Social Media Manipulation 2020. How Social Media Companies are Failing to Combat Inauthentic Behaviour Online
Social Media Manipulation 2020. How Social Media Companies are Failing to Combat Inauthentic Behaviour Online

Author(s): Sebastian Bay, Anton Dek, Iryna Dek, Rolf Fredheim
Contributor(s): Anna Reynolds (Editor)
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Psychology, Media studies, Communication studies, Sociology, Theory of Communication, Behaviorism, Social Informatics
Published by: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Keywords: Social media in 2020; social media manipulation; social media companies; coordinated manipulation campaigns; online behaviour; social media platforms;
Summary/Abstract: Antagonists, from foreign governments to terror groups, anti-democratic groups, and commercial companies, continually seek to manipulate public debate through the use of coordinated social media manipulation campaigns. These groups rely on fake accounts and inauthentic behaviour to undermine online conversations, causing online and offline harm to both society and individuals. As a testament to the continued interest of antagonists and opportunists alike to manipulate social media, a string of social media companies, researchers, intelligence services, and interest groups have detailed attempts to manipulate social media conversations during the past year. Therefore, it continues to be essential to evaluate whether the social media companies are living up to their commitments to counter misuse of their platforms. In an attempt to contribute to the evaluation of social media platforms, we re-ran our ground-breaking experiment to assess their ability to counter the malicious use of their services. This year we spent significant effort to improve our methodology further, and we also added a fifth social media platform, Tik-Tok, to our experiment.

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