The Reality Game summary

“FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.” 

In early November 2016, this sensational headline – printed in all caps – appeared on a website called the Denver Guardian, which billed itself as “Colorado’s oldest news source.” The story implicated the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a scandalous cover-up. 

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories. People have always tried to second-guess those who rule over them. In every society, there have been dark rumors of plots, scandals, and cover-ups. But in recent decades, something shifted.

In the past, conspiracies spread slowly; rumors about the evil doings of kings and presidents, impossible to confirm, rarely made it onto the evening news. But the world of social media is different. Online, conspiracies spread faster and reach farther. 

In late 2013, Ukrainians took to the streets to protest against the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian government, which saw Mr. Yanukovych as a long-standing ally, responded with an online offensive. Thousands of Russian-operated social media accounts and bots flooded the web. They spread disinformation directed against the protestors. A similar strategy would later be used against the United States in the 2016 presidential election.

At the time, many onlookers believed they were witnessing the birth of computational propaganda. But while the Russian government may have mastered the dark art of digital subversion, it wasn’t the first political actor to deploy these tactics. 

Every time you log onto Twitter and look at popular posts, you’re likely to encounter bot accounts. They’re busy liking, sharing, and commenting on other users’ content. It’s not hard to spot messages produced by this kind of software. Whether it’s spam or political vitriol, bots usually “write” garbled prose with wonky syntax. Their posts are precisely timed and come in machine-like bursts.

In other words, your average bot isn’t very sophisticated. So why, then, do so many journalists say that bots have “conquered democracy?” One answer is that it’s easier to focus on bots than to ask the more disquieting question: Why is it so easy to hack democracy with such simple tools? We’ll come back to that latter issue, but first, let’s take a closer look at these bots.

As we’ve learned, you don’t need sophisticated technology to hack public opinion. Whether you run a political campaign, or simply hawk junk news, all you need to overwhelm social media algorithms are rudimentary bots and clickable headlines. 

This brings us back to the disquieting question we posed in the last blink: Why is democracy so vulnerable to simple hacking tools? One answer can be found in the way social media companies are regulated. In public life, these corporations now occupy the position once held by newspapers and broadcasters. But the rules governing their work are far softer. 

Let’s ask one final question. Could we simply ban bots? In 2018, American senator Dianne Feinstein attempted to do just that by proposing the “Bot Disclosure and Accountability Act.” 

But the bill stalled in Congress. It’s hard to implement anti-bot measures without also violating the constitutional right to free speech. And there’s more. You may legislate against bots, but that won’t solve disinformation’s other problem: humans spread false news just as effectively as bots. The Chinese “50 Cent Army,” for example, is a coordinated troop of human accounts responsible for inundating the web with pro-government propaganda. Their activities would not be covered by anti-bot laws.