“The problem is they're extremely divisive and I don't have a solution for this,” said Nathan Carpenter, assistant director of convergent media in ISU's School of Communication. “It's been an extremely contentious election cycle and social media fostered the worst of it.”
That “worst” included fake news, the rise of so-called Twitter Bots that sent countless automated messages and even shattered friendships, Carpenter told a gathering of about 115 people Wednesday at the Bone Student Center.
His talk was the next to last in a series of programs with the theme, “The U.S. Presidential Election: Global Implications and Comparative Perspectives.” The talks are sponsored by the Office of International Studies and Programs and the Department of Politics and Government.
Carpenter said social media “shape what we see and know” and also “reinforce what we already know through our social network.”
About 62 percent of people surveyed by the Pew Research Center this summer said they get news on social media, he said.
Facebook has proved to be an important source of news for people, but sometimes the “trending news stories” are fake, partisan stories planted on Facebook.
An example was a fake story from the “Denver Guardian” that started circulating on Facebook a few days before the election, that said, “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apparent murder-suicide.” The problem, as reported in the real newspaper, the Denver Post, is “there is no such thing as 'The Denver Guardian' and the news story it reported never happened.”
“The fact that we have to think about this (fake news) to that degree is unnerving,” said Carpenter.
“Even more terrifying,” he said, are Twitter Bots — automated Twitter accounts programmed to tweet in response to certain variables and keywords while appearing to be real people. These can skew what topics are getting attention and “trending,” Carpenter explained.
Most of the places where the “bots” are created tend to be in eastern Europe, creating “global implications,” he said.
He described this manipulation of news as “a new version of cyber war” and “something we need to be extremely aware of.”
Moving from the global view to the individual, personal view, Carpenter said, “I'm sure all of you blocked friends (on Facebook) during this election cycle.”
Although Carpenter said such blocking — or even “unfriending” — is understandable in such a contentious campaign, by using such filters “we really miss out on information that could challenge our views.”
Carpenter issued “a personal challenge” to people, suggesting they “look at everybody you blocked and follow them again.”
©2016 The Pantagraph (Bloomington, Ill.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
