20180529-80650-1bg9f34.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Populists like Donald Trump have used Twitter to his enormous political advantage. But the popular social media platform is failing to bring to heel the bots and fake accounts that can and have interfered with democracy. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/J. David Ake) </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Digital media have enabled <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-social-media-trump-russian">new tactics of foreign influence</a> to sway voters and magnify the messages of populists such as Donald Trump. This runs against democratic processes, and comes with important new effects on <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2017.1364814?src=recsys">electoral politics</a> and <a href="http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2018/digital-technology-and-the-changing-face-of-diplomacy/">foreign relations</a>.</p>
<p>By building networks <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/31/technology/social-media-bots-investigations.html">of fake</a> and <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/529461/how-to-spot-a-social-bot-on-twitter/">automated accounts</a> on Twitter, governments and businesses can artificially inflate the popularity and influence of individual accounts and <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-trending-faqs">create trends</a> <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-use-hashtags">using hashtags</a>. Put differently, malicious users can employ Twitter to spread and amplify disinformation to its real users.</p>
<p>Governments and social media companies are racing to keep up with events, and companies like Facebook and Twitter are adapting their internal policies to forestall more onerous government regulations.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-canadas-response-to-the-facebook-scandal-has-been-so-weak-97071">Why Canada's response to the Facebook scandal has been so weak</a>
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<p>Will this be enough to protect democracy and free speech?</p>
<p>Specifically, can Twitter effectively limit its use for foreign influence by eliminating bots and fake accounts from its platform for one of the world’s most polarizing political figures, the current <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">U.S. president</a>?</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1001424695126880258"}"></div></p>
<h2>Twitter’s policy problem</h2>
<p>Twitter has been forced into the spotlight given its personal use by Trump and its prominence in <a href="http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2018/digital-technology-and-the-changing-face-of-diplomacy/">digital diplomacy</a>, its targeting by social media marketer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/insider/twitter-buy-followers-bots-investigation-devumi.html">Devumi</a> for fraudulent marketing, its citation in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">indictments</a> against Russian conspirators and its central role in establishing new regulations for social media.</p>
<p>In early 2017, the U.S. intelligence community <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf">released a report</a> concluding the Russian government executed an influence campaign to sway American voters in Trump’s favour. Not only did <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/automated-pro-trump-bots-overwhelmed-pro-clinton-messages-researchers-say.html">pro-Trump bots overwhelm pro-Clinton ones</a> on Twitter, but they were <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/15/study-russian-twitter-bots-sent-45k-brexit-tweets-close-to-vote/">effective in reaching pro-Trump users</a> throughout the campaign. </p>
<p>This bolstered <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/04/twitter-accounts-really-are-echo-chambers-study-finds">“echo chambers,”</a> and ultimately threatened the democratic process.</p>
<p>Prior to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/technology/twitter-russia-election.html">facing congressional</a> scrutiny in fall 2017, Twitter published an <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Russian-Interference-in-2016--Election-Bots-and-Misinformation.html">internal review of the 2016 election</a>, then promised a series of <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/safetycalendar.html">platform changes</a>, including advertisements, safety and “spam” elimination. It downplayed its role in the 2016 election outcome by insisting the volume of Russian disinformation was <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/opening_remarks.html">“comparatively small”</a> and that bots represented less than <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/Update-Russian-Interference-in-2016--Election-Bots-and-Misinformation.html">five per cent of its monthly active users</a>.</p>
<h2>Lack of enforcement</h2>
<p>If Twitter is unable or unwilling to follow through on its promise to address this issue, it isn’t because of a lack of policies — it’s due to ineffective design and enforcement.</p>
<p>First, its <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-impersonation-policy">impersonation policy</a> places the burden of proof on existing users to <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/report-twitter-impersonation#what">report fake accounts</a> rather than requiring new users to prove their authenticity from the outset. Twitter allows users to set up accounts for <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-account-policy">“parody, commentary and fan”</a> purposes, but forbids <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/fake-twitter-followers-and-interactions">fake engagements</a>, including the sale of followers or likes.</p>
<p>Second, Twitter’s <a href="https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/introduction-to-twitter-ads/twitter-ads-policies.html">ad policy</a> prohibits <a href="https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/prohibited-content-policies/hate-content.html">hateful</a> and <a href="https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/prohibited-content-policies/inappropriate-content.html">inappropriate content</a>, and <a href="https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted-content-policies/political-campaigning.html">requires political campaigning</a> to comply with applicable laws. Despite promising the contrary, its ad policy hasn’t been updated since 2015, according to its <a href="https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/other-policy-requirements/twitter-ads-policy-update-log.html">update log</a>, though it’s just announced <a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/technology/twitter-political-ad-restrictions.html">new measures to regulate political ads</a>.</p>
<p>By January 2018, Twitter <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html">published an update</a>. It found 3,814 accounts operated by the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html">Internet Research Agency</a> (IRA), an outfit of the Russian government. These accounts tweeted 175,000 times, reaching 1.4 million Americans during the election. </p>
<p>Twitter also cited improvements in its <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html">Information Quality initiative</a> to remove malicious users abusing its services.</p>
<p>But a week later, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html">the New York Times revealed Devumi</a> sold more than 200 million followers to 39,000 clients using roughly 3.5 million fake accounts. Shortly after, Mueller <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">indicted Russia’s IRA</a> and its conspirators for executing an influence campaign, citing the instrumental role of social media, including Twitter, in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.</p>
<p>Twitter has therefore become an unwitting instrument for foreign influence and political propaganda. Not only is the IRA-run network of bots <a href="https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21737297-mueller-indictment-reveals-some-kremlins-tactics-russian-disinformation-distorts">still active</a>, but some of Devumi’s clients are prominent foreign officials, including an editor of China’s state-run news agency and an adviser to Ecuador’s president.</p>
<p>To compound the problem, <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/fake-news-spreads-faster-true-news-twitter-thanks-people-not-bots">false information spreads faster</a> than factual information. The Parkland high school shooting illustrates how the potent combination of disinformation and bots can exacerbate partisan tensions and thwart democratic discourse. Not only did <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html">fake Russian accounts race</a> to fill the Twittersphere with divisive content following the shooting, but a <a href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2018/mar/26/viral-image/doctored-image-shows-parkland-school-shooting-surv/">doctored video circulated</a> in which student survivors of the shooting were seen tearing up the Constitution.</p>
<h2>Tweeting his way to the presidency</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=608&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220791/original/file-20180529-80633-1bfnnx1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Major events from 2013 to 2018.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Using our timeline above of major events <a href="https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/02/22/russian-disinformation-distorts-american-and-european-democracy">credited with attracting bot activities</a>, we tracked followers <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/what-fuels-a-tweets-engagement.html">and engagement</a> of the three Twitter accounts attached to Trump. The <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">@realDonaldTrump</a> account should be a particular attraction for bots and fake accounts given <a href="http://www.twiplomacy.com/ranking/the-50-most-followed-world-leaders-in-2017/">its size</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/us/politics/trump-russia-syria-china.html">volatility</a>, and the <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf">expressed interest</a> of government-affiliated Russians in Trump’s political influence. Therefore the effects of Twitter’s platform changes aimed at eliminating fake and automated followers should be especially noticeable here.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220505/original/file-20180525-51115-1qkn9bw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump’s Twitter following from the primaries to the presidency per account.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Twitter; Internet Archive's Wayback Machine</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s clear that Twitter’s <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2017/safetycalendar.html">platform changes</a> (expanded definition of “spam” in November 2017 and enforcement of new policies on Dec. 18, 2017) has not had the expected effects. With fake accounts making up about <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf">15 per cent of Twitter’s active users</a>, plus <a href="https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trumps-twitter-fake-accounts/">third-party estimates</a> that up to 30 per cent of @realDonaldTrump’s followers are fake, we would have expected to see a noticeable drop in Trump followers and engagement after the platform changes.</p>
<p>Instead, his followers and engagement rose steadily from 2015 on (as did the <a href="https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse">@WhiteHouse</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/POTUS">@POTUS</a> accounts, although much more slowly). This suggests one of three possibilities:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The platform changes were a publicity move rather than a substantive change of practice;</p></li>
<li><p>Despite its best intentions and efforts, the technical task of removing and blocking bots is more difficult than anticipated, or;</p></li>
<li><p>Bots are quick, adaptable and able to keep pace with any attempts to eliminate them.</p></li>
</ol>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>Twitter’s unsuccessful battle against bots and fake accounts demonstrates the problem of corporate self-regulation and suggests the need for coordinated and likely coercive government intervention. Companies have strong incentives to pass <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/technology/twitter-trump-rules.html">vague policies to provide flexibility</a> and to avoid undercutting their economic model. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/technology/social-media-impostor-accounts.html">enforcement is in the hands of the corporation</a>, policies that are open to interpretation protect them from pressures to enact costly measures.</p>
<p>While the initial political effects in social media platforms may have been unintended, the consequences have become stark and undisputed. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/us/elections/calendar-primary-results.html">Upcoming mid-term elections in the U.S. in November</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/technology/gdpr-european-privacy-law.html">new data privacy policy in the European Union</a>, and proactive measures to prevent political interference in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/business/ireland-facebook-abortion-referendum.html">Irish abortion referendum</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/technology/whatsapp-india-elections.html">Indian elections</a>, all call attention to the question of social media corporations’ ability to effectively self-regulate.</p>
<p>The initial evidence presented here reinforces these concerns.</p>
<p>Privately governed social media platforms, integral to many individuals’ daily lives, have yet to be held accountable for past political interference in democratic processes. Individual companies themselves have limited incentives to enact strong measures to protect democratic processes in the future, as this would disadvantage them in an incredibly competitive and lucrative economic market.</p>
<p>The remaining option is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19331681.2018.1448735">government regulation</a>, which could occur at the national or international level. </p>
<p>Given states’ incentives to keep regulation lax to encourage corporations to remain in their jurisdictions, the only option to prevent malicious manipulation of social media may be international cooperation for a <a href="http://www.danieldrezner.com/research/egovernance.pdf">new global information communication technology regime</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96840/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Bloodgood receives funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - société et culture (FRQSC) and the Social Science and Humanities Council (SSHRC). </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tristan Masson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Bots and fake accounts on Twitter helped sway the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Here’s how the social media platform has purportedly tried, and failed, to combat threats to democracy.Elizabeth Bloodgood, Associate Professor, Concordia UniversityTristan Masson, Researcher in Digital Technology and International Relations, Concordia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/940162018-04-02T19:59:47Z2018-04-02T19:59:47ZWhy the business model of social media giants like Facebook is incompatible with human rights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212596/original/file-20180329-189824-1k13qax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Facebook’s actions – or inactions – facilitated breaches of privacy and human rights associated with democratic governance.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Peter DaSilva</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Facebook has had a bad few weeks. The social media giant <a href="http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/facebook-says-sorry-again-in-string-of-major-newspaper-ads/news-story/51ff72863e51512605b23fd69cd60140">had to apologise</a> for failing to protect the personal data of millions of users from being accessed by data mining company <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election">Cambridge Analytica</a>. Outrage is brewing over its admission to spying on people <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17160944/facebook-call-history-sms-data-collection-android">via their Android phones</a>. Its stock price <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5519009/Facebook-stocks-plummet-Cambridge-Analytica-data-reports.html">plummeted</a>, while millions <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/pioneer-delete-facebook-addiction-social-life">deleted their accounts</a> in disgust. </p>
<p>Facebook has also faced scrutiny over its failure to prevent the spread of “fake news” on its platforms, including via an apparent <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/18/17021136/mueller-indictment-russia-internet-research-agency-community">orchestrated Russian propaganda effort</a> to influence the 2016 US presidential election.</p>
<p>Facebook’s actions – or inactions – facilitated breaches of privacy and human rights associated with democratic governance. But it might be that its business model – and those of its social media peers generally – is simply incompatible with human rights.</p>
<h2>The good</h2>
<p>In some ways, social media has been a boon for human rights – most obviously for freedom of speech. </p>
<p>Previously, the so-called <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankmiller/2017/12/04/theres-no-need-to-compel-speech-the-marketplace-of-ideas-is-working/#13902bb94e68">“marketplace of ideas”</a> was technically available to all (in “free” countries), but was in reality dominated by the elites. While all could equally exercise the right to free speech, we lacked equal voice. Gatekeepers, especially in the form of the mainstream media, largely controlled the conversation. </p>
<p>But today, anybody with internet access can broadcast information and opinions to the whole world. While not all will be listened to, social media is expanding the boundaries of what is said and received in public. The marketplace of ideas must effectively be bigger and broader, and more diverse.</p>
<p>Social media <a href="http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol35/iss1/3/">enhances the effectiveness</a> of non-mainstream political movements, public assemblies and demonstrations, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/opinion/sunday/delete-facebook-does-not-fix-problem.html">especially in countries</a> that exercise tight controls over civil and political rights, or have very poor news sources. </p>
<p>Social media played a major role in co-ordinating the massive protests that brought down dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as large revolts in Spain, Greece, Israel, South Korea, and the Occupy movement. More recently, it has facilitated the rapid growth of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/after-metoo-50716">#MeToo</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-43541179">#neveragain</a> movements, among others.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/metoo-is-not-enough-it-has-yet-to-shift-the-power-imbalances-that-would-bring-about-gender-equality-92108">#MeToo is not enough: it has yet to shift the power imbalances that would bring about gender equality</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The bad and the ugly</h2>
<p>But the social media “free speech” machines can create human rights difficulties. Those newly empowered voices are not necessarily desirable voices. </p>
<p>The UN <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=22794&LangID=E">recently found</a> that Facebook had been a major platform for spreading hatred <a href="http://time.com/5197039/un-facebook-myanmar-rohingya-violence/">against the Rohingya in Myanmar</a>, which in turn led to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. </p>
<p>Video sharing site YouTube <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html">seems to automatically guide viewers</a> to the fringiest versions of what they might be searching for. A search on vegetarianism might lead to veganism; jogging to ultra-marathons; Donald Trump’s popularity to white supremacist rants; and Hillary Clinton to 9/11 trutherism.</p>
<p>YouTube, via its algorithm’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html">natural and probably unintended impacts</a>, “may be one of the most powerful radicalising instruments of the 21st century”, with all the attendant human rights abuses that might follow.</p>
<h2>The business model and human rights</h2>
<p>Human rights abuses might be embedded in the business model that has evolved for social media companies in their second decade. </p>
<p>Essentially, those models are based on the collection and use for marketing purposes of their users’ data. And the data they have is extraordinary in its profiling capacities, and in the consequent unprecedented knowledge base and potential power it grants to these private actors.</p>
<p>Indirect political influence is commonly exercised, even in the most credible democracies, by private bodies such as major corporations. This power can be partially constrained by “anti-trust laws” that promote competition and prevent undue market dominance. </p>
<p>Anti-trust measures could, for example, be used to hive off Instagram from Facebook, or YouTube from Google. But these companies’ power essentially arises from the sheer number of their users: in late 2017, Facebook was reported as having <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/">more than 2.2 billion active users</a>. Anti-trust measures do not seek to cap the number of a company’s customers, as opposed to its acquisitions. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212368/original/file-20180328-109169-1s2elgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In late 2017, Facebook was reported as having more than 2.2 billion active users.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Ritchie B. Tongo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Power through knowledge</h2>
<p>In 2010, Facebook <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/facebook-experiment-boosts-us-voter-turnout-1.11401">conducted an experiment</a> by randomly deploying a non-partisan “I voted” button into 61 million feeds during the US mid-term elections. That simple action led to 340,000 more votes, or about 0.14% of the US voting population. This number can swing an election. A bigger sample would lead to even more votes. </p>
<p>So Facebook knows how to deploy the button to sway an election, which would clearly be lamentable. However, the mere possession of that knowledge <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-facebook-influence-an-election-result-65541">makes Facebook a political player</a>. It now <em>knows</em> that button’s the political impact, the types of people it is likely to motivate, and the party that’s favoured by its deployment <em>and non-deployment</em>, and at what times of day.</p>
<p>It might seem inherently incompatible with democracy for that knowledge to be vested in a private body. Yet the retention of such data is the essence of Facebook’s ability to make money and run a viable business.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-facebook-influence-an-election-result-65541">Can Facebook influence an election result?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Microtargeting</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036">A study</a> has shown that a computer knows more about a person’s personality than their friends or flatmates from an analysis of 70 “likes”, and more than their family from 150 likes. From 300 likes it can outperform one’s spouse. </p>
<p>This enables the micro-targeting of people for marketing messages – whether those messages market a product, a political party or a cause. This is Facebook’s product, from which it generates billions of dollars. It enables extremely effective advertising and the manipulation of its users. This is so even without Cambridge Analytica’s underhanded methods.</p>
<p>Advertising is manipulative: that is its point. Yet it is a long bow to label all advertising as a breach of human rights. </p>
<p>Advertising is available to all with the means to pay. Social media micro-targeting has become another battleground where money is used to attract customers and, in the political arena, influence and mobilise voters. </p>
<p>While the influence of money in politics is pervasive – and probably inherently undemocratic – it seems unlikely that spending money to deploy social media to boost an electoral message is any more a breach of human rights than other overt political uses of money. </p>
<p>Yet the extraordinary scale and precision of its manipulative reach might justify differential treatment of social media compared to other advertising, as its manipulative political effects arguably undermine democratic choices. </p>
<p>As with mass data collection, perhaps it may eventually be concluded that that reach is simply incompatible with democratic and human rights.</p>
<h2>‘Fake news’</h2>
<p>Finally, there is the issue of the spread of misinformation. </p>
<p>While paid advertising may not breach human rights, “fake news” distorts and poisons democratic debate. It is one thing for millions of voters to be influenced by precisely targeted social media messages, but another for maliciously false messages to influence and manipulate millions – whether paid for or not.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.osce.org/fom/302796">Declaration on Fake News</a>, several UN and regional human rights experts said fake news interfered with the right to know and receive information – part of the general right to freedom of expression. </p>
<p>Its mass dissemination may also distort rights to participate in public affairs. Russia and Cambridge Analytica (assuming allegations in both cases to be true) have demonstrated how social media can be “weaponised” in unanticipated ways.</p>
<p>Yet it is difficult to know how social media companies should deal with fake news. The suppression of fake news is the suppression of speech – a human right in itself. </p>
<p>The preferred solution outlined in the Declaration on Fake News is to develop technology and digital literacy to enable readers to more easily identify fake news. The human rights community seems to be trusting that the proliferation of fake news in the marketplace of ideas can be corrected with better ideas rather than censorship.</p>
<p>However, one cannot be complacent in assuming that “better speech” triumphs over fake news. <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.full">A recent study</a> concluded fake news on social media:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also, internet “bots” apparently spread true and false news at the same rate, which indicates that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The depressing truth may be that human nature is attracted to fake stories over the more mundane true ones, often because they satisfy predetermined biases, prejudices and desires. And social media now facilitates their wildfire spread to an unprecedented degree. </p>
<p>Perhaps social media’s purpose – the posting and sharing of speech – cannot help but generate a distorted and tainted marketplace of fake ideas that undermine political debate and choices, and perhaps human rights.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212369/original/file-20180328-109199-12r5bbj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fake news disseminated by social media is argued to have played a role in electing Donald Trump to the presidency.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What next?</h2>
<p>It is premature to assert the very collection of massive amounts of data is irreconcilable with the right to privacy (and even rights relating to democratic governance). </p>
<p>Similarly, it is premature to decide that micro-targeting manipulates the political sphere beyond the bounds of democratic human rights. </p>
<p>Finally, it may be that better speech and corrective technology will help to undo fake news’ negative impacts: it is premature to assume that such solutions won’t work. </p>
<p>However, by the time such conclusions may be reached, it may be too late to do much about it. It may be an example where government regulation and international human rights law – and even business acumen and expertise – lags too far behind technological developments to appreciate their human rights dangers. </p>
<p>At the very least, we must now seriously question the business models that have emerged from the dominant social media platforms. Maybe the internet should be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/20/digital-oligarchs-rewire-web-facebook-scandal">rewired from the grassroots</a>, rather than be led by digital oligarchs’ business needs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Joseph does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Human rights abuses might be embedded in the business model that has evolved for social media companies in their second decade.Sarah Joseph, Director, Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/936752018-03-21T12:07:23Z2018-03-21T12:07:23ZPsychographics: the behavioural analysis that helped Cambridge Analytica know voters’ minds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211239/original/file-20180320-80618-1chynat.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C2699%2C1526&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Making connections through tracking behaviour.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GarryKillian/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The dealings that have been revealed between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller: a Bond villain-style CEO, a reclusive billionaire, a naïve and conflicted whistle-blower, a hipster data scientist turned politico, an academic with seemingly questionable ethics, and of course a triumphant president and his influential family. </p>
<p>Much of the discussion has been on how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain data on more than 50m Facebook users – and how it allegedly failed to delete this data when told to do so. But there is also the matter of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with the data. In fact the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence.</p>
<p>For example, pollsters have long used segmentation to target particular groups of voters, such as through categorising audiences by gender, age, income, education and family size. Segments can also be created around political affiliation or purchase preferences. The data analytics machine that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used in her 2016 campaign – named Ada after the 19th-century mathematician and early computing pioneer – used state-of-the-art segmentation techniques to target groups of eligible voters in the same way that Barack Obama had done four years previously.</p>
<p>Cambridge Analytica was contracted to the Trump campaign and provided an entirely new weapon for the election machine. While it also used demographic segments to identify groups of voters, as Clinton’s campaign had, Cambridge Analytica also segmented using <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/03/psychographics-are-just-as-important-for-marketers-as-demographics">psychographics</a>. As definitions of class, education, employment, age and so on, demographics are informational. Psychographics are behavioural – a means to segment by personality.</p>
<p>This makes a lot of sense. It’s obvious that two people with the same demographic profile (for example, white, middle-aged, employed, married men) can have markedly different personalities and opinions. We also know that adapting a message to a person’s personality – whether they are open, introverted, argumentative, and so on – goes a long way to help getting that message across.</p>
<h2>Understanding people better</h2>
<p>There have traditionally been two routes to ascertaining someone’s personality. You can either get to know them really well – usually over an extended time. Or you can get them to take a personality test and ask them to share it with you. Neither of these methods is realistically open to pollsters. Cambridge Analytica found a third way, with the assistance of two University of Cambridge academics.</p>
<p>The first, Aleksandr Kogan, sold them access to 270,000 personality tests completed by Facebook users <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/meet-the-psychologist-at-the-center-of-facebook-s-data-scandal">through an online app he had created</a> for research purposes. Providing the data to Cambridge Analytica was, it seems, against Facebook’s internal code of conduct, but only now in March 2018 has Kogan been banned by Facebook from the platform. In addition, Kogan’s data also came with a bonus: he had reportedly collected Facebook data from the test-takers’ friends – and, at an average of 200 friends per person, that added up to some 50m people.</p>
<p>However, these 50m people had not all taken personality tests. This is where the second Cambridge academic, <a href="https://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/michal-kosinski">Michal Kosinski</a>, came in. Kosinski – who is said to believe that micro-targeting based on online data could strengthen democracy – had figured out a way to <a href="https://applymagicsauce.com/">reverse engineer a personality profile from Facebook activity</a> such as likes. Whether you choose to like pictures of sunsets, puppies or people apparently says a lot about your personality. So much, in fact, that on the basis of 300 likes, Kosinski’s model is able to predict someone’s personality profile <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/13/your-computer-knows-you-researchers-cambridge-stanford-university">with the same accuracy as a spouse</a>.</p>
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<span class="caption">Something different for everyone.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/cropped-image-young-man-working-on-648758662?src=8MwCturVDH8XHvp9TzgCRg-1-24">GaudiLab via Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Kogan developed Kosinksi’s ideas, improved them, and cut a deal with Cambridge Analytica. Armed with this bounty – and combined with additional data gleaned from elsewhere – Cambridge Analytica built personality profiles for more than 100m registered US voters. It’s claimed the company then used these profiles for targeted advertising. </p>
<p>Imagine for example that you could identify a segment of voters that is high in conscientiousness and neuroticism, and another segment that is high in extroversion but low in openness. Clearly, people in each segment would respond differently to the same political ad. But on Facebook they do not need to see the same ad at all – each will see an individually tailored ad designed to elicit the desired response, whether that is voting for a candidate, not voting for a candidate, or donating funds.</p>
<p>Cambridge Analytica worked hard to develop dozens of ad variations on different political themes such as immigration, the economy and gun rights, all tailored to different personality profiles. There is no evidence at all that Clinton’s election machine had the same ability.</p>
<p>Behavioural analytics and psychographic profiling are here to stay, no matter what becomes of Cambridge Analytica – which has <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/19/facebook-data-scandal-cambridge-analytica-denies-whistleblowing-claim.html">robustly criticised</a> what it calls “false allegations in the media”. In a way it industrialises what good salespeople have always done, by adjusting their message and delivery to the personality of their customers. This approach to electioneering – and indeed to marketing – will be Cambridge Analytica’s ultimate legacy.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cambridge-analytica-scandal-legitimate-researchers-using-facebook-data-could-be-collateral-damage-93600">Cambridge Analytica scandal: legitimate researchers using Facebook data could be collateral damage</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93675/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Wade is co-author of Digital Vortex: How Today's Market Leaders Can Beat Disruptive Competitors at Their Own Game.</span></em></p>How data-driven behavioural sciences are being road tested in the political sphere.Michael Wade, Professor of Innovation and Strategy, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/920102018-02-19T00:34:12Z2018-02-19T00:34:12ZThe first charges over Russian involvement in the US election have been laid – are there more to come?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206864/original/file-20180218-75967-3kxqpi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Special Counsel Robert Mueller (centre) has laid the first charges from his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Aaron Bernstein</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Special Counsel <a href="https://www.justice.gov/sco">Robert Mueller</a> has issued an <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">indictment</a> outlining charges against the Internet Research Agency LLC (and two related entities which had “various Russian government contracts”) and 13 Russian individuals. The defendants are charged with:</p>
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<p>knowingly and intentionally conspiring with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.</p>
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<p>The defendants, posing as activists, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">allegedly created</a> “false personas” and fake accounts to operate social media accounts and pages on divisive social issues. The indictment does not specifically state that the individual defendants were connected to the Russian government, although at least one of them is <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/trump-russia-indictments-mueller-investigation-415667">known to be close</a> to Putin. Specific to the 2016 election, the defendants’ goal was “supporting” the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and “disparaging” Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>Their activities were not merely online. They gathered intelligence, staged rallies posing as Americans (in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida) and “communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign.” </p>
<p>Some of their efforts were effective. For instance, the fake Twitter account “Tennessee GOP”, which falsely claimed to be operated by the Republican Party in that state, attracted 100,000 followers.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-a-special-counsel-and-what-will-he-investigate-in-the-trump-administration-77952">Explainer: what is a special counsel and what will he investigate in the Trump administration?</a>
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<p>The indictment lists political advertisements taken out by the defendants. These included such messages as “Donald wants to defeat terrorism … Hillary wants to sponsor it”, “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”, and “Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is.”</p>
<p>Their tactics were insidious. They targeted vulnerable groups such as African-Americans and Muslims to sow hate and reduce Clinton’s turnout.</p>
<p>The indictment provides rich detail about the Russian agency: it was incorporated in 2013, based in St Petersburg, employed hundreds of people for its online work, and had a budget of millions. It described its work as “information warfare” against the US and wanted to “spread distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general” during the 2016 election. Again, no direct link to the Russian government or Putin is mentioned in relation to these actions.</p>
<p>It is alleged the company and the named individuals conspired to violate the <a href="https://www.fara.gov/">Foreign Agent Registration Act</a>, which stipulates certain informational requirements for agents of foreign principals who attempt to influence US public opinion, policy and legislation. They also violated the <a href="https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/legislation/">Federal Election Campaign Act</a>, which prohibits foreigners from making contributions etc relating to electioneering communications. The indictment also alleges identity theft, bank and wire fraud, and violations of visa laws.</p>
<p>Crucially, the indictment does not state that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. It clearly notes that any contact with the campaign was “unwitting”. </p>
<p>Deputy Attorney-General <a href="https://www.justice.gov/dag/staff-profile/meet-deputy-attorney-general">Rod Rosenstein</a> also <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/16/deputy-ag-rod-rosenstein-on-grand-jury-indictment-of-russians.html">clarified</a> there was no allegation of collusion in the indictment and he stated that the Russians did not affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Following the indictment, President Trump has <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/16/trump-tweets-russia-started-anti-us-campaign-long-before-he-ran-for-president.html">tweeted</a> that his campaign “did nothing wrong – no collusion!”</p>
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<p>The president has also <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/374444-trumpser-boils-over-with-russia-probe">tweeted</a>: </p>
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<p>This marks an important step for Trump. He is now apparently dismissing Russian influence after repeatedly refusing to condemn them, seeking to downplay their involvement <a href="http://time.com/5163273/donald-trump-robert-mueller-russia-2016-presidential-election/">in the election</a>, and labelling it a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-russia-hoax-turns-out-to-be-real/2018/02/16/be3d174a-1346-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?utm_term=.b57afc6e0ba8">hoax</a>.</p>
<p>He has since <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/374391-trump-lashes-out-at-fake-news-media-over-muller-indictments">pointed out</a> that the indictment shows Russian involvement began in 2014 – before he entered the campaign. Moreover, the evidence shows that the Russians did not support only Trump. They also supported Bernie Sanders (who has <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/republicans-democrats-slam-trump-tweetstorm-about-mueller-indictments-2018-2?r=US&IR=T">blamed</a> the Obama Administration for not doing more to tackle it), although this fact has not been adequately covered in the media. Further, the goal of the Russians was to sow distrust in the political system and undermine the electoral process – not specifically to help Trump.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/us-approach-to-security-is-deeply-troubling-and-its-not-just-about-trump-91239">US approach to security is deeply troubling – and it's not just about Trump</a>
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<p>Does the indictment mean that the president and members of his campaign are in the clear? The answer is difficult to determine at this stage. The indictment leaves open the question as to whether other US individuals might have aided the defendants.</p>
<p>Subsequent actions by Mueller might bring forward additional charges against Trump or his team. Further, the indictment does nothing in relation to the potential obstruction-of-justice case against Trump, although the evidence on this is likely to be weak.</p>
<p>Finally, from a purely political standpoint, it is hard to see from the evidence outlined that the Russian involvement was decisive. To be sure, they propped up fringe groups and spread discord, which local groups were fully capable of doing and did throughout the election. In addition, the sums of money documented in the indictment are small change in the context of the gargantuan amounts both campaigns spent during the 2016 campaign.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92010/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandeep Gopalan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The indictments issued against a company and 13 individuals show a determination to disrupt the presidential campaign, but there is no allegation of collusion with Donald Trump’s team.Sandeep Gopalan, Professor of Law, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/915382018-02-15T11:34:41Z2018-02-15T11:34:41ZTrump may owe his 2016 victory to ‘fake news,’ new study suggests<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206454/original/file-20180214-124886-540t8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton concedes the 2016 presidential election. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Matt Rourke</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Could “fake news” have helped determine the outcome of the 2016 presidential election?</p>
<p>Social media users and intensely partisan news broadcasts disseminated a massive number of messages during the campaign. Many of these messages demonized candidates and seriously distorted the facts presented to voters. One recent study of nearly <a href="http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/working-papers/junk-news-and-bots-during-the-u-s-election-what-were-michigan-voters-sharing-over-twitter">25,000 election social media messages shared by Michigan voters</a> identified nearly half as “unverified WikiLeaks content and Russian-origin news stories” that fall “under the definition of propaganda based on its use of language and emotional appeals.” </p>
<p>What hasn’t been clear, however, is how much of an impact – if any – these “fake news” items had on the outcome of the election. To our knowledge, there have been no empirical studies that have systematically assessed the extent to which believing fake news stories influenced voting decisions in 2016. So, we set out to do one.</p>
<p>We are scholars associated with the <a href="http://u.osu.edu/cnep">Comparative National Elections Project</a>, which is coordinated at The Ohio State University. In December 2016, we commissioned YouGov to conduct a nationwide post-election survey. <a href="https://u.osu.edu/cnep/files/2015/03/Fake-News-Piece-for-The-Conversation-with-methodological-appendix-11d0ni9.pdf">Our study concludes</a> that fake news most likely did have a substantial impact on the voting decisions of a strategically important set of voters. </p>
<p>Here’s what we learned.</p>
<h2>Our research questions</h2>
<p>The survey had 1,600 respondents. We focus our analysis on the 2016 electoral behavior of 585 respondents who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. This strategic subset of voters was selected for two reasons. </p>
<p>First, restricting our analysis to former Obama supporters allowed us to weed out those respondents who were hostile to all Democratic candidates.</p>
<p>Second, if Hillary Clinton had retained the support of Obama voters, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/upshot/a-2016-review-turnout-wasnt-the-driver-of-clintons-defeat.html">she would have most likely won the 2016 election</a>. Instead, just 77 percent of Obama voters supported Clinton. Our survey data show that 10 percent of these former Obama voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016, 4 percent switched to minor parties and 8 percent did not vote. </p>
<p>Our key research question is: What accounts for these defections?</p>
<h2>Study methodology and results</h2>
<p>Our survey asked 281 questions, including three false statements best characterized as fake news – two negative statements about Hillary Clinton and one positive statement about Donald Trump. <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?">All three were widely disseminated through social media</a> and <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444817712086">spread by mainstream and partisan news outlets.</a> </p>
<p>The first is that <a href="https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-has-parkinsons-disease">“Hillary Clinton is in very poor health due to a serious illness.”</a> Twenty-five percent of all survey respondents believed that this was “definitely true” or “probably true,” as did 12 percent of our former Obama supporters. </p>
<p>The second is a statement that asked our respondents if they believed that <a href="https://www.snopes.com/wikileaks-cofirms-hillary-clinton-sold-weapons-to-isis">“During her time as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton approved weapon sales to Islamic jihadists, including ISIS.”</a> Thirty-five percent of our national sample believed that Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State, as did 20 percent of former Obama voters.</p>
<p>Finally, the third is a statement that <a href="https://www.snopes.com/pope-francis-donald-trump-endorsement">“Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president prior to the election.”</a> About 10 percent of our national sample and 8 percent of Obama supporters thought this statement was true. </p>
<p>Belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters. Among respondents who didn’t believe any of the fake news stories, 89 percent cast ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Sixty-one percent of those who believed one fake news item voted for Clinton. But only 17 percent of those who believed two or all three of these false assertions voted for Clinton.</p>
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<p>To be sure, data from a one-time survey cannot “prove” that these fake news items caused former Obama voters to defect. It is also possible that someone who chose not to vote for Clinton might endorse these false statements after the fact in order to rationalize their voting decision. </p>
<p>We also explored a number of other possible explanations for these voters’ defections.</p>
<h2>What else could explain these defections?</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206455/original/file-20180214-124924-1bte6np.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">What explains the voters who backed Obama but not Clinton? The study shows sexism wasn’t a main cause.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite</span></span>
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<p>The Clinton campaign heavily emphasized gender issues in an attempt to mobilize female voters. Could this have alienated men to the extent that they abandoned their prior support for the Democratic presidential candidate? Our data provide no support for such a claim. An identical 23 percent of both male and female respondents who had voted for Obama in 2012 defected from the Democratic ticket.</p>
<p>Did the lack of an African-American presidential candidate lead black voters to waiver in their commitment to the Democratic candidate? No. Indeed, fewer African-American voters (20 percent) defected from Clinton than did white voters (23 percent).</p>
<p>Age is weakly related to defection from Clinton. While 20 percent of voters over 35 abandoned the Democratic ticket in 2016, 30 percent of younger voters did so. </p>
<p>Education is also weakly associated with defection. Among college-educated former Obama voters, just 16 percent did not vote for Clinton, but the percentage almost doubled to 27 percent defecting for those with lower educational attainment. </p>
<p>More overtly political variables had a stronger impact. Half of those who placed themselves near the conservative end of the ideological scale defected from the Democratic candidate, while only 14 percent of those on the left did so. </p>
<p>Similarly, dissatisfaction with the condition of the economy also had an impact: Just 12 percent of those who thought that the economic situation at the time of the survey was “good” or “very good” abandoned Hillary Clinton, while 39 percent who regarded the economy as “poor” or “very poor” at the time of the survey defected from the Democratic ticket.</p>
<p>Party identification exerted a stronger influence. Among the former Obama voters who identified themselves as Democrats, 7 percent did not vote for Clinton. This rose to 40 percent among independents and to 68 percent among those who identified with the Republican, Libertarian or Green parties.</p>
<h2>Controlling for alternative explanations</h2>
<p>So do all of these alternative factors mean it’s impossible to measure the unique impact of belief in fake news on the vote in 2016? Actually social science offers us a way. Multiple regression analysis is a tool that allows researchers to account for many different factors influencing behavior, in this case defecting from the Democratic ticket in 2016.</p>
<p>We used this tool to estimate the joint impact on the vote of all of these alternative explanatory factors. The first equation we ran included gender, race, age, education, ideological orientation, dissatisfaction with the condition of the economy and party identification. All together, these variables “explained” 38 percent of the likelihood of defection. </p>
<p>We then added the fake news items to the equation to measure their impact. The three fake news items explained an additional 14 percent of the likelihood of Obama voters defecting after the influence of all of the other variables had been taken into consideration. </p>
<p>We also added one more compelling element to our study. Using “feeling thermometers,” we measured how much each respondent liked or disliked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If defection of Obama voters was only due to disliking Hillary Clinton or liking Donald Trump, then the introduction of this thermometer variable into the equation should make the link with fake news disappear.</p>
<p>Though how people felt about Clinton and Trump did somewhat reduce the strength of the relationship between fake news and defection, it did not eliminate it. Belief in fake news remained a significant predictor of defecting from Clinton. In sum, even after the impact of all of these other factors is taken into consideration, former Obama voters who believed one or more of these fake news stories were 3.3 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who did not believe any of these false claims.</p>
<p>That may not seem like much, but Clinton lost the presidency by about 78,000 votes (0.6 percent of nationwide vote) cast in the <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-election-came-down-to-77744-votes-in-pennsylvania-wisconsin-and-michigan-updated/article/2005323">key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin</a>. Though our evidence does not “prove” that belief in fake news “caused” these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016, our study results suggest that it is highly likely that the pernicious pollution of our political discourse by fake news was sufficient to influence the outcome of what was a very close election.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91538/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Gunther currently receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Funding from other sources was received more than a decade ago. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erik C. Nisbet receives funding from the National Science Foundation</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Beck currently receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Funding from other sources was received more than a decade ago. </span></em></p>Yes, votes are cast based on many factors. But a new survey and analysis suggests that belief in fake news could have been decisive during the 2016 election.Richard Gunther, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, The Ohio State UniversityErik C. Nisbet, Associate Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Environmental Policy and Faculty Associate with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State UniversityPaul Beck, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, The Ohio State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/898092018-01-19T14:06:54Z2018-01-19T14:06:54ZA year of Trump: how his incendiary style took the place of substance<p>Anyone looking for a visual representation of Donald Trump’s first year in office need only behold Time magazine’s cover marking the anniversary. Composed by artist Edel Rodriguez, it depicts Trump as a furious, bellowing mouth, his notorious hair rendered in livid flames.</p>
<p>For a year of poisonous rhetoric backed up with few substantial achievements, it could scarcely be more apt. Without even a glance at a policy checklist, the most casual observer knows that Trump has torn up the presidential rule book and set the shreds on fire.</p>
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<p>Ever since the Kennedy era ushered in the personalised presidency, scholars of US politics have cautioned their students to beware of the shiny distractions that take up the news agenda and focus on the substance of what the executive branch is doing – the most meaningful business is often done in the shadows. But, then again, rhetoric is a powerful tool of the executive. A president’s words – and <a href="http://time.com/5099544/donald-trump-tweets-first-year/?utm_campaign=time&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&xid=time_socialflow_twitter">tweets</a> – really matter.</p>
<p>Trump has spent the past two-and-a-half years crafting a political style which, when distilled, consists of little more than catchy soundbites and incandescent tweets. Detractors might <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-stumped-in-first-debate-with-clinton-will-it-cost-him-65706">scorn</a> his freewheeling (to put it politely) verbal style, but from the start of his campaign, he energised his supporters in a way that his Democratic opponent could only dream of – and all while giving only the sketchiest details of how he planned to achieve anything once elected. </p>
<p>But, on the campaign trail, a candidate can be forgiven for lacking substance – in fact, it may be an advantage. As far as campaigns go, substance can be hard to sell – Hillary Clinton was roundly mocked for offering dull, wonky stump speeches demonstrating her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGm0FQ6i74U">grasp of complex policy problems</a>. The Make America Great Again mantra, on the other hand, was a stroke of Reaganesque genius, vague enough that voters could read into it whatever they liked.</p>
<p>Governing, though, is another matter. Trump has not shifted American public opinion on any given issue, and nor has he tried. Instead, he has focused on gratifying his tribal base.</p>
<h2>Don’t look too hard</h2>
<p>For now at least, the 39-40% of voting Americans who <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/">still approve of him</a> appear satisfied with the president and his “America First” rhetoric, despite his administration’s paucity of meaningful achievements. To the extent Trump had a plan, this is in keeping with it. As presidential scholar George Edwards has <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3022796">detailed</a>, Trump came to office with a powerful slogan and even some goals, but no discernible strategy. </p>
<p>To the extent he has pursued a coherent agenda, he has focused on <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-ways-donald-trump-is-rolling-back-the-obama-years-or-trying-to-84747">rolling back Obama-era achievements</a>, but to little avail. Most conspicuously, he has <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/20/trump-obamacare-mandate-repeal-taxes-216125">failed to repeal Obamacare</a>, which the Republican party has been promising to dismantle more or less since it was passed.</p>
<p>Instead of mastering the art of dealing with Congress, Trump has followed Obama’s late term example and used <a href="https://qz.com/899741/how-many-executive-orders-has-donald-trump-signed-compared-to-barack-obama/">executive actions</a> to fast-track some of his most dramatic priorities. Again, it was a triumph of style. The substance of these often single-page documents was generally wafer thin, and some (the travel ban included) were blocked by the courts. The sight of him signing away in his early Oval Office days reassured to his voters that their leader was firmly in control, fearlessly implementing an agenda that ticked the conservative boxes.</p>
<p>As journalist <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/">Selana Zito</a> put it in the Atlantic, liberals continue to take him literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him very seriously but not literally. Reflecting on what Trump has achieved to date, perhaps the most consequential aspect of his first year is that he has energised those who view their county and the world through an “America First” lens – with the dark connotations that this brings.</p>
<p>Despite his insistent cries of “I am not a racist”, his language has been at best unpresidential, at worst, divisive and race-baiting. Either way, he has <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/11/13/fbi-hate-crimes-reach-5-year-high-2016-jumped-trump-rolled-toward-presidency-0">provided oxygen and succour</a> to those with a white nationalist agenda. That is a toxic achievement by any measure.</p>
<p>Whether he cares about these consequences is another matter. One year into his reign, it’s clear that for the 45th US president, style <em>is</em> substance. His greatest skill and top priority is to keep the spotlight – however unflattering – firmly on himself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89809/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clodagh Harrington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Never mind a “Muslim ban”, Obamacare repeal or a wall on the Mexican border – Donald Trump’s only real agenda is himself.Clodagh Harrington, Senior Lecturer in Politics, De Montfort UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.