[P2P-F] Fwd: You may hate Donald Trump. But do you want Facebook to rig the election against him? | Opinion | The Guardian

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vasilis Kostakis <kostakis.b at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 10:57 PM
Subject: You may hate Donald Trump. But do you want Facebook to rig the
election against him? | Opinion | The Guardian


Scary:


http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/19/donald-trump-facebook-election-manipulate-behavior

You may hate Donald Trump. But do you want Facebook to rig the election
against him?
[image: Mark Zuckerberg]

While the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency is a terrifying one,
perhaps this is scarier: Facebook could use its unprecedented powers to
tilt the 2016 presidential election away from him – and the social
network’s employees have apparently openly discussed
<http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990>
whether they should do so.

As Gizmodo reported on Friday
<http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990>,
“Last month, some Facebook employees used a company poll to ask [Facebook
founder Mark] Zuckerberg whether the company should try ‘to help prevent
President Trump in 2017’.”

Facebook <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/facebook> employees are
probably just expressing the fear that millions of Americans have of the
Republican demagogue. But while there’s no evidence that the company plans
on taking anti-Trump action, the extraordinary ability that the social
network has to manipulate millions of people with just a tweak to its
algorithm is a serious cause for concern.

The fact that an internet giant like Facebook or Google could turn an
election based on hidden changes to its code has been a hypothetical
scenario for years (and it’s even a plot point in this season’s House of
Cards). Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain explained in 2010 how
“Facebook could decide an election without anyone ever finding out”, after
the tech giant secretly conducted a test
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/us/politics/social-networks-affect-voter-turnout-study-finds.html?_r=0>
in which they were able to allegedly increase voter turnout by 340,000
votes around the country on election day simply by showing users a photo of
someone they knew saying “I voted”.

Facebook repeated this civics engagement experiment on a broader scale
<http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/can-voting-facebook-button-improve-voter-turnout>
during the 2012 election. While the testing did not favor any one
candidate, the potential for that power to be used to manipulate voters
became such an obvious concern that Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, said
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/facebook-sandberg-emotions-experiment/#u2CUPeMsisqm>,
in 2014, “I want to be clear – Facebook can’t control emotions and cannot
and will not try to control emotions.” She added: “Facebook would never try
to control elections.”

Her comments came right after a controversial study conducted by Facebook
became public. It showed that, in fact, the company had secretly
manipulated the emotions
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/facebook-sandberg-emotions-experiment/#u2CUPeMsisqm>
of nearly 700,000 people.

Some 78% of Americans have a social network profile of some kind
<http://www.statista.com/statistics/273476/percentage-of-us-population-with-a-social-network-profile/>.
The dominance of Facebook
<http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/>
in Americans’ daily lives, and the fact that more people get their news
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/media-websites-battle-falteringad-revenue-and-traffic.html?partner=rss&emc=rss>
from it than any other source, means the influence of the company in
elections has never been greater. With each year that passes, the potential
that an internet giant could swing an election gets greater.

Earlier this year, the Guardian reported
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/28/facebook-voters-us-election-ted-cruz-targeted-ads-trump>
on the treasure trove of data Facebook holds on hundreds of millions of
voters and how it is already allowing presidential candidates to exploit it
in different ways:

Facebook, which told investors on Wednesday it was ‘excited about the
targeting’, does not let candidates track individual users. But it does now
allow presidential campaigns to upload their massive email lists and voter
files – which contain political habits, real names, home addresses and
phone numbers – to the company’s advertising network. The company will then
match real-life voters with their Facebook accounts, which follow
individuals as they move across congressional districts and are filled with
insightful data.

And in a Politico Magazine piece entitled
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548>
“How Google could rig the 2016 election”, research psychologist Robert
Epstein described how a study he co-authored in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences found that “Google’s search algorithm can easily shift
the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more – up to 80% in
some demographic groups – with virtually no one knowing they are being
manipulated.”

As Epstein says
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548>,
much of this manipulation is unintentional: search results on Google are
influenced by the popularity of other searches, algorithms are changed all
the time for various reasons, and some tweaks that affect what people see
about politics may not be the result of malicious engineers bent on
changing the country’s political persuasions. However, the potential for
that to happen is there – and the same risks apply to Facebook.

To be sure, many corporations, including broadcasters and media
organisations, have used their vast power to influence elections in all
sorts of ways in the past: whether it’s through money, advertising,
editorials, or simply the way they present the news. But at no time has one
company held so much influence over a large swath of the population – 40%
of all news traffic now originates from Facebook – while also having the
ability to make changes invisibly.

As Gizmodo reported, there’s no law stopping Facebook from doing so if it
desires. “Facebook can promote or block any material that it wants,” UCLA
law professor Eugene Volokh told Gizmodo
<http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990>.
“Facebook has the same First Amendment right as the New York Times. They
can completely block Trump if they want. They block him or promote him.”

To those disgusted by Trump’s xenophobia, his boorish and erratic behavior,
this might seem like a welcome development. But one organisation having the
means to tilt elections one way or another a dangerous innovation. Once
started, it would be hard to control. In this specific case, a majority of
the public might approve of the results. But do we really want future
elections around the world to be decided by the political persuasions of
Mark Zuckerberg, or the faceless engineers that control what pops up in
your news feed?

-- 
This message is from Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance
internal email list
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Ragnar Nurkse School" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to ahi-ttu+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ahi-ttu at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.




-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20160420/70d488f1/attachment.htm