When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media

[cal04]

by JARED KELLER
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/


Since young voters discovered they could friend Barack Obama on Facebook during the 2008 election, social media has become ingrained in the way we think about political discourse. Politicians and tech evangelists alike see it as the key to a new type of politics: Campaigns and candidates can better engage citizens, facilitate grassroots organization, and craft legislation with the direct input of a Tweeting electorate. The inevitable results, optimists argue, will be a sort of "digital democracy," defined by a closer, more coherent relationship between the elected officials and their constituents.

But social media, like any tool, can be used to erode democratic practices as well.

A few days before the special election in Massachusetts to fill Senate seat formerly held by the late Edward Kennedy, the conservative American Future Fund (AFF) conducted a "Twitter-bomb" campaign against Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate. The AFF set up nine anonymous Twitter accounts in early morning hours prior to the election that sent hundred of tweets accusing Martha Coakley of taking money from health insurance lobbyists to other influential Twitter accounts around the state, linking back to anonymous websites containing further details. Twitter realized the messages were spam and shut down the accounts two hours later, but by that point the messages had reached nearly 60,000 people. The sudden spike caused the attacks on Coakley to turn up in Google searches for her name, effectively gaming Google's real-time search functions. Scott Brown won the election due to a variety of factors, but Eni Mustafaraj and Panagiotis Metaxes of Wellseley College, who documented the incident, concluded that the promulgation of anti-Coakley messages through social networks highlighted future opportunities for "a small fraction of the population to hijack the trustworthiness of a search engine and propagate their messages to a huge audience for free, with little effort, and without trace." While the attacks on Coakley were based on a fundraiser she did indeed hold in Washington, hosted by lobbyists with health care clients, it's plausible the same methods could be used to spread blatant misinformation about a candidate.

More recently, a group of right-leaning users on the popular social news network Digg were accused of censoring from the site stories with a perceived liberal bias and promoting stories with a conservative slant through collective action. While the online identities of many of the so-called "Digg Patriots" were revealed, their motivations and affiliations with existing political organizations remain subject to speculation. "In a time when mainstream news organizations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well?" asked Michael Hirschorn with regards to the Digg Patriots. "And thanks to the emergence of social media as the increasingly dominant mode of information dissemination, are we nearing a time when truth itself will become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the social-media markets?"