What Facebook, Twitter and Trump are telling us about fake news and a polarised world

Niall Ferguson says the rise of social media platforms has revolutionised the democratic process, with rogue users able to spread not just fake news but extreme opinions to cause massive polarisation, as like attracts like

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Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the Harvard University graduation ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 25. Photo: AP

Published: 1:00pm, 2 Oct 2017Updated: 7:27pm, 2 Oct 2017

Last October, with just a few weeks to go for the US presidential election, I pointed out something strange about Donald Trump’s campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump had read out a leaked email he claimed was from Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal, which suggested that the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died, could have been prevented by Clinton, then secretary of state. The crowd lapped it up.

In fact, as I pointed out, the words Trump read had been lifted from a Newsweek article and falsely attributed to Blumenthal by Sputnik, a Russian news website. It was already clear that Moscow was meddling in the election. A Homeland Security statement said the Kremlin had “directed” the hacking of email accounts associated with the Democratic Party “to interfere with the US election process”.

There was not much doubt that Russia was behind the release by WikiLeaks of emails to and from Clinton.

Trump says Russia ‘and others’ interfered in election, Obama ‘did nothing’

Shortly after the election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “a pretty crazy idea” the notion that fake news might have decided the contest in Trump’s favour. Last week, he had to admit that he regretted those words.

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We now know that before (and after) the election, Russian trolls with bogus identities bought more than 3,000 Facebook ads. The Russians also used Facebook Events to organise phoney political protests in the US, including an anti-immigrant rally in a small Idaho town known for welcoming refugees. It was to be “hosted” by “SecuredBorders”, a Facebook group exposed in March as a Russian front.

Twitter was used in a similar way. In response to congressional investigations, the company admitted last week it had identified about 200 accounts linked to Russia, and that Kremlin-backed news site RT spent US$250,000 on Twitter ads last year.

Donald Trump finally acknowledges Russian meddling in presidential election

It is still too early to conclude that Russian use of social media decided the election. However, we probably can conclude that social media decided the election. The Trump campaign spent about US$90 million on social media, most of it on Facebook. Last November, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, said: “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing.” I believe he is right.