What Facebook, Twitter and Trump are telling us about fake news and a polarised world
Niall Ferguson says the rise of social media platforms has revolutionised the democratic process, with rogue users able to spread not just fake news but extreme opinions to cause massive polarisation, as like attracts like
There was not much doubt that Russia was behind the release by WikiLeaks of emails to and from Clinton.
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We now know that before (and after) the election, Russian trolls with bogus identities bought more than 3,000 Facebook ads. The Russians also used Facebook Events to organise phoney political protests in the US, including an anti-immigrant rally in a small Idaho town known for welcoming refugees. It was to be “hosted” by “SecuredBorders”, a Facebook group exposed in March as a Russian front.
Twitter was used in a similar way. In response to congressional investigations, the company admitted last week it had identified about 200 accounts linked to Russia, and that Kremlin-backed news site RT spent US$250,000 on Twitter ads last year.
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It is still too early to conclude that Russian use of social media decided the election. However, we probably can conclude that social media decided the election. The Trump campaign spent about US$90 million on social media, most of it on Facebook. Last November, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, said: “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” I believe he is right.
In less than a decade, the public sphere – and the democratic process – has been revolutionised. In 2008, the defeated Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, had 4,492 Twitter followers and 625,000 Facebook friends. Barack Obama had four times as many “friends” and 26 times as many followers. Yet the platforms were still in their infancy.
Everyone, including Russian trolls, as long as they conceal their whereabouts, can use social networks to spread not just falsehoods but extreme opinions. This is a key problem the titans of Silicon Valley gravely underestimated. The tendency for “birds of a feather to flock together” means like-minded people form clusters in any social network, regardless of its size.
The result is massive polarisation. A recent study of 665 blogs and 16,852 links between them showed that they formed two almost separate clusters: one liberal, the other conservative. A study of Twitter revealed that retweets have the same character: conservatives retweet only conservative tweets. A study of language used on Twitter showed that, on hot-button issues such as gun control, same-sex marriage and climate change, it is the tweets using moral and emotional language that are more likely to be retweeted.
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The key question is how tenable that defence now is. A platform for all ideas? Or the most powerful media publisher in the history of the world?
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford
