Media, Law & Policy

How Fake News is Damaging Democracy

Friday, September 29, 2017, By Sawyer Kamman

An assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, Jeff Hemsley and his PhD students actively research the viral spread of fake news or other categorizations of viral information. In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas we learned about the rapid emergence of fake news that made false accusations and identified people incorrectly.

“Clearly, this is a hard problem for Facebook, Twitter and Google to deal with,” says Hemsley who draws on theories and concepts like information gatekeeping, personal influence, status, presentation of self, social capital and viral events. “Their algorithms are designed to quickly identify trending content and promote it such that it reaches the widest audience possible. The underlying assumption is that it must be news or interesting. This is analogous to a juicy rumor spread among a network of friends: if it is spreading, it must be interesting.”
 
“It is easy for those with programming skills to quickly make automated accounts, bots, that spread content in such a way that they mimic a human trend,” says Hemsley who sees this as a big problem for tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
 
“Worse is that some actors create something like cyborg accounts. These are accounts that humans operate some of the time but are automated at other times. Since humans operate them some of the time, they don’t look like bots and so are harder to shut down. Alternately, actors can hack into other people’s accounts and take them over for the purpose of automating those accounts to spread whatever content they want.”
 
Hemsley describes an alarming reallity, one sophisticated actor can automate or cyborg many accounts simultaneously, creating a bot army – enough to drive some bit of content onto Twitter’s trending page, for example. “The end result is, as Danah Boyd notes, a kind of hacking of our attention economy,” says Hemley.
 
Such deceptive practices leads Hemsley to one overarching question.
 
“We have to wonder at the motives of people that put this much energy in doing this. What drives someone (or a group of actors) to spend that much time and energy building and managing bots just to spread false or misleading information. Are they getting paid for it? By whom? Or, like the way we have described teenage hackers of the 90s, is this just an ego boost? Do they do it to show that they can? Is this a game to them and do they think they have won if their content makes it onto Google? Then there are politically motivated actors who are more concerned about attacking the other side than they are about the potential harm their activities cause. Seeing their side “win” may be more important to them then how these hacks to our attention economy may adversely affect our democracy.”
 
Syracuse University faculty are available to speak to media via phone, email, Skype, or LTN studio. Please contact Scott McDowell, executive director, regional strategic communications at semcdowe@syr.edu or 212-826-1449 or Ellen James Mbuqe, director of news and PR at Syracuse University, at ejmbuqe@syr.edu or 315.443.1897.