Keeping It Real in the Era of Bots and Trolls

Today it is much harder to distinguish science from science fiction.(1) The advent of social media has created a universe of information made up of equal parts of opinion, facts and false information.(2) The evolutionary shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades have enabled bad actors increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation(3), with the help of trolls, bots, and respondentdriven algorithms.(4) Internet trolls and bots greatly amplify the message of alternative internet news outlets: Between 9% and 15% of Twitter accounts are estimated to be bots, and Facebook estimates that as many as 60 million bots are currently trolling its platform; in 2016, 20% of all tweets concerning the presidential election came from bots.(3)(5)(6) As a result of these changes over the last 30 years, communication in media and political environments has changed profoundly in ways that degrade effective communication.(4) Rather than process information dispassionately, partisan stakeholders resort to motivated reasoning with the goal of protecting their beliefs and values from external threat. As Iyengar and Massey(4) put it, “As a result, whenever scientific findings clash with a person or group’s political agenda, be it conservative (as with climate science and immigration) or liberal (as with genetically modified foods and vaccination risks), scientists can expect to encounter a targeted campaign of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation in response, no matter how clearly the information is presented or how carefully and convincingly it is framed.”