Let’s dispel a few myths about Russia and the 2016 presidential election.

Yes, the Russian government may have manipulated the election. Yes, fake news — the deliberately misleading kind, not the kind you denounced because you don’t agree with it — likely influenced votes cast and political opinions held during the election cycle. And yes, we are more susceptible to online deception than we thought.

In late October, a Senate judiciary committee questioned representatives from tech mammoths Facebook, Google and Twitter on a series of newly discovered social media posts from various Russian accounts. From photoshopped celebrity endorsements to claims of being Bill Clinton’s illegitimate child, these posts are downright ridiculous. They don’t seem like they’re capable of influencing an election.

The scary thing? They did.

Until this investigation surfaced, people on one side of the aisle believed fake social media posts were specifically targeted at the other side. But loads of the posts have since been made public, proving the opposite is true. A buff, rainbow Bernie Sanders supposedly defends LGBTQ rights, and Jesus arm-wrestles Satan to prevent Hillary Clinton’s election.

https://twitter.com/search?f=images&vertical=default&q=buff%20bernie&src=typd

https://twitter.com/search?f=images&q=jesus%20satan%20arm%20wrestling%20&src=typd

To someone who’s the least bit informed, the posts frankly look a little silly. But as Russia knows, American political discourse on the internet has actually become this ridiculous. Instead of turning to legitimate news sources like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, people have started finding sources that confirm their own beliefs.

Regina Luttrell, a professor of public relations at the Newhouse School with an interest in social media habits, said she’s hardly shocked by how easily these internet trolls were able to fool people.

Luttrell said people on the social sphere create their own “filter bubbles” that determine the experience they receive on social media. If we subscribe to page updates from liberal-leaning pages, we’ll get a lot of liberal-leaning posts on our timelines. Subscribing to conservative-leaning pages can just as easily create a biased, one-sided timeline.

That’s where fake news propagates.

“As consumers we can choose what we see, don’t see, subscribe to or don’t subscribe to,” Luttrell said in an email. “When the only source of information people had was the evening newspaper or the 6 o’clock news, we saw less of this. Journalists were our main source of information, and we relied upon them to be unbiased. Today, anyone with an internet connection can create content and with enough influence, can be considered reputable.”

This bubble played a large part in helping fake news to spread in the 2016 election. With nobody to reputably fact-check, people believed fake stories confirming whatever biases they already had.

The most shocking of the posts photoshop celebrities like actor Aziz Ansari onto ads encouraging people to “vote from home” via text message. Voting by text isn’t possible in the United States, yet there’s no telling how many people were misled into thinking these posts were legitimate.

https://twitter.com/search?f=images&q=aziz%20ansari%20fake&src=typd

These are all signs of a meticulously planned attempt to manipulate how we think. The plan’s success shows that Russia may know how we tick on social media even better than we do.

This whole phenomenon boils down to an inherent distrust of traditional media in the U.S. Numbers have improved recently, yet only 48 percent of people surveyed in an October Reuters/Ipsos poll declare any level of trust in the press.

Andy Mendes | Digital Design Editor

Luttrell sees this as a problem that could be fixed with better media literacy.

“Going forward, we have to educate the general population,” Luttrell said. “We have to increase people’s ability to think critically rather than take what is on the internet at face value.”

This isn’t to suggest a relationship of blind trust with every news article and source out there.

It simply means we need to better distinguish between actual, hard truth and manipulatory posts seeking to divide and mislead people rather than inform them. We can start with collectively better learning how to read news in the internet age.

Russia knows our online political discourse is broken, and the country took advantage of it in the most egregious way possible. These posts weren’t created by people passionate about any particular issue or position. They were created to take advantage of our existing disagreements and divide us even further along those lines.

Disagreeing on opinions is healthy in a working political environment. Debating over facts when everyone is working off the same factbook is even better. But political discussion on the internet is utterly broken, and only a purge of fake and misleading information — beginning with us users — can eradicate it from future election cycles and beyond.

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a senior newspaper and online journalism and information management and technology dual major. He can be reached by email at bweisers@syr.edu or on Twitter at @brettws.

Published on November 16, 2017 at 12:03 am