Anne Applebaum, the award-winning historian and Washington Post columnist, was at the forefront of covering a plethora of nefarious Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks that have sought to distort political outcomes around the globe. Long before the 2016 presidential election, she made Americans aware of the Russian government’s online efforts to propagandize and deceive.
Her recent column notes that bad actors have perpetuated substantial online mischief and fraud by exploiting the difficulty we all face in distinguishing humans from automatons on the Internet. Robotic online mobs posing as humans and targeting real people through the Internet is a threat posed by “artificial intelligence” that has not been addressed in many dystopian science-fiction stories, but it is a growing real-world problem.
“One tech executive told me he reckons that half of the users on Twitter are bots, created by companies that either sell them or use them to promote various causes,” Applebaum writes. That possibility should give anyone who uses Twitter on a regular basis pause.
Of course, many sophisticated people can figure out which Twitter followers are fake by their blatant marketing pitches, salacious content, or implausible identities (someone with 67 followers claiming to be a major celebrity, for example). However, a substantial number of people are already being fooled, and as bot technology improves, the imposters will likely become more difficult to spot.
I agree with Applebaum that we are moving towards “a world where you don’t know whether the emotions you are feeling are manipulated by men or machines.” Perhaps the best we can do with this information for now is to avoid getting emotionally agitated by Internet commenters, if possible.
However, some regulation of social media sites by the world’s governments seems necessary to address this growing problem. Perhaps even the threat of such regulation might cause Facebook and Twitter to voluntarily become more rigorous in making sure their users are real people.
Citizens and politicians need to take up the cause of Internet reform. Otherwise, our industries and governments will continue to be manipulated by clever computer programmers and their armies of bots.