News: Digital Deception
As the 2020 election approaches, social media companies shouldn't be self-policing when it comes to political ads.
The bedrock of a representative democracy is participation. When individuals are prevented from voting — whether through increased physical barriers or through digital deception — that undermines our entire political system.
Mark Zuckerberg has rigged the rules of Facebook political advertising, making him complicit in lies and voter manipulation. The result is the most powerful propaganda amplifier in history, boosting campaigns that traffic in falsehoods.
As digital political advertising continues to grow without legislative oversight, the disclosure that is so crucial to democratic decision-making is shrinking. Without disclosure, advertisers are able to target minority groups with propaganda to deliberately disenfranchise them or suppress voter turnout.
With calls for big tech companies to be broken up growing louder, Silicon Valley is flooding think tanks and nonprofits in the nation’s capital with cash.
Tech journalists have illuminated the puzzles. Should they help solve them?
As we approach the 2020 election, it seems almost a foregone conclusion that foreign powers or other bad actors will try to use social media to spread false information and influence political campaigns.
We lacked the laws and systems to combat deceptive digital politics in 2016, and we have yet to make significant progress with the 2020 election quickly approaching.
We’ve collected and defined some of the terms most commonly used in reference to online political manipulation. If you find yourself having trouble telling your botnets from your troll farms, never fear: MapLight’s digital deception glossary is here.
The global epidemic of disinformation poses an urgent and ongoing threat to democracies around the world. Countries in the Americas share a strong commitment to democracy and could form a specialized task force to address the common issues caused by disinformation.