Weapons of Math Destruction summary

In many ways, the internet helps democracy. It’s a public platform that supports independent voices. But that same platform is also open to powerful propaganda machines that can manipulate the conversation.

Research has shown that social media and search engines are especially vulnerable to algorithms that can influence the decisions of unsuspecting users.

Researchers Robert Epstein and Ronald Robertson found proof of this after asking undecided voters in the United States and India to find information about a handful of different political candidates.

The catch was that the voters were told to use a specific search engine, unaware that it had been programmed with an algorithm that favored one candidate over all the others. As a result, the participants showed a 20-percent shift toward voting for the algorithm's preferred choice.

A similar study happened on Facebook just prior to the 2012 elections: Solomon Messing, of the Pew Research Center, designed a special algorithm that would generate the news feeds of two million users and favor political news over all other posts.

Facebook surveyed the participants before and after the elections, and the results showed that 3 percent more users turned out to vote than was expected before the algorithm had been adjusted to favor politics.

While we can’t know for sure whether certain search-engine or social-media algorithms are designed to influence users, it is clear that there is vast potential for abuse.

It is also clear that political candidates are well aware of their power to garner votes.

Heading into the 2012 elections, Obama had a team of data analysts who interviewed thousands of voters and used their answers, in addition to demographic and consumer data, to create mathematical profiles.

These profiles were then used to find similar people on national databases. Based on the profiles, they could assume that people with similar interests and backgrounds would also share the same political views.  Once people with similar data were grouped together, the analysts could create algorithms that made sure these groups received specifics ads that would appeal to their tastes.

So those who showed evidence of having environmental concerns, for instance, were targeted for ads that highlighted Obama’s environmental policies.