A few comments on the debate over fake twitter handles of public figures, on the rise in Canada (thread):
1. There is a difference between parody and deception. The line actually isn’t all that grey - you know each when you see them. And the intent and impact of each are different.
2. Yes, this is not a new problem, all political stripes have done it. And, what we are seeing now is different.
3. It is different because it appears to be embedded in a political strategy to that sees an alignment between political gain and the undermining of our civic discourse.
Taking a playbook out of the US, too many right leaning Canadians seem to think that undermining facts and even reality in the public sphere will benefit them politically. They are dancing with the devil.
5. They may be right in the short term, but if we want to see where this path leads, we only need to look south. Deep fragmentation and toxicity in the political discourse and a fundamental undermining or democratic institutions.
6. This problem is ultimately a by-product of outsourcing our public sphere to private companies, who’s incentives and capabilities they enable are not necessarily aligned with the interests of our democracy.
Bots, fake accounts and a high tolerance for hateful speech may or may not be judged as acceptable for the businesses of Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, but they may also harm our civic discourse.
7. We need to get a handle on this problem now, because we are on the edge of a cliff. AI is going to change the game in a number of ways, including:
Political chatbots that are highly personalized to nudge our behaviour; Microtargeted Deepfakes that upend our common perceptions of reality; Widespread foreign meddling in our elections, that is invisible and largely unaccountable.
This is why in my view the debate we are finally starting to have about the politics enabled by AI and the platform economy are both long overdue and urgent. Governments, political parties and platform companies are all going to need to decide what side of this to be on.
PS - a number of people have called out my identification of this as a predominantly 'right wing' problem. A few additional comments on this.
There is no question that in a number of western democracies there is an emerging political constituency that has very effectively used social campaigns and automated media to undermine civic discourse for political ends.
this movement is often supported by foreign actors (Russia), and at the moment (in the UK and the US in particular) many on the right see a confluence between the illiberal nature of these tactics and their various motives and their electoral politics.
this is not to say that liberal political constituencies are immune to this. far from it. If we don't stop this trend now, the race to the bottom will lead everyone to these tactics. and the result will be the collapse of the our public sphere.
I think in CDA we are lower on this curve. Our political discourse has so far proven more immune to this descent. But my fear is that we're at a tipping pt. Not because of a parody account. But because we are seeing an alignment between the tactics of misinfo and political gain
There is a ton of work studying this problem, and in particular the current pathologies and tactics that have resulted in the Fox News/Breitbart/AltRight etc misinformation ecosystem. A few things worth checking out:
An @oiioxford study that mapped the spread of "junk news"
A study that explored how Russian bots infiltrated the US political discourse. "Conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced 36x more tweets" arxiv.org/abs/1802.04291
A Harvard/MIT study of the spread of misinformation during the 2016 election. cjr.org/analysis/breit… found that: 
A good report on the psychology and methods of misinformation, which finds that *at the moment* "Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right.” shorensteincenter.org/combating-fake…
and I would highly recommend @d1gi's medium page for a series of analyses on this phenomenon: medium.com/@d1gi
here is a good resource on some recent academic studies on the problem: journalistsresource.org/studies/societ…
And there is lots of ongoing work being done to better understand this problem, including by @EthanZ @datasociety @zephoria @katestarbird @YBenkler @pnhoward @CraigSilverman @BrendanNyhan @zeynep @profcarroll @emilybell @alicetiara @TowCenter and many many others.
