Studie der Universität Oxford, 19.6.2017 (engl. Originalfassung)
The strategic manipulation of information online to exercise political power has emerged as a critical concern for the formation of public opinion in the twenty-first century – and as one of the most heatedly debated issues on the political and public agenda in Germany. In just the past year, there was the presumed Russian interference in the United States presidential elections; political bot networks endorsing the United Kingdom’s possible Brexit during the referendum; social media fake news campaigns in the Ukraine crisis; and the automated amplification of the Macron leaks in France. In Germany our prior research has found active social bots and an abundance of German junk news during the federal presidency elections. Online echo chambers, fake news and coordinated misinformation campaigns, political social bots that amplify, distort or initiate conversation online and algorithmically afforded micro-targeting of individuals with political messages are all instruments of a novel form of twenty-first century propaganda.
Computational propaganda refers to autonomous scripts and algorithms tasked with the manipulation of public opinion online. Equipped with big data, autonomous agents create, disseminate and amplify political messages over social media with the objective of sowing discontent,fomenting uncertainty and silencing opposition. Both state and non-state political actors have used computational propaganda to manipulate conversations, demobilize opposition and generate false support. Social media, as a central networked sphere for public discourse and information seeking, serves as an arena for automated scripts tasked with the manipulation of opinion. Code-driven instruments of computational propaganda have been found to be especially prevalent on social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Sina Weibo, where they operate as social actors and through algorithms that disseminate information.
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