It can be said that Mr. Ellberg Jerry was a smart and lucky man at the same time, a rare consensus in fact, when he was governor of Massachusetts in the early 2000s, he was given the authority to divide his constituencies according to his political wisdom. But Jerry was fundamentally opposed to the idea of parties, so he devised a clever plan in which his followers could be victorious in free and fair elections.
Election with the taste of salamanders
To understand Jerry's idea of imagining a virtual state or province with only 16 eligible voters, eight of them support the Blue Party, and eight support the Orange Party. You are the governor of this state and would like the Blue Party to win free and fair elections in four constituencies. But when you have the right to divide the constituencies you can start by putting three Orange Party supporters in one constituency, here the Orange Party will definitely win in that constituency, but that movement will give you an edge over it, where you will distribute the rest of its members to districts with more Party supporters Blue, so your chances of winning are 75% instead of 50%.
This case is called Germanism, after our friend Jerry ("Jerry") and Salamander ("Mander"). It means manipulating electoral boundaries by dividing an area into artificial constituencies in favor of the dominant party in order to secure the victory of its supporters in the elections, when he reinstated Elbridge. Jerry distributed circles to serve his supporters, it happened that one of the circles has become a very strange shape resembling an animal salamanders, hence the term, as a kind of sarcasm on this strange state of political corruption, which still exists and cause great problems between the conflicting parties when There are no clear criteria for dividing Electoral districts.
At that point, a joint research team of three US universities enters in an interesting study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature that this type of manipulation can also take place in a completely different and unpredictable range: social networks, in his conversation with " "Our study suggests that how information is transmitted through social media can lead to a strong bias in the outcome of decisions, even when the information is completely honest," says Dr. Mohsen Musleh of the Massachusetts Higher Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the authors of the study. .
The squirrel who dies off your house
To begin with, let's start from a question from Mark Zuckerberg, once from a journalist, about the importance of each one's Facebook homepage. He answered very cleverly: “A squirrel dying in front of your house now may be more relevant to your interests than people dying in Africa. ". Simply put, your Facebook homepage is made up of your wishes. If we assume that we are friends on Facebook, we have the same shared friends, admirers of the same pages, and share the same groups, does that mean that each of us will be the same?
In fact, no, because each of us has desires other than each other, each of us stands at a certain post that supports a political party, and he looks at a different declaration, and presses a different link, I love the types of food, and you tend to travel and travel publications, designed Facebook algorithm, and each Other social media, and search engines like Google, to track your desires and then feed them with new suggestions.
This is the so-called "information bubble," the idea that, as Musleh points out in his interview with Meedan, social media algorithms are interested in examining many of your criteria, such as browsing history, format, number of clicks and links you click and those that stand. Little by little to think, these algorithms form a tangled knowledge of your tendencies, and then feed your homepage with publications that tend to be yours, answer your questions, and motivate you to spend more time with them.
The simple idea is that your presence on social media is a point linked to other points via electronic links, the link between you and others is strengthened by the interaction between you, and completely disconnected if you do not interact, you do not automatically see any new publications after one of the lack of interest in what is written, And so you automatically form the networks themselves, everything happens, from your fashion choices to your political preferences.
In the latter case, the social network tends to inform you about the publications of your political party's supporters, and your home page will become more like a demonstration of support, while algorithms work to avoid negative experiences. Here, these experiences simply mean anti-political publications . ": In that case you will live in a bubble of publications that are just about supporting your desires."
According to the new study, the problem is that our political positions are determined as much as the debate on the media. If you are in a group that all supports the "Blue Party," your convictions will gradually form to support this party after looking at the choices of those around you, but if you are exposed to more Supporters of the Orange Party in your surroundings will tend to the Orange Party because you think it has an advantage, but what if social media coordinators decide to manipulate a little?
Network Limit Manipulators
This is where the absurdity starts. If you assume that you are in charge of a social network and want a candidate to win the US election because he supports your position in the face of a blatant attack by the Senate, all you need to do is reprogram the rules of your network's mathematical laws, which are able to know the trends. You may want to see orange posts in your bubble, but the network will expose you to blue posts with more orange. Here you may change your attitude towards Blue Party support, especially if you haven't decided yet. Party members Blue they will live in their blue bubbles naturally.
In their experiments, Musleh and his companions subjected more than 2,500 people online to similar cases, divided into groups of 12, divided into supporters of the Blue Party and supporters of the Orange Party.The research team used ideas from game theory to ignite the conflict between “If you are a Blue Party supporter and you win your party, you get a reward,” Musleh said. “If the other party wins, you get a lower reward. On rewards. "
You will certainly think of one thing: victory, but what if you feel that the other party tends to win? Here you will tend to support the other party in order to get a second-place reward instead of nothing. Through these smart experiments, researchers found that deliberately manipulating the structure of networks between the contestants, so that they tend to favor one party of them, pushing this party to victory by 20% full, you may see it A small percentage because we live in a region of the world where numbers do not affect such, but in Europe and the United States, 1% of the votes is a great distance between success and loss, says Musleh in his interview with the " Meedan ": "Show our mathematical model, in addition to network experiences Social, that the election results can be severely biased A paper by which polling information was distributed across networks participating in the games. "
Moreover, it may go beyond the deliberate change in the structure of networks by social media operators to the parties themselves, which compete to develop mechanisms aimed at voters, not as groups but as individuals sought by e-marketing tools with precision, which may transform the movement The network of some in the direction of the exit of the bubble because they are increasingly subject to publications from the other party is compulsory, on the other hand can develop information grimandria as an unintended result chosen by artificial intelligence while building algorithms and track the results and then modify Li retro nutrition.
To understand the last point, a different part of the same experiments could be contemplated in which the research team wanted to examine whether Zealot-bots could change the structure of networks in favor of a particular party. The idea is for researchers to develop a program that examines the group owners' dialogues among themselves. It is activated when there are any signs calling for compromise with the other party to reject and urge others to refuse, and here the results came to say - in the words of a reformer in his statement to " Meedan " - that these robots "were able to influence the opinion of the majority towards the party. Even when the parties had exactly the same number of members ,. When each player was the same amount of influence "
In whose hands?
That's why a reformer, speaking to Meydan , points out that “we have to be careful about relying on social media as a primary source of information when it comes to forming opinions and making decisions, especially in important contexts such as elections,” in fact it is with every step In the world of social media, we learn day after day that we must pay little attention, our immersion in this different reality and our involvement in the enjoyment of the fun aspects made it difficult to realize its hidden influence on us, which may extend to everything from your musical choices to the President of your country. Musleh concludes his interview with Meydan : "People have to understand the depth of influence social media have on them."
There is no doubt that the results of the new study do not yet represent solid and reliable information to ensure that something is going wrong, and there are still many problems facing such research, the first is the small sample size and the nature of the games used different from the ground and the nature Therefore, we still need more scientific research in this area, but these results - although only indicating the possibilities and possibilities - undoubtedly intersect with contemporary fears of tampering with somebody, was a platform or intelligence, the electronic border between voters in favor of a party Particular.
One of the most famous examples is the recent crisis over the possibility of Russian intelligence interfering in the results of the American elections that brought Donald Trump to power.This is escalating to a future effect that cannot, in fact, be predicted, but we are undoubtedly facing something that threatens the very essence of the democracy project itself. He is simply in the grip of a new Jeremandre (informational grimandre) dividing circles as you like, but this time not in the hands of Jerry Elbridge, but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or perhaps Vladimir Putin, and no one knows who also can prolong that power!