92 Zombie Media
In an analysis of top performing news stories from the final three
months of the 2016 campaign, Craig Silverman found that headlines
from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs outperformed those from
major news outlets such as The New York Times and Washington
Post, generating more than 8.7 million shares, reactions, and comments compared to nearly 7.4 million for the mainstream media. Until that phase of the campaign, traditional media sources had easily
outperformed fake news sites, but headlines such as those claiming
Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS or the apparent murder of an FBI
agent investigating her email leaks proved far more tempting.
50
While
a number of these stories shared similar roots in 4chan and related
sites to attempt to influence the outcome of the election by using an
alt-right shadow Internet, the issue was given a greater impact by the
apparent intervention of Russian, state-sponsored hackers to cloud the
democratic process. By mid-2017, it was becoming evident that Russian interference was even more widespread than previously believed,
with deliberate attempts to spread fake news in an attempt to discredit
American democracy if not necessarily support the election of Donald
Trump.
51
Even without the intervention of outside powers, the presidential election demonstrated just how important social media companies had become during a scandal that came to light in 2018. In May of that year,
Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that had done work for
the Trump campaign, announced that it was closing amidst allegations
of misuse of voters’ data. Cambridge Analytica was founded as a data
mining company in 2013 and was partly owned by the family of Robert
Mercer who, among other activities, was a funder of Breitbart news. In
2016, it collated data for the Brexit and Trump campaigns, especially
after Steve Bannon (as the vice president of Cambridge Analytica as well
as the editor of Breitbart) joined Trump’s campaign. SCL Group, the
public relations and messaging firm that used data provided by Cambridge Analytica (and for which CA may have been a shell company),
took pride in its ability to target and persuade people of its clients’ preferred messages, describing its techniques as “psychological warfare”.
52
As part of its activities to support Trump, Cambridge Analytica CEO
Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about
emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, but
more significant activity came in the form of its relations with Facebook.
Aleksandr Kogan, an American-Russian researcher at Cambridge University, built a Facebook app that was a quiz called thisismydigitallife.
This app not only harvested data from the 270,000 users who took part
in the quiz (based on an earlier myPersonality psychometric test) but, by
exploiting a loophole in Facebook’s API, was able to gather information
about other accounts linked to theirs. By 2015, Cambridge Analytica
was claiming that they had a data set of over 40 million users to work
In an analysis of top performing news stories from the final three
months of the 2016 campaign, Craig Silverman found that headlines
from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs outperformed those from
major news outlets such as The New York Times and Washington
Post, generating more than 8.7 million shares, reactions, and comments compared to nearly 7.4 million for the mainstream media. Until that phase of the campaign, traditional media sources had easily
outperformed fake news sites, but headlines such as those claiming
Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS or the apparent murder of an FBI
agent investigating her email leaks proved far more tempting.
50
While
a number of these stories shared similar roots in 4chan and related
sites to attempt to influence the outcome of the election by using an
alt-right shadow Internet, the issue was given a greater impact by the
apparent intervention of Russian, state-sponsored hackers to cloud the
democratic process. By mid-2017, it was becoming evident that Russian interference was even more widespread than previously believed,
with deliberate attempts to spread fake news in an attempt to discredit
American democracy if not necessarily support the election of Donald
Trump.
51
Even without the intervention of outside powers, the presidential election demonstrated just how important social media companies had become during a scandal that came to light in 2018. In May of that year,
Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that had done work for
the Trump campaign, announced that it was closing amidst allegations
of misuse of voters’ data. Cambridge Analytica was founded as a data
mining company in 2013 and was partly owned by the family of Robert
Mercer who, among other activities, was a funder of Breitbart news. In
2016, it collated data for the Brexit and Trump campaigns, especially
after Steve Bannon (as the vice president of Cambridge Analytica as well
as the editor of Breitbart) joined Trump’s campaign. SCL Group, the
public relations and messaging firm that used data provided by Cambridge Analytica (and for which CA may have been a shell company),
took pride in its ability to target and persuade people of its clients’ preferred messages, describing its techniques as “psychological warfare”.
52
As part of its activities to support Trump, Cambridge Analytica CEO
Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about
emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, but
more significant activity came in the form of its relations with Facebook.
Aleksandr Kogan, an American-Russian researcher at Cambridge University, built a Facebook app that was a quiz called thisismydigitallife.
This app not only harvested data from the 270,000 users who took part
in the quiz (based on an earlier myPersonality psychometric test) but, by
exploiting a loophole in Facebook’s API, was able to gather information
about other accounts linked to theirs. By 2015, Cambridge Analytica
was claiming that they had a data set of over 40 million users to work