Re-coding Black Mirror Part IV

This is part IV of our tour through the papers from the Re-coding Black Mirror workshop exploring future technology scenarios and their social and ethical implications. In 2016, the world witnessed the storming of social media by social bots spreading fake news during the US Presidential elections… researchers collected Twitter data over four weeks preceding the final ballot to estimate the magnitude of this phenomenon. Their results showed that social bots were behind 15% of all accounts and produced roughly 19% of all tweets… What would happen if social media were to get so contaminated by fake news that trustworthy information hardly reaches us anymore? Fake news and hoaxes have been around a long time, but the nature of social media pours fuel on the fire. Any user can create and relay content with little third-party filtering or fact-checking; many adults get their news on social media; and research has shown that people exposed to fake news tend to believe it.