Title: The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict | Center for Information Technology and Society - UC Santa Barbara
Headings: The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict
The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict
Social Conflict, American Style
Pizzagate
Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Cambridge Analytica
Other Political Groups
Fake News and Social Conflict Abroad
Some Take-Aways

Content: The two Facebook messages, below, created "events" out of thin air, in an effort to get people to believe them, show up, and make trouble. This Russian ad was targeted to people living in South Carolina on June 30, 2016. There’s no real “Black Matters” group. Russians also paid Facebook to have this ad shown to people residing in Washington, DC: Cambridge Analytica
“Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica chief, is among the executives coming under pressure for the group's business practices.” Source: Financial Times
Cambridge Analytica was a company that specialized in using data from social media to build psychological profiles about social media users in various countries. It acquired data for 87 million Facebook users without the users’ knowledge or consent [3]. With these data—specifically a person’s likes—they were able to predict people’s political preferences and issue interests. Political campaign operatives coordinated by Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, used this information to target political advertisements and memes on Facebook that mainly focused on discrediting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and influencing Americans on a number of pro-Trump issues [4].