The 21st century has been defined by new forms of communication and the way these platforms have affected our society and interpersonal relationships. Social media has changed the way we communicate across all relationships and platforms. Not only has social media made our lives easier and changed the face of mass communication, but it has also created new dangers we must learn to face.
IU’s Observatory on Social Media was founded in 2019. Their goal is to investigate how information and misinformation spread through social media and provide resources and tools to avoid misinformation online. The Observatory brings together faculty and researchers from several different programs and schools at IU, including the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, The Media School and the IU Network Science Institute, according to a News at IU press release.
The Observatory, led by Director Filippo Menczer of the Luddy School, has many different tools and resources to combat misinformation while on social media. These tools can be used by the general public, but are designed for those who use social media professionally, such as politicians, journalists and researchers.
As citizens, government officials and journalists have seen over the past several years, social media can be manipulated by groups or individuals in order to create chaos and change public opinion. Social media can be manipulated to influence thought on opinion on products, subjects and even national elections.
“We discovered that we are all vulnerable to manipulation through social media,” Menczer told the Indiana Daily Student. “The more we rely on social media for information and news value, the more vulnerable we are to manipulation through disinformation.”
IU Observatory Director Filippo Menczer talks about how it is easy for social media to be manipulated because of the way we rely on it for both information and topical relevance.
Social media is vulnerable to misinformation campaigns by individuals as well as groups or organizations. Individuals can be coordinated on Twitter, or fake users called Bots can be established in order to make it seem that more users are tweeting about a certain topic. While we may think we can see the truth among the noise, trending topics dictate the conversation on many platforms and can distract from what is really happening.
Instances of social media manipulation by individuals, groups and bots is not a new phenomenon, but the risks and harms associated with these attacks are becoming very serious in our society.
“The consequences of disinformation and social media manipulation can be very large,” Menczer said. “They can affect policies, it can affect international agreements, they can affect the environment, it can affect crime and social justice; so every aspect of our lives ultimately depends on the opinions that we form and how we translate those opinions into actions.”
Menczer warns how disinformation campaigns can control social media platforms through the illusion of mass support by users.
In order to avoid these kind of targeted disinformation campaigns by either individuals or groups, IU’s Observatory on Social media has developed several tools to monitor the spread of information online. Hoaxy, Botometer and BotSlayer are all available for public use.
While this software can be used by the general public to understand more about the information they see and share, researchers and professionals use the tools to discover targeted disinformation campaigns where an average user may only see heavy internet traffic.
Menczer speaks about how researchers can determine if a trending topic is being spread on Twitter by individuals with targeted goals.
Hoaxy allows users to search keywords and topics and see how users on Twitter are interacting and spreading these subjects. Not only can you see the exact users tweeting about these topics, but Hoaxy creates live charts and diagrams that allow you to understand how the information spreads across Twitter, but how information can become disinformation. Hoaxy will even assign a value to each user, rating them from legitimate user to bot.
A second tool, Botometer, allows researchers to search specific Twitter users to determine if the user is legitimate or a bot. The program analyzes Twitter activity, including followers, tweets and interactions and gives the user a score between zero and five. Lower scores indicate legitimate users and higher scores indicate more bot-like activity.
A third tool, BotSlayer, allows users to do individual analysis of trending events and topics on Twitter. Users can download the tool and create their own settings and receive data directly from Twitter. Trending topics are shown on the BotSlayer dashboard and allow users to see the topic, how many tweets there are on the topic, how many accounts are tweeting about it and how likely they are to be bots or targeted messages. On top of this, users can see these topics on other websites, or see what is happening with the tweets with other Observatory applications. BotSlayer was developed with researchers and journalists in mind, and allows users to see manipulation on social media as it occurs.
BotSlayer and other Observatory tools are used outside of the university environment as well. Using this application for analysis, the Washington Post, with the help of IU P.h.D. student Pik-Mai Hui, discovered that teenagers were being recruited and paid by companies and organizations to run targeted misinformation campaigns on Twitter.
As we have seen, social media is not going anywhere anytime soon, because of this, we must learn how to defend ourselves from the dangers, while still enjoying the benefits brought by social media. Social media, like all other tools, is not inherently good or bad, it is what we make of it.
Menczer warns that we must learn to defend ourselves as individuals and society against the possible dangers of social media, while not ignoring the benefits it has given us. By adapting certain behaviors on social media, we can better protect ourselves.
