Title: Fake news, propaganda spread quickly on social media - The Daily Universe
Headings: Fake news, propaganda spread quickly on social media
Fake news, propaganda spread quickly on social media
‘Fake News’
Hackers and their influence
Voter manipulation

Content: If users are trusted by a group of people, their posts are more likely to be accepted and shared as truth. Utah Valley University assistant professor David Morin is the chair of the Department of Communications and manages the university’s NUVI Social Media Command Center. He said fake news is often cultivated by extreme factions on the internet. From there, it only takes one “pseudo-legitimate” website to give a false idea the credibility it needs to spread on social media. Morin and Durfee also said bots, legions of artificial social media accounts, can often be easily set up to frequently post information and ideas. While the technique can be used by businesses for marketing posts, it can also be harnessed by internet trolls to spread fake news through velocity, volume and confirmation bias. “You can buy bots for anything, and it’s relatively easy for someone with basic programming understanding to create a simple bot that can tweet and retweet messages thousands of times,” Morin said. Leading up to the 2016 presidential elections, Russian hackers used social media bot accounts to push misinformation that likely contributed to President Donald Trump’s victory, according to a study by Ohio State University. According to the study, U.S. citizens who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 were most affected — 10 percent cast ballots for Trump, 4 percent changed political affiliation and 8 percent did not vote due to fake news statements. Bots and trolls have also continued spreading fake news to influence politics, which has led to social media platforms taking action.