As candidates move forward with their 2020 campaigns, there is one fast-growing contingency they have no interest at all in persuading or spending a single campaign dime to influence. That’s odd, considering this group is so large that in a three-month period, Facebook identified more than 2.2 billion profiles belonging to this subset of users. Of course, I’m talking about fake profiles, aka bot networks, trolls, fake users, and, yes, election meddlers.
While 2016 is behind us, the work on behalf of bot networks for 2020 is already underway, and so is the influence that bot networks have on our political discussions. Despite Donald Trump’s pronouncements, the overwhelming majority of fake news shares, according to studies, were conservative. How much impact these bot networks have through faked articles and shared content is difficult to say, but the bans at Facebook hint that much bigger problems may be lurking.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have fought hard against any real oversight of how their businesses may be manipulated by armies of imaginary accounts.
It is time for the U.S. House to begin asking serious questions of Facebook and Twitter, about their advertisement policies, reporting policies, data services, and what plans, if any, they have to prevent online hordes from overwhelming any real discussion of issues in 2020.
Concern trolling and cost blackholes
Since January, high-profile Republican activists have been caught, and banned, by Facebook for their attempts to manipulate Democratic primaries, promote fake concerns, and manipulate audiences. These high-profile cases are newsworthy but represent only the very tip of the iceberg. With the potential to have billions of fake accounts, it doesn’t take sharing news content or promoting fake news to create real damage to the way we discuss any issue our nation faces. Petty comments, stirred-up fights, and concern trolling have all become a part of the methodology used successfully by bot networks and those who plan to meddle in presidential elections.
The danger of concern trolls or even faux Democratic activists is that not only do they represent an opportunity to try and poison support for any particular candidate, they can also act as a black hole for advertising costs a candidate may pay.
While fake accounts can be fully automated, it is also easily possible to maintain their logins and visits to view content. How does that pay off? As these fake accounts log in and out of social networks, presenting bogus zip codes, bogus addresses, and bogus values, they can become targets for all advertising platforms.
That’s right: Your candidate, who may be paying for Facebook advertisements or promoted posts, might be spending some of their campaign cash to reach fake people. Your local businesses and other entities who use even less-refined marketing strategies are even more likely to find that some of their ad impressions went to non-people. And while Facebook may ask for cheers in banning 2.2 billion accounts, the story no one is seeing is whether or not Facebook had a means to calculate ad costs sunk into the 2.2 billion accounts they banned, and if the advertisers received credits.
Because concern trolls represent users who are logged in to potentially multiple accounts at the same time, the more active they become in meddling, the more likely they are to be targets of paid advertisements.
The era of self-regulation and secrecy must end
Taking on Facebook and Twitter is too often dismissed, even by Democratic activists, as being low-priority. But the concentration of mindshare, as well as the ability of these platforms to be manipulated by trolls and bots, can cause real damage to any cause you may be involved in. Conservative troll bots will gladly use concern trolling to attack any issue you may care about, whether that is global warming, women’s rights, gun safety, LGBT rights, immigration, or any other issue. You will find that making actual progress on an issue is made far more difficult when one of the largest platforms available can be manipulated to provide a bullhorn that spews misinformation.
The problem with this extends far beyond the Trump presidency or any election. By using fake profiles, groups have been able to promote anti-vaxxer conspiracies, and, more recently, push conspiracies around cell phones and technology. CBS News Online covered this problem:
According to Axios, however, misinformation about vaccines is not the only threat, as Russia is focusing on spreading misinformation around health care issues ahead of the 2020 election.
Not only did Russia fuel the anti-vaccination debate, they have also spewed unverified information about 5G wireless technology. RT, a U.S.-based Russia-backed TV network, reported that new 5G technology was linked to cancer, autism, Alzheimer's and other health issues, The New York Times reports. This had a real-world effect, with smaller blogs and websites picking up RT's false stories and sharing them as fact, the Times said.
Using social platforms to misinform, or, frankly, brainwash some of the American public by using panic and non-science can cause real work on real issues to grind to a halt. Poisoning reasonable discussion on any issue is one of the quickest ways to derail any topic you care about.
Breaking up Facebook is the right thing to do
I light of Facebook’s profit-above-all motivation and its continued gobbling-up of other entities, there may be only one real approach left: break those entities up before they declare such an event is technically impossible. Chris Hughes, a Facebook founder, agrees that a breakup of the entity is in order in his New York Times opinion piece:
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
We already have the tools we need to check the domination of Facebook. We just seem to have forgotten about them.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.
Attempts to regulate Facebook and put it in the same category as traditional communication entities, like cell phone carriers, could solve some problems and create others. We are entering a new era, and the handling of Facebook cannot follow old rules that apply to traditional utilities.
We need a more modern view of the danger that delivery monopolies and information hosts can pose. In the past, it simply wasn’t possible for outside forces to control the front page of the local newspaper or to change major network news in real time.
Now, with a few clicks and a few million fake users, the delivery of fake content and manipulated concern is very real.
It is time we recognize the new world we are living in—and the danger it can pose to every issue we care about.