In early September, President Trump retweeted a video allegedly showing an “black lives matter/antifa” activist pushing a woman into a subway car. The video is nearly a year old, and the man in question was mentally ill and had no connection to either group.
As a researcher studying social media, propaganda, and politics in 2016, I thought I’d seen it all. At the time, while working at University of Oxford, I was in the thick of analyzing Twitter bot campaigns pushing #Proleave messaging during Brexit. As a research fellow at Google’s thinktank Jigsaw that same year, I bore witness to multinational disinformation campaigns aimed at the U.S. election.
That is nothing compared to what I am seeing in 2020. The cascade of incidents surrounding both this year’s U.S. Presidential contest as well as a multitude of other contentious political events around the globe is staggering. From doctored videos, “smart” robocalls, spoofed texts and—yes—bots, there’s an overwhelming…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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