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: 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]. These messages were often inflammatory, sensationalistic, sometimes violent, and false. They exploited data that many Americans never agreed to share with advertisers. (We also talk about Cambridge Analytica when we discuss Microtargeting .) Other Political Groups
Another major effort to disrupt American society has been to fuel fires of suspicion and conspiracy in the wake of major social tragedies—mass shootings, in particular. Conspiracy theorists were fed, and quickly reposted content that originated from Russian agents, political campaign operatives, and other fake news sources, which claimed that these shootings were staged (usually, they claimed, as a way to fool people into supporting gun restrictions).