- The video discusses the responsibilities of social media platforms and governments in relation to bots.
- Bots are scripts or pieces of code that can perform various tasks, such as web scraping or mimicking human behavior on social media platforms.
- These bots have been used by governments for a long time to shape discussions and manipulate public opinion.
- Bot tactics have evolved over time, with new entrants experimenting with more sophisticated techniques to manipulate algorithms and create content.
- WhatsApp is being manipulated in contexts like India, where it is a popular platform, but studying its use is challenging due to its closed nature.
- Disinformation campaigns involve the use of memes, bots, search engine optimization tactics, videos on YouTube, and pictures on Instagram to manipulate public opinion.

- The prevalence of fake news on social media platforms is a growing concern that needs more research.
- Bots are able to infiltrate platforms like Twitter more easily due to the ability to create accounts with fake identities and the availability of automation tools.
- Facebook has stricter account creation requirements, making it harder to create fake accounts, but the impact of fake accounts on Facebook may be more significant due to the perception of fewer fake users.
- Platforms have not had an incentive to delete fake accounts in the past because more users meant more value for advertisers, but now advertisers are realizing the ineffectiveness of advertising to bots.
- There is a debate about the responsibility of platforms to remove fake accounts, with some arguing for stricter enforcement and others cautioning against censorship.
- Transparency around platform algorithms and operations is important to understand how content is delivered, but complete transparency may not be ideal.
- The issue of fake news is not solely a digital problem, but also reflects human nature and the tendency to select information that aligns with personal beliefs.
- Education plays a role in addressing the problem by teaching critical thinking and the importance of diverse sources.
- The lack of optimism in online communication contrasts with the optimism that exists in day-to-day life, and there is potential for new business models in the market.

- The speaker's friends are leaving social media platforms, which may create opportunities for new business models not reliant on advertising.
- The consolidation of platforms has limited competition and exacerbated problems.
- The speaker is more conscious of the information they share and practices digital privacy.
- The speaker believes issues of privacy, data collection, and targeted messaging are significant.
- In the UK, there is still shock around private companies misusing data, while government surveillance is more transparent.
- The Mueller report has shed light on the activities of the Internet Research Agency, but the impact remains uncertain.
- During the 2018 midterms, the ratio of junk news to professionally produced information increased compared to 2016.
- Swing states may be more heavily targeted by misinformation.
- The decline of fake news sharing is expected but has not been observed.
- Other countries have lower levels of junk news compared to the US.
- The speaker is interested in studying the Canadian elections in 2019 due to concerns about populist narratives and anti-immigration rhetoric.
- Populist narratives also persist in the UK after Brexit.

- Political rhetoric regarding manipulation techniques will continue in the UK and the US in 2020 and beyond
- The US election sees a lot of innovation in manipulation techniques due to the large amount of money involved
- Deep fakes may not become a major issue as research agencies are working on detecting manipulated photos and videos
- Optimism exists in the fact that governments are starting to seriously consider the problem and educate themselves on the intersection of technology and politics
- Proper government regulation is a positive sign, as long as it doesn't break technology
- Being nice to each other on the internet and promoting dialogue is important in combating polarization and anger in society.

- The video discusses the responsibilities of social media platforms and governments in relation to bots and fake news.
- Bots have been used by governments to manipulate public opinion, and their tactics have evolved over time.
- Disinformation campaigns involve the use of various techniques, such as memes, bots, and search engine optimization.
- Fake news on social media platforms is a growing concern that needs more research.
- Platforms like Twitter are more susceptible to bot infiltration due to fake identities and automation tools.
- Facebook has stricter account creation requirements, but the impact of fake accounts may still be significant.
- There is a debate about the responsibility of platforms to remove fake accounts, with arguments for stricter enforcement and caution against censorship.
- Transparency around platform algorithms and operations is important, but complete transparency may not be ideal.
- Education plays a role in addressing the problem by teaching critical thinking and the importance of diverse sources.
- The consolidation of platforms has limited competition and exacerbated problems.
- The speaker is more conscious of the information they share and practices digital privacy.
- The Mueller report shed light on the activities of the Internet Research Agency, but the impact remains uncertain.
- Swing states may be more heavily targeted by misinformation.
- Other countries have lower levels of junk news compared to the US.
- The speaker is interested in studying the Canadian elections in 2019 due to concerns about populist narratives and anti-immigration rhetoric.
- Political rhetoric regarding manipulation techniques will continue in the UK and the US in 2020 and beyond.
- Deep fakes may not become a major issue as research agencies are working on detection methods.
- Governments are starting to address the problem and educate themselves on the intersection of technology and politics.
- Proper government regulation is positive as long as it doesn't hinder technology.
- Promoting dialogue and being kind on the internet is important in combating polarization and anger in society.

Samantha Bradshaw is a researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project and a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She’s been tracking the phenomenon of political manipulation through social media.

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/samantha-bradshaw/
https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/

You can find Samantha on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sbradshaww

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

***

Topics

:30 - What is a bot?

2:30 - When computational propaganda began

3:30 - Changes in bot tactics since 2016

5:30 - Using bots for content creation

7:05 - WhatsApp and the upcoming Indian election

9:00 - Trends in computational propaganda

10:30 - How bots integrate into platforms

13:00 - Responsibilities of platforms to remove fake accounts

14:30 - The role of governments in media manipulation

17:55 - Fake news and selecting news that aligns with your beliefs

19:30 - Are platforms getting better or worse?

21:10 - Samantha's personal internet habits

22:40 - Sentiment around tracking in the UK vs the US

24:00 - The Mueller report and US midterms

28:45 - Canadian elections

29:55 - 2020 US elections

30:30 - Deepfakes

31:25 - Optimistic thoughts for the future

32:45 - How to help against computational propaganda

So I want to talk about 2 separate things.

So 1 is the responsibilities of these platforms and the responsibilities of governments.

And then the other thing is bots, because I think a lot of people hear the word bots, but don't necessarily know what that means.

So maybe we should start there, and you can contextualize what bots are actually doing right now.

And then we can talk about how these corporations are interacting with their users and with governments.

Yeah, so a bot is essentially just a script or a piece of code.

And I mean, bots can do a whole bunch of different kinds of things.

So a bot, for example, could be a web scraper.

Like Google's search engine is essentially a bot.

what it does is it goes out and it crawls the internet in an automated way, and then stores information about different pages.

And so that's a really good bot that we need for the internet.

Because if Google wasn't able to scrape and crawl pages in an automated way, It wouldn't be able to index them and we wouldn't have Google search.

Other bots, and I think the bots that are being talked a lot about in the media and you know around all these questions about Russian foreign interference and elections and manipulating the media, these are bots that people design and they're designed to mimic human behavior in an automated way.

So they might plug into Twitter or into Facebook, and then they might like, share, retweet a whole bunch of different stories very quickly to give something a sense of popularity.

Like ooh, lots of people are really engaging with this content.

They might follow people just to, again, sort of amplify that popularity, maybe around a particular person rather than an idea.

Some of the more sophisticated bots might actually interact with real people.

And we all have been to those customer service pages where the thing pops up at the bottom and says, hi, can I help you today?

But it uses a lot of natural language to interact with people.

And so that kind of technology can be plugged into some of the bots that we're seeing on social media platforms to actually respond to users in comment threads or post a little comment about a story that's being shared.

Yeah, And when did it become clear that governmental agencies or non-governmental agencies were using bots to manipulate manipulate thoughts around politics?

So I think this phenomenon really came into media and public attention during the 2016 election.

But from some of the research that I've done here at the OII and on the computational propaganda project, we know that these techniques have been experimented with by governments for a long time.

We had evidence of them going back to even the early days of social media platforms and using these kinds of tools to shape discussions mainly at home and in more authoritarian regime contexts as another tool of social control.

And so now that you've been studying this for 2 years, so you came on in 2016?

And so then pre-election you started doing this research and now there's a lot more attention paid to it.

Yeah, so it's been fascinating to study this from the, you know, sort of inception of attention to this issue Because even when I started this research agenda, the whole focus was on Russian interference in the US election.

But I just had this inkling that it was a much broader phenomenon.

And there's more, all kinds of these digital techniques being used that, you know, make use of automation and algorithms and trying to game them to manipulate public opinion.

And so, in terms of how I've seen this change over time, We're definitely seeing a lot of new entrants starting to experiment with this kind of technology and you know in particular around elections.

Usually these new entrants might experiment with some of the more crude bots, so things that might just like, share, and retweet certain kinds of stories or follow a politician.

So they don't really engage with users very much.

It's usually pretty easy to tell that these are bot accounts.

Yeah, so it's trying to give the algorithm signal to show that something might be good,

So we're seeing a lot of that evolve over time.

We're seeing a lot more gaming of the algorithms as well in more of these kind of sophisticated techniques.

So not just liking and sharing, but using specific keywords to get content trending, to try to get things at the top of Google's search algorithm, trying to get things at the top of YouTube to be recommended next, and trying to get some more of this organic reach and what the search engine optimizers have been doing for decades.

You know, we're just seeing these tools now being applied to politics.

And is it breaching into full length content creation at this point?

We're definitely seeing content creation, especially in more of the sophisticated operations.

I mean, a lot of the stuff that's come out about Russia's actions in the US has shown, you know, a lot of content creation.

It seems to just kind of be, you know, throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.

But, you know, They're putting a lot of resources into finding out exactly what the buttons are to push in society and then creating content around those issues.

So is that what's happening with WhatsApp or are these individuals that are just creating content and then getting them posting them to groups.

On 1 side you do definitely have organized state actors who are involved in creating messages, figuring out what sticks, and then spreading them.

In other cases it's, you know, just individuals who might have a particular political ideology.

They just want to get messages to spread because, you know, that's what they believe in.

Other times, you know, there's a whole economic incentive behind getting content to go viral, which is kind of what I talked about at the beginning.

If you can get people to look at your content on a website, you can generate advertising revenue the more people that click through.

Yeah, that's kind of the more pure form of using bots.

So, could you contextualize how WhatsApp is being manipulated?

Because this is a very non-US trend, specifically with the Indian election coming up.

And this is another interesting point about disinformation, too, is that it's different everywhere you go.

Because the people who want to manipulate public opinion, they're going to go to where the people are and the platforms that the people are using.

So in the US, we tend to see a lot of these campaigns on Twitter and Facebook, because that's the platforms that the majority of people use.

In contexts like India, more people are on WhatsApp and they use that more than other platforms.

So that's where we're seeing a lot of these campaigns.

In terms of how WhatsApp is actually being used, there's still not very much known about it from an academic standpoint.

Just because of the nature of the platform, it's really hard to study because it's essentially a closed platform.

You can't actively monitor a lot of the communications that happen on WhatsApp.

There are certainly public groups that you can join and follow.

But that doesn't give you like a whole good look of, you know, what's happening on the platform.

And sometimes it can be hard to find the groups that you need to join to study them and stuff.

But, you know, overall, people, I mean, we looked at WhatsApp in Brazil, for example.

And in that study, we joined a bunch of different groups, were looking at the kinds of images and the kinds of conversations that were being shared.

And there were a lot of memes that were being used to push disinformation to people that were in that groups.

And so in that way, it's kind of similar to Facebook and Twitter.

So it is kind of like the Reddit Pepe sort of stuff we saw in 2016.

A lot of mobilizing images to get people riled up and getting them to feel certain kinds of emotions.

And so what are other creative forms that you've seen?

Because In your recap of what you saw in 2017, you said that there were something like 48 countries you found this being used in, in 10 languages or something like that?

Yeah, so we're definitely seeing a lot more memes, a lot more bots on platforms, search engine optimization tactics.

We're also seeing more videos on YouTube and more pictures on Instagram.

A lot of these platforms that haven't necessarily been focused upon in the media, but they're very powerful platforms because of the way that they deliver content.

Images and video can have a much more powerful effect on our psyche and how we, I guess, digest information.

And what we see, opposed to what we read, tends to stick with us longer.

So if someone was more likely to see some see a piece of fake news they'll more actively remember it than if they read it.

So we're seeing a lot more disinformation on these kinds of platforms and it's not very well studied yet but certainly needs to be.

In terms of how bots actually work could you break down how they are entering in these platforms at all?

I think many people are curious about like, you hear bots, but then you think about, well, when I sign up for Facebook, like I have to give all this personal information.

So how are these systems engineered to infiltrate platforms with such scale?

And further, like, do they even need that degree of scale to be effective?

Wood, CTO of Google Analytics I think when we're talking about the platforms and how bots integrate, there's quite a big difference between even Facebook and Twitter.

Starting with Twitter, for example, it's relatively easy to plug into the API to scrape information and to create an account on Twitter you also don't need a real name.

So you can use any kind of fake identity to create an account, which is why Twitter tends to have a lot more of these fake accounts that use some kind of automation.

There are also a bunch of tools that allow you to automate your activity on Twitter, things like Hootsuite and whatnot.

So You can set timers on tweets and things like that.

Yeah and that was a signal you guys used right?

It was like over 50 posts a day therefore a bot or more likely to be a bot?

That was when we first started looking at this phenomenon back in 2015.

We just had a very crude measure of you know over 50 tweets a day you're probably an automated account because most people don't you know write that many tweets during a day.

Yeah, or if nothing else to do, but that's still quite a large number of tweets.

Whereas Facebook, you still need to have a real name to create an account.

Sometimes Facebook actually verifies your identity.

I know this because I actually set up a fake Facebook account once.

And this is a while ago, and I just wanted to log into it recently.

And I tried, but they wanted me to send them a piece of ID, so like a passport or a driver's license, things like that, to verify that this account was real.

like, oh, I don't have anything with a fake name on it, so whatever, I'll just leave my fake account alone.

But that also means that because it's so hard to create fake accounts on Facebook, the accounts that are fake might actually be a little bit more powerful because people don't expect there to be as many fake people on Facebook as they do Twitter.

And so they might actually have more of an impact in the circles and communities that they've managed to infiltrate.

Yeah, and so when it comes to the responsibility of a platform to get rid of fake accounts, Where do you think it lies?

I think for a long time there hasn't been an incentive for them to, because the more active accounts there are on these platforms, the more they're valued on the market, right?

Because all of a sudden, there's this huge user base of people that these platforms can advertise to and sell that advertising space to.

But as soon as you start saying, oh millions of people are not actually real, they become devalued, right?

So I think for a long time there wasn't this incentive to actually go through and delete all the fake accounts.

Yeah, so basically the public market thinks more users equals more money, therefore good, keep going.

But then on the advertiser side, if those views are from bots, you're also not getting what you want.

Exactly, and I think this is where it has sort of flipped now because advertisers are starting to realize, actually, these aren't real people, So why am I paying this much money to advertise to a piece of code that's not going to buy my product?

And so now that these Senate hearings are happening, they're happening all over the world, when you're starting to see governments get involved, I know it happened in Germany around a certain degree of censorship.

What do you think is the right course of action?

Yeah, so I think this is a really complicated problem that has so many dimensions to it.

It's not just, you know, fake news or that kind of disinformation.

You know, we've talked about the accounts and how those are problematic.

We've talked about foreign interference and like these really coordinated campaigns against governments.

There are so many different issues that are kind of connected in this media manipulation, social media manipulation bucket.

When governments go after the content of what's being shared, I think that's a mistake.

I don't think that's getting to the underlying problem that's sort of fueling the fake content or the disinformation to spread or to go viral in the first place.

So things like net DG for example, when it was first introduced in Germany in I think 2017, early 2017 someone from the AFD had posted some, you know, horribly racist comment online and of course it got taken down immediately because NetDG essentially says Facebook or any platform has to remove content that breaks German law within 24 hours or else they'll face a like 50 million euro fine.

So because this broke the hate speech law, Facebook removed it immediately.

But they also removed all of the content that was created around that tweet, all of the people that were calling this person out for making such a racist comment, all of the criticism on it.

And so all of a sudden, you start to lose the vibrancy of this online political sphere.

So I don't think going after the content is necessarily a good idea.

We're already also seeing authoritarian governments adopt this law into their own legal systems to silence dissent and to go after journalists who are publishing so-called fake news and whatnot.

So I think it has a lot of unintended consequences and

lot more negative consequences and things like collateral censorship.

In terms of what could be done, I think enforcing more transparency around the platforms and their operations and their algorithms is really important.

Right now, all of these, you know, platforms, they're just black boxes and we don't understand anything about how these algorithms work and how they're tailored to deliver certain kinds of content.

Complete transparency is also not great, because if you perfectly understand what goes viral on Google, everyone will then know how to break it.

But at least maybe understanding the intentions of the designer and like tracing those kinds of processes and those meetings and having those kinds of principles be more out in the public would be 1 way of starting to get that kind of in into understanding what's what's happening with these algorithms and in these kind of more closed black boxes

But what about in a world where say we could get rid of all fake news?

How do you avoid the problem of us only wanting to see what we agree with.

Yeah, I mean, and this is also part of the problem too, because fake news is not just a digital problem, but it's 1 of human nature.

And there's a lot of research out there in academia that shows people do select news and information that adheres to their own beliefs, right?

So that's where things like education and stuff come in.

And I know education is often used as the go-to solution to the problem.

But it does have a really important role here in teaching us how to be good citizens and reminding us why democracy is important and why it's important to look at different sources and to be able to negotiate that public consensus with 1 another.

You know, the system's not perfect, but I think we've been focusing on how much it's been broken for so long that, you know, the positives have sort of been lost in a lot of the conversations.

Yeah, I think we were talking about this before, but I think the lack of optimism in online communication misses the real optimism that exists in day-to-day life.

And yeah, there's not really been a place for that yet, or at least it doesn't do that well unless it's incredibly cheesy, kind of like life inspirational, life hacks, that sort of thing.

So in terms of these platforms in the long run, based on your research, do you think this problem is getting, things are getting better?

Or do you think that they just, you know, combust with enough, you know, bots involved?

I think we're already starting to see combustion happen, especially with Facebook.

You know, a lot of my friends this year are starting to get off these platforms and to de-platform, which might open up the market to new kind of models that aren't based on advertising and aren't completely monetized by digital advertising, maybe we'll start to see different kind of business models prop up and maybe create a little bit more space in the market.

I mean, Is that the breaking up of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram?

Is that a topic of conversation here at the OAI as well?

I mean, it's something that I think we all tangentially are thinking about, and what that would look like, and how that would actually be done.

I'm not an economist or an expert on any of this, but I do think that the consolidation of these platforms and the fact that there's no space for competition like that's kind of locked us into These systems which has then made the problem so much worse because now all of a sudden It's everyone that is being affected opposed to you know, just just a smaller, right?

So you have to be 100% in or 100% out, which is tricky.

And so what have you been doing in terms of your personal internet habits to, I mean, you haven't checked out completely, obviously.

That's how you have a Twitter account, like you're on.

Yeah, I mean, I keep using the excuse that, well, I study this, so I need to be on it to see, you know, what's happening.

I might, you know, pick up on some change that I wouldn't have been able to actually see or understand if I wasn't on the platform.

But I think I'm just a little bit more conscious around, you know, the kinds of information that I'm putting out on these platforms.

I'm trying to be a little bit more conscious around apps on my mobile phone and making sure that I'm restricting access to certain kinds of things.

Just practicing a lot more digital privacy and better habits around that.

Okay, Anything weird and ultra fringe or just kind of basic good practice?

I think I'm pretty pretty basic when it comes to this stuff.

Yeah, I haven't, you know, totally got the tinfoil hat on and, you know, disconnecting everything in my life because I'm worried about these issues to that extent.

But I do think that, especially these issues around privacy and data collection and how that relates to disinformation and even targeting messages based on the data about me.

And the climate here, do you feel it's the same as it is in the States?

Because the UK has had CCTV everywhere for quite a while now.

Are people more comfortable with that tracking or less comfortable or the same?

I think it's probably I think they're probably the same.

You know a lot of my British friends are still outraged when they find out that private companies have been doing X, Y, and Z with their data.

I think the difference around what private companies are doing and what governments do around surveillance.

Because everyone kind of knows what the government does.

There are all kinds of laws that have been passed and debated that's a little bit more transparent in terms of what they're collecting, or at least they give the impression of transparency around that.

There's more of a public discussion where I think people are, there's still a shock factor around the fact that Facebook was storing private phone calls and private messages and selling that data to other marketers without the users knowing.

I think the shock factor still exists in that space.

So to go back to the States just a little bit.

I know this is happening everywhere, but yeah, I can be a little America centric or US centric.

What are your thoughts on what will come of the Mueller report?

I hope, I'm happy that the Mueller report at least brought to public attention a lot of the detail around what the IRA, the Internet Research Agency, was doing in the U.S.

And that was a very credible source of information around the wide range of techniques, not just the digital, but, you know, even the real world activities that were going on.

Whether or not it will lead to any outcome, I'm not sure.

But the fact that it has at least made this information public,

And so, you know, whatever comes out in the future, like, you know, at least we have more information and more knowledge around the investigation.

And then in terms of the midterms, have you guys crunched those numbers yet?

Yeah, so when we looked at the midterms, actually let me go back, because we studied the 2016 elections and we studied the midterms.

And in both these studies, we were looking at what people were sharing as political information and news online on both Twitter and Facebook.

In 2016, we found that Americans on average were sharing about a one-to-one ratio of junk news to professionally produced information.

Junk news meaning fake or just not high quality?

We have a five-point definition that we tend to check off and you need to have like 4 out of the 5 things.

So things like counterfeit, is it mimicking a real legitimate news source?

Is it using like the Washington Post font or the BBC colors to give you know more credibility?

Things like do they adhere to any kind of journalistic standards?

The kind of language that they use, are they using a lot of F-bombs and really hyperbolic language?

So it's not just fake news, but it's all of this other kind of low quality information that isn't necessarily helping our democracy.

So yeah, in 2016, users were sharing junk news at a 1 to 1 ratio to professionally produced information in 2018 when we redid this analysis during the midterm the ratio of junk news actually went up

so we controlled for the number of users and we also in 2016 did a study on the swing states and you know in actual swing state states people were sharing more junk news compared to uncontested ones.

We haven't done that same analysis now for 2018 midterms, but I think it would be interesting to see if it's also geographically distributed in terms of who's sharing what.

The assumption would be that these people are more heavily targeted in terms of botnets, right?

is sharing that information, but we can see that by number, it's more concentrated in certain places than in others.

Yeah, because I've been curious to see if that like the net number is just going to decline.

So you could still find instances of fake news being shared, but more people become more skeptical and aren't checking it at all.

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Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw