# data[].attributes.body
There is an unintended consequence to social media. With the ability to get information from just about anyone, we are not just running the risk of being manipulated by governments and companies, but also by ourselves.

The golden age of information is proving to be even more secretly manipulative than the worst regimes of past times. With very few laws governing this abuse, social media users need to take their internet security more seriously, if they wish to safeguard the very foundations of their societies.

# data[].attributes.body
Anyone logging onto the internet today knows that they run the risk of being hacked. You might even be aware of monitoring by governments or companies looking to gain knowledge, profit or both from your personal data. What you probably are not aware of, is that you are also being manipulated.

Most of us are certain that we are well informed, that we have listened to both sides of the argument, that we have analyzed the information and have formed an opinion based on the knowledge gained from doing so.
However, evidence is mounting that this may not be the case, and there is a growing worry that it is happening more often. With the current issues surrounding the US federal election and the Brexit Vote of 2016, there is very real concern that the campaigns were meddled with, and the voters may have been manipulated by false information.

This begs the question; if people are better informed than ever before, how are people being manipulated in this golden age?

What is surfacing, is the reality that data we generate while using social media tools, is being gathered, cataloged and sold or stolen. Then it being used to generate anything from false grassroot campaigns to foment groups or direct other groups in new directions.

Some of the contexts where this occurs; Activism, Advertising, Hoaxing, Propagandizing, Psychological Warfare and Public Relations. These all aim to control the flow of information from an organization to the public.

Astroturfing, Clickbait, Distraction, Search Engine Marketing; all tools used to manipulate, are part of many related techniques, where manipulators create an image or argument that favour the particular interests of targeted social media users.

The end goal here is to get compliance from the general public, and regardless of the goals of the organization, steer users in a new direction. Perhaps, a specific demographic will now by a new car, or have a new favourite sports drink. Perhaps, something that was uninteresting to a group will now seems tantalizing.

But this nefarious behaviour just doesn’t sell products, at its worst, it may be altering democratic elections and cause political upheaval. Fortunately, there are tools being developed that help social media users fight back. One of them – Who Targets me - is listed below.

The most despairing thing is that, while many users of social media were shocked to hear that these actions and subterfuge were occurring, many of them remained unconcerned, unfazed and continued to use the tools that cheated their users. Momentarily, there was some anger at the news that this was blatantly occurring, but then it appears the cogs of the machine began to turn once more and new information quickly replaced the old, and the cycle began anew. The very nature of social media tools appears to create complacency.

There is a certainty today for most people that our opinions are our own and that we came to those opinions based on the information that we comb through. That we get news from trusted sources. That the information shared by our friends and family can be trusted. Now, however, those channels are being manipulated and friends and family may be sharing fraudulent information with their social circles. Be careful what you click.

Please read the information that is shared here. You might learn something very useful.

# data[].attributes.headline
Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

# data[].attributes.subject
Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media

# data[].attributes.body
"The Daily Me" is mentioned here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other.

# data[].attributes.body
Great Starting point; A fantastic idea that now seems to have unintended consequences. Possibly where it all began?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Daily Me is a term popularized by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte to describe a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual's tastes. Negroponte discusses it in his 1995 book, Being Digital, referencing a project under way at the media lab, Fishwrap.

# data[].attributes.headline
To See The Future Of Social Media Manipulation In Politics, Look To Mexico

# data[].attributes.subject
To See The Future Of Social Media Manipulation In Politics, Look To Mexico

# data[].attributes.body
The sad reality of what may become the norm in the future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many Americans first learned about the role of online bots in influencing elections in 2016, when Russia-linked software reportedly spread disinformation to boost President Trump's campaign.

But just across the Mexican border, automated software has been deployed to influence political opinion for the better part of a decade. As early as the country's 2012 general election, Twitter was swarmed with apparent automated accounts supporting now-president Enrique Peña Nieto. Hacker-for-hire Andrés Sepúlveda claimed in a 2016 Bloomberg Businessweek interview that he managed a budget of $600,000 to digitally sway the election toward Peña Nieto, hacking rivals' networks and deploying an army of at last 30,000 bots to artificially generate trends on Twitter.

"It's surprising to me," says Oxford researcher Sam Woolley, "that in the United States we didn't look to our southern border to see what might happen during our 2016 election."

And more recently, most observers say all parties in Mexico have used bots to promote their own messages online and promote their opponents, whether by flooding opponents' hashtags with meaningless spam, impersonating supporters of rival factions to post extremist content, or even issuing out-and-out threats. Those are hard not to take seriously in a country that a Committee to Protect Journalists report last May called "one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the press" and where activists are routinely killed.

"I think what the bots have done a lot of time is to frighten people, not just regular citizens, but also journalists, in an effort to cause chilling effects," Woolley says.

A general election to choose the term-limited Peña Nieto's successor is scheduled for July 1, and experts have already warned that bots and trolls will likely be heavily deployed from all sides, in a country where a high level of internet access and a history of corruption made it a frequent testbed for digital manipulation techniques often later seen elsewhere. U.S. national security advisor H.R. McMaster warned in December there are signs of Russian meddling in the election through online propaganda, and experts say domestic bots continue to be a powerful force in Mexican politics, signaling false levels of support for candidates and drowning out their rivals in online conversations.

"There is a lot of examples but the most recent and important to me is when Obama [visited Mexico in 2014] and bots erased all the [Twitter trending topics] protesting against the visit," says Alberto Escorcia, an activist who has tracked Mexican political influence bots since 2012, in an email to Fast Company. "And [then] last January when the people were protesting against the increase of gasoline and oil prices."

In that case, bots are believed to have spread false reports of violent looting in an effort to turn the public against the protesters and their cause.

Bots have also been implicated in the fierce rivalries between Mexican broadcasters. Last September, after the deadly earthquake in central Mexico, newscasters, especially those with TV giant Televisa, reported on a girl named Frida Sofia who was reportedly trapped under the rubble. Naval officials initially said rescuers were in contact with the girl, then admitted she never existed.

Rival TV network Azteca quickly aired an episode of "The Simpsons" where Bart plays a similar hoax, and anti-Televisa hashtags began trending. According to multiple reports, including a third-party analysis obtained by Fast Company, anti-Televisa messages and memes were boosted by accounts usually associated with Azteca productions and, likely, with the aid of bots. (According to some reports, pro-Televisa bots subsequently helped drive the most prominent critical hashtag from social media trending lists).

And when it comes to foreign influence, Russians aren't the only outside players believed to be interested in the election. Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven campaign firm that has worked with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, has posted job ads in advance of this year's elections in Mexico. It's also signed a deal with Pig.gi, a company that offers free, ad-sponsored internet service in Mexico, which could let it deliver highly targeted, data-driven campaign messages to Pig.gi's hundreds of thousands of users in Mexico.

Cambridge Analytica is believed to have been particularly effective at using carefully demographic targeted social media posts to help sway U.S. voters to Donald Trump in 2016. But whatever role it takes in the Mexican election, it likely won't be the only organization trying to learn from Trump's unexpected digital success.

"There are many companies that are trying to do this," says Paola Villarreal, an engineer and activist who has written about bots in Mexican politics.

Candidates are likely to use bots this year to alienate supporters of their political rivals as much as to energize supporters and woo new voters, she says.

"I guess the use of the bots in the Mexican election is going to be more to demoralize and demobilize the electorate, instead of making them vote for someone," Villarreal says.

That could include impersonating unhappy citizens saying they don't intend to vote, supporters of particular candidates claiming to defect to a rival, or even representatives of political parties implying they're sure to win in a landslide.

"They can definitely start to say 'oh, thank you for supporting us-we no longer need you,'" she says.

For its part, Twitter says it's taking steps to promote meaningful political discourse on its platform in advance of the election.

"First, we have set up an alliance with the NGO Jóvenes en Movimiento and the Tec of Monterrey University, to educate both parties and voters on best practices to inform, consume, and debate electoral information on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson writes in an email to Fast Company. "Through these workshops we aim to explain that the power of platforms like Twitter is both to inform people but also to engage with the audience, question policy proposals, and thus help to have a better informed citizenry."

The spokesperson also pointed to the company's ramped-up efforts to shut down "malicious automation," which identified than 6.4 million suspicious accounts per week in December 2017-up 60% from October.

But in state elections last year, Villarreal says, bots and trolls turned in part from newsfeed-based social media-where people have learned to be distrustful and which some prominent activists, journalists and others have moved away from after attacks from trolls-to one-on-one tools like WhatsApp and ordinary text messages.

"It's not only social media-it's whatever and wherever people are paying attention," she says.

Already, misinformation campaigns have been spotted on popular messaging platforms around the world, including in the days leading up to last year's contested election in Kenya and gubernatorial vote in Jakarta, Indonesia. And should they prove successful in Mexico, experts say it's likely they'll be seen around the world before long.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To See The Future Of Social Media Manipulation In Politics, Look To Mexico

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many Americans first learned about the role of online bots in influencing elections in 2016, when Russia-linked software reportedly spread disinformation to boost President Trump's campaign. But just across the Mexican border, automated software has been deployed to influence political opinion for the better part of a decade.

# data[].attributes.headline
Manipulating the net: How much can we trust what we read on the net?

# data[].attributes.subject
Manipulating the net: How much can we trust what we read on the net?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusions: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom" is one of the most important books I have read. Having read it two years ago, I now often treat web news, in particular those coming from social media ( e.g., Facebook and Twitter), with plenty pinches of salt.

Recently, another important book "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday reaffirms my view that the web can be a dark and dangerous place to obtain information.

These two books show that we are naïve. We believe the web is a boon to democracy because it gains us access to more information, more empowerment, and more opportunities for social activism. We believe the web, through its propagation of information, create "shared awareness" such that we not only better understand a situation but also better understand what others are thinking too. Through shared awareness, we believe the web coordinates loose groups of people into collective action to demand change.

But the truth is the web does not free us from information bias, conflicts, manipulation, and sensationalism. To believe otherwise is not only naïve but also utopian.

Holiday's "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" is the first book of its kind. It is an exposé of a self-confessed and (partly) reformed media manipulator. Ryan Holiday's job involves the dark arts of carefully creating, packaging, and feeding false information to the web. He would then sit back as his false information spreads virally to achieve its intended outcome.

Holiday is the person you would hire to manipulate information on the web for some specific purpose, such as to promote a product brand, to create controversies (when there is initially none), or to target your enemies with fake information or rumor. What is worse is Holiday is not alone. There are many such media manipulators out there and whose identities are unknown even to seasoned Holiday.

So, yes, we the web users are naïve, and we have been subtly duped and exploited many times over.

In his book, Holiday writes that news on the web is not a critical investigation of issues, but engineered to hook, distract, and cause us to react in certain desired manner. With the advent of the web, standards of what constitutes news, how news are vetted for validity, longevity of news, and the tone news are presented have changed for the worse.

We have been taught to believe that written information have validity, but with the advent of web, this belief has been corrupted by media manipulators. Web news are speculations, impulsive, exaggerated, distorted, and misleading.

The result is what Holiday calls as "unreality", a situation whereby we cannot distinguish truth from fiction, real outcome from what was staged, relevant from trivial. Furthermore, false information in the web do not stay false; they evolve to become accepted as real.

Unreality occurs because of the so-called link economy and the delegation of trust. This is a case when a news or story is linked by multiple sites, and each site assumes the story has been verified by the source from which this story was taken. In other words, trust has been delegated to other parties. Web sites commonly rely on other sites to provide stories, to borrow stories from one another. A site may perhaps add a few commentaries on a story it linked, but essentially, the story is taken in verbatim, often with no or little verification.

Multiple site linkages to a story gives appearance of credibility, akin to multiple citations to a scientific paper. But unlike in science where evidence is verified independently and repeatedly, web articles receive no such cross checks. Instead, in the world wide web, the false can morph into real if the false is disseminated by enough people (or sites). False information are often not taken down quickly and can even persist for years in the web.

Holiday gives several reasons why the web is an easy breeding ground for manipulation. Web sites are driven by traffic and advertisements, which ultimately determines the site's revenue. Consequently, quality of information is less important, as long as the information triggers traffic or better still, goes viral. The value of information is not determined by its accuracy or helpfulness but by its "spreadability". If the information is not shared, the information is regarded as useless. Furthermore, the quick turnover of information on the web places enormous pressure on sites to produce news, which leaves little time for research or verification.

This kind of environment makes it easy for media manipulators to feed false information that have been designed to arouse powerful emotions in people so that the information goes viral. But arousing just any emotion will not do. Holiday cites a research by Berger and Milkman in 2011 who found that of all emotions, anger was found to be the most powerful criterion that causes people to share information. In short, anger - not sadness, depression, or mixed emotions - makes information viral. Similarly, the research by Lang in 1996 found that people were provoked more emotionally, paid more attention, and had better memory recall of negative than neutral video footages.

Furthermore, fake stories are designed to additionally anticipate for user comments. Media manipulators do not want stories that are too safe, too well written, or complete in information because such stories elicit no comments. Fake stories have to be incomplete, incendiary, and even misleading to provoke people to comment. Media manipulators would not only create fake stories, but also create fake comments to supplement the fake stories. Made-up comments from fake users are given to stage a scene of a heated and polarized debate on the fake story. These media manipulators may also send fake emails to reporters or web publishers to give an impression that some trivial issue has turned "hot".

Errors in news are propagated quickly and widely in the web. But corrections are seldom done and even if done, these corrections are seldom highlighted, noticed, or remembered. Errors remain "sticky" in people's minds. Holiday cites a research where corrections do not fix errors. Instead, corrections were found to fortify and entrench people's misconceptions. That corrections amplify misconceptions is surprising. It is as if people regard corrections as a cover up on deception.

A good example of the futility of correcting errors is Malaysia's opposition street rallies, collectively called as "Blackout 505", which is so named in response to the perceived blackouts that had occurred in some vote-counting stations. Even though these blackouts were shown later to never have occurred, this misconception still persists, perhaps even amplifying in people's minds that these blackouts were further evidence of election fraud.

Another serious problem with news from the web, Holiday adds, is some sites practise "interactive journalism", where, information are published first, then verified later. Such news are updated frequently by relying on others to validate the facts, to send in updates, or to send in additional sources for contact. Interactive journalism does not create finished articles, but create articles that remain work-in-progress, awaiting further input. This kind of journalism encourages misinformation, allegations, rumors, half-truths, shoddy reporting, needless information, and endless projections and predictions. Interactive journalism also encourages sensationalism. If stories are anything but sensational, why would anyone read these so-called interactive news and participate by sending in updates?

The problem with interactive journalism is the information presented at any one time may be inaccurate or even downright wrong. The news may be updated frequently, but people see only a snapshot of the information at a point in time. Even the crowd-sourced and collaborative Wikipedia has been fed with false information by media manipulators, which has led to false information being propagated by other sites as fact. Although the wrong information was later corrected or deleted from Wikipedia, the false information continued to persist in some news sites. If you have not been following the Wikipedia updates or corrections, you may take these false information at face value and accept them as true.

So, at the end, what hope do we as web users have? Holiday offers little hope or resolutions in his book. Far from freeing people with greater access to information, the web polarizes people, exacerbating differences between groups of people by filtering of information and by helping to present information on what people only want to see. The web, Holiday remarks, is hardly the place for revealing the truth; instead, the web is a place for cultural catharsis, made up of online lynch mobs, attack blogs, smear campaigns, cyberbullying, and trial by comments.

Perhaps it is time, Holiday suggests, that we demand quality of information and not quantity. We cannot expect instant news and yet expect it to be done well. No one owns or controls the information flow on the web, not completely anyway. Media manipulators, Holiday admits, are manipulated too on the web. After years of misusing and exploiting the web, Holiday has become frightened of what the web has become.

Holiday's book uses several examples of media manipulation in the US, but it is not difficult to find similar examples in Malaysia. Government-hired blogs, the mysterious Red Bean Army, and lone operators have been working anonymously in the background to manipulate the web for devious, ulterior purpose.

The web can indeed be a dark and dangerous place to obtain information.

Sources

1. Berger, J. and Milkman, K.L. 2011. What makes content viral? Journal of Marketing Research: 49: 192-205.

2. Brendan, N. and Reifler, J. 2010. When corrections fail: the persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32: 303-330.

3. Lang, A. 1996. Negative video as structure: emotion, attention, capacity and memory. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Arts, Fall 1996: 460.

4. Shirky, C. 2011. The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change. Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manipulating the net: How much can we trust what we read on the net? - Christopher Teh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusions: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom" is one of the most important books I have read. Having read it two years ago, I now often treat web news, in particular those coming from social media (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), with plenty pinches of salt.

# data[].attributes.headline
Crowdturfers, Campaigns, and Social Media:Tracking and Revealing Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media

# data[].attributes.subject
Crowdturfers, Campaigns, and Social Media:Tracking and Revealing Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media

# data[].attributes.body
Crowdturfing is the 🤬-side to Crowdsourcing. Combined with Social Media, it spreads malicious URLs to create artificial grassroots campaigns which can influence susceptible people

# data[].attributes.body
Install Who Targets Me to find out who’s trying to win your vote – and how they’re doing it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Install the Who Targets Me browser extension - it's free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join over 30,000 people who have added Who Targets Me to their browser to find out how politicians are trying to win votes with social media ads.

# data[].attributes.headline
Is social media empowering us or manipulating us?

# data[].attributes.subject
Is social media empowering us or manipulating us?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hi. I'm Mia Palmer. The FT has been running a series of special reports on how people in communities are using technology, everything from apps for civic activists, to digital solutions for the disabled. And the project wouldn't be complete without looking at technology and democracy, especially the rather inflamed question of how we use social media. Is it empowering us or manipulating us?

With me to discuss this are Carl Miller, Research Director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the Think Tank Demos and who's also writing a book called Power. We also have two people with very interesting projects applying technological solutions to political problems. One of them is Tom de Grunwald, who founded Swap My Vote, a website that allows people in the UK in general elections to trade votes with each other for tactical voting.

And Sam Jeffers, co-founded Who Targets Me, a technology that helps you track who is targeting you with online political ads. So thank you all for joining me. Let's start by talking about where we are with social media today.

When you read about the fact that Russian accounts were buying highly targeted political advertising on Facebook during the US election, there's that feeling that social media is being used to subvert the democratic process rather than aiding it. Is that a fair assessment of where we are? How does it feel to you? What are you seeing, Carl, at Demos and as you're writing your book?

Well, I think that very clear to us now is that social media is both of the most emancipatory and liberating things ever to happen to politics. And also one of the things that is adding and introducing all these new ways in which we can be controlled or manipulated. The kind of tremendous problem that we all have is both exactly the same time.

So everyone's finding their voices. We have this explosion of civic activism. We've had all these new amazing ways in which people are engaging in the political process, sometimes for the first time. I think that's a shift which is one of the most important of all and it's one that we've only just begun to really realise it's happening.

So yes. What do we do about that?

I think in terms of what we do, one of the big things we have to really focus on is literacy and media literacy. We have to make sure that we're all cognizant of the way that technologies are being used and Sam's project's fantastic. And I will talk about it in a moment. But that's a really great example of how people can come together to actually increase the knowledge of what is going on.

Yeah. Well it's a good point actually to bring Sam in. I mean, Sam, can you tell us a little bit about Who Targets Me?

The inspiration for it was really disparity between the conservative and labour elections pending in 2015 on social media and the conservatives saying how much money and how successfully they had used Facebook advertising to win that particular election. And realising that there was no real way of knowing for sure exactly what was going on.

And so, when the 2017 election was called, we built this piece of software that allows users to essentially scrape the Facebook ads off their feed into a database that allows us to do, A, to tell them who's targeting them, but B, to do more analysis of how a campaign is being fought.

And so, for the first time really we're trying to create the sort of things actually we believe the big platform companies should do themselves, which is kind of expose more of what's going on so that people have more visibility over how a campaign is actually being run.

And was this because it was actually really difficult to know how much exactly was being spent on Facebook advertising and by whom? It didn't exist in the public record.

So the public record would tell you how much was spent and it would basically the invoices, but it wouldn't how that money was spent.

And what kind of information then were you collecting? You were seeing what the message was and the ad, who it was targeted to, and on what basis people were targeted?

Exactly. So we could see the ad itself, some of the interaction with the ad, people liking it. Is it being positively responded to? We asked our own questions about how it was being targeted and we probably could have asked more. But at least gave us some semblance into this ad is showing up in this constituency and it is reaching women over 50 for example.

And so, that at least allows you to see how the parties think they're going to win. And that's kind of unprecedented really, having those kind of real time sources of information about how election campaigns are being fought.

And were there any conclusions that you are beginning to draw from the data that you collected?

The thing that probably in the end was most interesting to me was the negativity within the major campaigns. And I think this is newish to UK politics is the ability to say, for example, the dementia tax, which is Labour's phrase they coined for Tory inheritance policy. They were targeting ads into older people who owned homes and not obviously other people who might be put off at that kind of negative turn in their messaging.

And I think that's the sort of thing where you see social media being used to really open out the polar extremes of political debate in a way that hasn't really happened before. Because if people didn't like your negativity, they'd be switched off by it. You might be a little averse to doing more of that type of messaging. So that's within the mainstream of.

And this way nobody go to see that. People who might be turned off by the negativity don't see it. And then, the people who like that message, only they see it. So it's that kind of secretive nature of it.

Yeah. Political campaigning types know that negativity works and now they have this platform where they can reach exactly who they want to with that negativity.

Carl, are you seeing-- Do you think is that something that you're following at Demas and is it having quite a big impact in terms of changing political discourse?

Well one of the brilliant things about Sam's project is that he's exposing something which is actually very closed and it's incredibly difficult for researchers like us at Demas to actually get a handle on what kind of messaging is happening.

And unfortunately, I think the bigger picture here is that Sam and projects like his are stepping into a gap which really should be sorted out by the electoral commission and public authorities and statutory authorities.

It is incredible to me how we've seen the rise of digital platforms, which is now one of the key ways in which political power is actually won, is one of the main areas of emphasis where political parties are investing enormous amounts of time, completely new technology, completely novel uses of data. And as we've seen here, all new dangers that come attached to that. And it's there where there was absolutely no regulation.

Why have we failed to regulate there? Is it just because regulation takes time or there's a real feeling that this is not regulatable? Nobody wants to do it?

I think that's a question which we run picking now. I think partly the story here is of technology now always moving faster than the legal and political institutions which try to govern it. That's a massive problem. I think partly this is a question of the actual kind of fundamental difficulty of actually regulating the internet in first place.

These are almost predominantly American tech giants, which is very difficult for any single country, any single legislative body to actually handle. And that means that I think we've got this almost sense of learned helplessness within the political class of the moment.

I want to bring Tom in now to talk about Swap My Vote, which was in a way, a kind of real harnessing of technology. I suppose, let people do deal with the frustration of the UK'S first Past The Post system, where quite often, your vote doesn't count.

In 2010 I was living in a marginal and I just moved house and just moved from a place where something quite exciting was happening electorally. And I really wanted to vote to my old constituency. Meanwhile, my friend in the old constituency had exactly the opposite feelings about the parties. And said, well, why don't we swap votes?

And I thought, why don't we have a web platform that helps people find a voting partner? So we got ready for 2015 election. It was a sort of a thought experiment to some extent. It was just the idea that actually, let's put this up there and see what happens. See whether tonnes of people use it.

We've thought it was be tremendous if 100 people used it. But actually, thousands of people used it and hundreds of people found work through it in 2015. And we repeated it 2017 and had an order of magnitude more people using it. Felt like it started to really cut through people's sense of what is possible in an election. So the idea feels like it has caught now.

It did feel like it was permeating the general conversation. I heard people completely unconnected to work mentioning this to me and so I do feel like it's something that's starting to feel maybe a little bit more normal. But people are still really worried that, well, what if I agree to swap my vote but the other person doesn't honour their side of the bargain.

And there are certain questions people always have and that's one of them. How do I trust my partner? And so, I think where we helped the idea of votes were pretty much has been around for a while and it's even used in parliament by MP's and the innovation that we brought was the ability to log in with your social media profile which has a degree of identity attached to it.

And that means that the person at the other end, once you actually find a person to swap with, you can recognise that they're a real person.

So there's that element of trust?

Exactly. So that introduces that level of trust. And of course, if you click through and you don't have a sense of trust with the person at the other end, then you don't agree with them. You find another partner.

Do you think it will make a difference, Carl? Is this encouraging to you that people like Tom are taking the initiative, creating websites that are helping them maybe make some political changes?

Yeah. Undoubtedly. Look I mean, we at Demas have always been concerned with political engagement and always want to try and help and applaud those that are finding new ways of increasing it. So technologies which allow people to get over some of the kind of General Palon malaise of the first part of the vote system is, I think, really good.

I think also, there's tremendous potential for technologies to increase engagement of people between elections too. And I think of the most exciting kind of initiatives we're seeing are ones which are beginning to change what politics actually is.

What kinds of things are you thinking of it?

Well, as I was writing the book the most interesting person and example that I came across was Taiwan and Audrey Tang. So Audrey was a high school dropout. She became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. She retired at the age of 13. Went back her native Taiwan and became a civic hacker.

And then in 2014, the sunflower revolution happened in Taiwan. And a kind of Motley collection of students and academics and activists occupied the legislative chamber there for weeks. And at the end of it, it began kind of as these things always do on a technicality.

It was to do with the fact that the opposition didn't think they were being consulted enough on a trade treaty with China. At the end of all of this Audrey was approached by the government who desperately wanted to stop anything like that happening again. And she eventually became digital minister of Taiwan.

And what Audrey's done since then, is to try to use digital technologies to radically throw open the decision making process from the government out to as many people she possibly can. The protest is angled towards finding consensus and if that consensus is actually found, she's committed the government to actually honouring that consensus in law.

Now if you kind of step back for a moment and pause and think about what that actually means, it actually means something that I think is incredibly profound. It has to do with power being moved outside of government and onto these strange new forms of debate and engagement.

And I think that Audrey's is only one of I think a kind of growing, kind of ripple of politicians, who don't only want to change what government does but what is itself. And kind of embracing digital technologies as offering, I think perhaps for the first time, a completely new idea of what democracy means the 21st century.

Because it's massively increased participation, which is now possible, and this is where I kind of want to go back to Sam. I mean, your project is another one of these ones where they needed to instal a browser extension, did they not, to run who targets me?

Yeah. So we had about 12,000 people will do it in the UK election and the bigger the sample, the more ads you capture, the more you see and also the better your information is about how those ads are being targeted. So it does require us to get to a certain level of involvement and engagement.

And who was typically volunteering to do this?

We saw people from 18 to 80 installing the software, men and women. Geographically, we had a really good spread. So we had at least one person, every constituency in the country, and we had a very equal mix of people in marginals verses people in safe seats. So it's important, if you want to try and sort of monitor these big global platforms, to get as many people as possible to participate in it.

Because Facebook and others provide you essentially a bespoke experience for you. Your Facebook is different to everyone else's Facebook. To be able to build up that picture, you need as many people as possible to participate.

And you also did this in Germany during the German elections.

Yeah and also in Austria. We just finished in their elections as well. And so we're starting to think about how we take it from being a UK effort into being sort of this global observatory really of political ads. The software works anywhere now

In Germany, we saw, again focusing on the political parties, at least stuff that was recognisable as communication but potentially more aggressive and pushy. So certainly from the AFD on the right, some of the ads and messaging they were using were very kind of unsubtle dog-whistly stuff that you might not have gotten away with on the radio or on a TV interview without being challenged.

I think that, again, sort of stuff about how things are being polarised was an interesting thing we saw in Germany too.

What do you hope to do with all of that, when you say you'd like to be a sort of global observatory of social media political advertising? Would it be open for people to maybe look at to see what was the totality of what's going on? Is transparency the main objective or there other goals that you have?

There's a range of objectives and we're still of trying to work ourselves out in that respect. But I think that one of those things is that individual voters should just have some ability to hold politicians accountable for the messages they've seen.

So one of the problems with ads is they disappear pretty much after you've seen them and if someone makes you a political offer that you then can keep hold of, that's not a great thing and that has been the case with ads about saying one thing to one of the people and one thing to another group of people.

So the ability to sort of see what was offered to you and also compare it to what was offered to others is I think an important thing if we're going to have these micro targeted campaigns. And I think then storing all of that making that open and available to people and researchers and journalists and so on is part of what we want to do as well.

And then alongside that, there is this advocacy piece about what happens next. What should the platforms do if, as they say, they are. so committed to Democrat integrity, et cetera, what actually should their steps be?

Well, let's brainstorm some ideas. Where do you, Carl, think we need to go from here? I mean, obviously, you've already said about the social media platforms taking a much more proactive role, governments need to understand and legislate and so on. But what would you like to see happen?

Well, I think one of the most important things that we need to do is actually expose where power lies and what power is. I think we can't underestimate in systems that look really distributed and look kind of like they've radically thrown power open, we can't underestimate the capacity for sophisticated well-financed actors to themselves form new concentrations of power within it.

So, I have every faith that Tom's platform will be safe. But for many I think kind of civic society initiatives happening around the world they are incredibly vulnerable to the activities of sophisticated state actors.

So how do we bring about that exposure? Is that where projects like Sam's and others come into it?

Well, to be honest, no. I think that's where investigative journalism comes into it. I think that journalism has always tried to, at its best, expose and confront power in its mendacious and abusive forms.

And here's a new worry. Exactly at the moment when we need journalism to be at its strongest, is also the moment when commercially it seems to be, by those very same networks and platforms we've been talking about, being undermined.

Sam, what about you? Any thoughts on where do we move from here?

Well, I totally agree on the point about investigative journalism. I mean, one of the things we did was partner with the Bureau of Investigative Journalists on the project in the UK to make sure that we had people who had an understanding of how to go through large volumes of data, how to read stories, how to tell stories, how to pitch them to the right media that they get out the right people.

And I think we're going to have to work out a lot more of that in the future. I think one of the things that we're trying to do is to get the big platform companies to sort of accept and the regulators too to kind of understand what standards we as voters expect of them in terms of transparency.

We've now got to this story with the Russian ads, where Facebook is starting to publish some of its political staff and it's going to expose what it calls dark ads. It hasn't made that very clear just yet. And I very much doubt they're going to take very extreme steps in terms of transparency.

So you know, things I would like to see more about is like how much money is being spent on this stuff? Who was the ultimate buyer of this ad? How much of the interaction in this post was paid for versus organic? You know, you'll see a lot of the sort of tactics about this Russian approach was to create a lot of fake pages that looked real enough.

And they probably used a smallish amount of money to kind of seed them in the first place into real users. You then start to share them around and kind of govern it from there. And so, how do detect that approach better?

I mean, here's an idea, a practical one. Let's oblige every political party that fights in the next election to submit all of their ads to the electoral commission. And let's put some simple rules around what can and can't be said, which reflect in the online space all the values and principles which we've long considered to be important for advertising in any other arena.

Yeah. Absolutely. Budgets, content, and targets, that's what we need to see in social advertising from the parties. And it makes sense for the electoral commission to collect that data and make it available to them.

I'm afraid we're going to probably have to stop there. I think we could keep talking about this and there are plenty more interesting projects I think to come. But for the moment, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us. If you would like to read more from the People's Technology Special Report, you can find it at FT.com/reports/peoples-technology.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is social media empowering us or manipulating us?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social media can be exploited by foreign powers and interest groups during elections in ways that are hard to track, but tech projects such as Who Targets Me and Swap my Vote are fighting back, attempting to bring people a greater sense of transparency and control.

# data[].attributes.headline
New Report - Freedom on the Net 2017: Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy

# data[].attributes.subject
New Report - Freedom on the Net 2017: Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Governments around the world are dramatically increasing their efforts to manipulate information on social media, threatening the notion of the internet as a liberating technology, according to Freedom on the Net 201 the latest edition of the annual country-by-country assessment of online freedom, released today by Freedom House.

Online manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 18 countries over the past year, including the United States, damaging citizens' ability to choose their leaders based on factual news and authentic debate. The content manipulation contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, along with a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media.

"The use of paid commentators and political bots to spread government propaganda was pioneered by China and Russia but has now gone global," said Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House. "The effects of these rapidly spreading techniques on democracy and civic activism are potentially devastating."

"Governments are now using social media to suppress dissent and advance an antidemocratic agenda," said Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project. "Not only is this manipulation difficult to detect, it is more difficult to combat than other types of censorship, such as website blocking, because it's dispersed and because of the sheer number of people and bots deployed to do it."

"The fabrication of grassroots support for government policies on social media creates a closed loop in which the regime essentially endorses itself, leaving independent groups and ordinary citizens on the outside," Kelly said.

Freedom on the Net 2017 assesses internet freedom in 65 countries, accounting for 87 percent of internet users worldwide. The report primarily focuses on developments that occurred between June 2016 and May 2017, although some more recent events are included as well.

Governments in a total of 30 countries deployed some form of manipulation to distort online information, up from 23 the previous year. Paid commentators, trolls, bots, false news sites, and propaganda outlets were among the techniques used by leaders to inflate their popular support and essentially endorse themselves.

In the Philippines, members of a "keyboard army" are tasked with amplifying the impression of widespread support of the government's brutal crackdown on the drug trade. Meanwhile, in Turkey, reportedly 6,000 people have been enlisted by the ruling party to counter government opponents on social media.

Most governments targeted public opinion within their own borders, but others sought to expand their interests abroad-exemplified by a Russian disinformation campaign to influence the American election. Fake news and aggressive trolling of journalists both during and after the presidential election contributed to a score decline in the United States' otherwise generally free environment.

Governments in at least 14 countries actually restricted internet freedom in a bid to address content manipulation. Ukrainian authorities, for example, blocked Russia-based services, including the country's most widely used social network and search engine, after Russian agents flooded social media with fabricated stories advancing the Kremlin's narrative.

"When trying to combat online manipulation from abroad, it is important for countries not to overreach," Kelly said. "The solution to manipulation and disinformation lies not in censoring websites but in teaching citizens how to detect fake news and commentary. Democracies should ensure that the source of political advertising online is at least as transparent online as it is offline."

For the third consecutive year, China was the world's worst abuser of internet freedom, followed by Syria and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the government shut down mobile networks for nearly two months as part of a state of emergency declared in October 2016 amid large-scale antigovernment protests.

Less than one-quarter of the world's internet users reside in countries where the internet is designated Free, meaning there are no major obstacles to access, onerous restrictions on content, or serious violations of user rights in the form of unchecked surveillance or unjust repercussions for legitimate speech.
Key Findings

Governments manipulated social media to undermine democracy: Governments in 30 countries of the 65 countries assessed attempted to control online discussions. The practice has become significantly more widespread and technically sophisticated over last few years.

State censors targeted mobile connectivity: An increasing number of governments have restricted mobile internet service for political or security reasons. Half of all internet shutdowns in the past year were specific to mobile connectivity, with most others affecting mobile and fixed-line service simultaneously. Most mobile shutdowns occurred in areas populated with ethnic or religious minorities such as Tibetan areas in China and Oromo areas in Ethiopia.

More governments restricted live video: As live video gained popularity with the emergence of platforms like Facebook Live, and Snapchat's Live Stories internet users faced restrictions or attacks for live streaming in at least nine countries, often to prevent streaming of antigovernment protests. Countries likes Belarus disrupted mobile connectivity to prevent livestreamed images from reaching mass audience.

Technical attacks against news outlets, opposition, and rights defenders increased: Cyberattacks against government critics were documented in 34 out of 65 countries. Many governments took additional steps to restrict encryption, leaving citizens further exposed.

New restrictions on virtual private networks (VPNs): 14 countries now restrict tools used to circumvent censorship in some form and six countries introduced new restrictions, either legal bans or technical blocks on VPN websites or network traffic.

Physical attacks against netizens and online journalists expanded dramatically: The number of countries that featured physical reprisals for online speech increased by 50 percent over the past year-from 20 to 30 of the countries assessed. In eight countries, people were murdered for their online expression. In Jordan, a Christian cartoonist was murdered for mocking Islamist militants' vision of heaven, while in Myanmar, a journalist was murdered after posting on Facebook notes that alleged corruption.

Since June 2016, 32 of the 65 countries assessed in Freedom on the Net saw internet freedom deteriorate. Most notable declines were documented in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey.

To view the report, see www.freedomonthenet.org.

Join us on Facebook and Twitter (freedomhousedc). Stay up to date with Freedom House's latest news and events by signing up for our newsletter and our blog.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Report - Freedom on the Net 2017: Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Governments around the world are dramatically increasing their efforts to manipulate information on social media, threatening the notion of the internet as a liberating technology, according to Freedom on the Net 2017, the latest edition of the annual country-by-country assessment of online freedom, released today by Freedom House.

# data[].attributes.headline
Online Manipulation: All The Ways You’re Currently Being Deceived

# data[].attributes.subject
Online Manipulation: All The Ways You’re Currently Being Deceived

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a fine line between online persuasion and manipulation.

In university, most classes, at least in the humanities and social sciences, dealt at least in partial with the morality of the lessons we learned. Especially in marketing and communications classes, there was the line between persuasion and propaganda.

Online, though, for whatever reasons, ethics aren't discussed as frequently. Of course, we're all in the business of persuasion, at least to the extent that we'd like people to buy our products. Nir Eyal put it well a while back:

"We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people "users" and even if we don't say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted."

But, in the end, what differentiates persuasion from its more evil cousin?

The Facebook Controversy: A Contemplation of Ethics

Not that ethics in experimentation has ever been very clear cut, but the internet has made things even weirder.

We all (hopefully) remember the Facebook scandal, where Facebook manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to see if they could affect their emotional state. They basically skewed the number of positive or negative items on random users' news feeds and then analyzed these people's future postings. The result? Facebook can manipulate your emotions.

As AV Club put it, "Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It's less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated."

The publication of these results, of course, led to massive blowback. Though people signed off their permission for Facebook to do such a thing, it still came as a shock that they would test something like emotional manipulation on such a massive level. As such, it became one of the most salient discussions in online manipulation in recent memory.

What is "Skinner Box Marketing"?

You remember B.F. Skinner from psychology 101? He conducted all sorts of messed up studies around ' operant conditioning'. Well there are a few voices claiming that we're entering a new age of Digital Skinner Box Marketing. According to The Atlantic, it's essentially ...

We're entering the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser's interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.

Joseph Bentzel broke the process down into three broad pillars..

Three Pillars of Skinner Box Marketing:
1. Emotional manipulation as 'strategy'
Accoriding to Bentzel, "the emotional manipulation is always and often rationalized under the flag of 'serving the customer'."
2. The new 'chief marketing technologist' as that 'man behind the strategy curtain'.
Bentzel:

"On the surface the 'chief marketing technologist' looks like strategic marketing progress in the digital age. But when you combine these powerful technologies with emotional manipulation as strategy--you're getting pretty close to something more than a few folks see as unethical."

3. The 'big data scientist' as 'skinner box management' provider.
You need big data to fuel these insights. Therefore, Bentzel lists this as the third pillar of Skinner Box Marketing:

"And not just any big data but the kind of big data that provides a 360 degree surround-sound view of the specimen in the digital skinner box, aka the consumer. The big data component of the skinner box data management model is now on the agenda at the big analyst firms. They call it 'customer context'."

Digital Market Manipulation

The ascension of Skinner Box Marketing on the internet is backed by an academic concept Digital Market Manipulation.

Market Manipulation, the original theory, supplements and challenges law and economics with the extensive evidence that people do not always behave rationally in their best interest as traditional economic models. Rather, to borrow a phrase from Dan Ariely, humans are "predictably irrational."

Digital Marketing Manipulation builds onto this theory, focusing on the dramatic capabilities of the digitization of commerce to increase the ability of firms to influence consumers at a personal level.

In other words, M. Ryan Calo posits that emerging technologies and techniques will increasingly allow companies to exploit consumers' irrationality or vulnerability. Essentially, the internet makes it that much easier to exploit emotions on a personal level and manipulate actions.

Anyway, all of this is to say that companies can and have been manipulating consumers in a variety of ways. On the internet, these are most often referred to as "dark pattens."

Dark Patterns, Reintroduced

You've almost assuredly heard of 'dark patterns':

"Normally when you think of "bad design", you think of the creator as being sloppy or lazy but with no ill intent. This type of bad design is known as a "UI anti-pattern". Dark Patterns are different - they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user's interests in mind. We as designers, founders, UX & UI professionals and creators need to take a stance against Dark Patterns."

The holy grail of dark patterns examples is at darkpatterns.org. Check that out. They list 14 categories of dark patterns:

1. Bait and Switch

2. Disguised Ads

3. Faraway Bill

4. Forced Continuity

5. Forced Disclosure

6. Friend Spam

7. Hidden Costs

8. Misdirection

9. Price Comparison Prevention

10. Privacy Zuckering

11. Roach Motel

12. Road Block

13. Sneak in the Basket

14. Trick Questions

Flip around the site and check out some of their examples. I know you'll recognize these techniques and probably be able to find tons more examples..

Example: Google's Disguised Ads

As the SEO Doctor pointed out, even Google isn't always so righteous in their practices. He gave two examples of their (possible) dark pattern of disguising ads.

Though I think the first one may be a bit exaggerated, the article gives the example of the deceptive background color of Google's sponsored links. For example...

The second example I thought was a little more legitimate, because, well, I've definitely fallen for it many times.

SEO Doctor draws attention to the arrow box on adwords - you know, when you're on a blog and there's a button that looks as if it will send you to the next page. But, no. It's a subtle ad.

Blackhat Copywriting

Challenges of ethics are not new in advertising. Read any advertising history book to see the messed up tactics they'd use to manipulate readers. But, of course, manipulative copywriting still exists on the internet (and it's probably easier to get away with it, too).

Instead of scouring the internet for bogus claims (of which there are many - check some out here), here are three very specific, and not often talked about, copywriting manipulations:

1. Testiphonials

2. False Scarcity

3. The Damning Admission

Testiphonials

You know not all testimonials are legit, right?

Of course they aren't. Testimonials work more often than not in A/B tests (at least the trustworthy ones), but they're not all done ethically. Take this one for example, where a company pulled a quote from a ConversionXL article to get a fake testimonial from Peep:

Testimonials, when authentic or perceived to be authentic, boost the credibility of your offer by engaging social proof. It's more common than you'd think for companies to fake or embellish testimonials. Keep an eye out for that.

False Scarcity

False scarcity is a pretty common tactic in online marketing. It's also infuriating, and it can obviously backfire if the consumer catches onto it.

Peep wrote about this a while ago, giving the example of the following email he received:

Normally scarcity works (a pillar of Cialdini's 6 persuasion principles), but when it's deliberately forced like this? It screams sleazy. The email was referring to a digital course that, somehow, had sold out of monthly pay as you go levels, but still had yearly memberships available. Funny how that works.

The Damning Admission

This one is pretty common in infomarketing, but it's been applied to more than just that field.

Basically, the damning admission is designed to lower the guard of the consumer and make your offer seems more authentic and credible. Here's how White Hat Crew described it:

"Just before making a claim that you want people to believe, you admit something negative about your product. By demonstrating your willingness to show your product in it's true light, you gain credibility, and the prospect is more likely to believe your positive claim.

Of course, this technique can be used either to shine a more perfect light on the truth (to help people accept a true but exceptional claim that would usually be received with skepticism), or to manipulate (to trick people into accepting a false claim).

Your intent may guide your decision to use the technique or not, but it's the truth or falsehood of the claim that determines whether it's persuasive or manipulative."

As implied by the above quote, the damning admission isn't always unethical. Heck, most of the time it's an example of truly and authentically describing your product. But when one employs the strategy in order to legitimize a false claim that follows, it's an example of blackhat copywriting.

The Power of Defaults

The power of defaults? That's something Jakob Nielsen wrote about about a decade ago in relation to search engines. Turns out, users almost always pick the top option (even when the top 1 and 2 switch places). This leads to the idea that users overwhelmingly choose the default option in online decision making. Of course, many companies exploit this.

An example of this online comes from none other than RyanAir (via darkpatterns.org). They offer travel insurance but the free option to decline it.

Not only do you have to look in a list called 'Insurance - country of residence', but the free option, 'Don't insure me', distinguished at all for easy access. They've placed it alphabetically between Denmark and Finland.

Negative Option features

The power of defaults can be positive, but negatively embodied the tactic becomes known as 'negative option features.'

These negative option features have been written about extensively by the BBB, Visa, and many others interested in deterring online deception. Here's Visa's description of a negative option feature:

"Consumers accept an offer online, often for a "free trial" or "sample." They provide their card information in order to pay a small amount for shipping. What they may not realize is that there is a pre-checked box at the bottom of the page in fine print or buried in the terms and conditions that authorizes future charges. Consumers are required to un-click or opt-out of a pre-checked terms and conditions or payment authorization box or cancel before the end of the trial period to avoid being billed a recurring monthly charge.

For free trials with a negative option feature, a company takes a consumer's failure to cancel as permission to continue billing. Cancelling can also be complicated by merchants with poor customer service, slow response times, and untimely refunds."

Tricking You Out of Tips

For one last real world example, picture yourself purchasing a large latte at your local coffee shop.

When you go to pay, it's now almost always done on an Ipad. According to Nir Eyal, "digital payment systems use subtle tactics to increase tips, and while it's certainly good for hard-working service workers, it may not be so good for your wallet."

Again, the power of defaults.

First, by removing physical cash from the equation, they remove many barriers to tipping. For example, what Dan Ariely coined as the Pain of Paying - that's no longer applicable. Also, leaving a tip on the digital system is easy - equally as easy as it is not to tip. Here's how Nir Eyal put it:

Nir Eyal:

"When cash was king, anyone not wanting to give a tip could easily leave the money and dash. "Whoops, my bad!" However, with a digital payment system the transaction isn't complete until the buyer makes an explicit tipping choice. Clicking on the "No Tip" button is suddenly its own decision. This additional step makes all the difference to those who may have previously avoided taking care of their server."

Another way they increase our tip amounts is by anchoring. At a coffee shop it may be the worst, because you're likely to purchase less than a $4 cup of coffee. The three options you're usually presented for a tip on the screen are $1, $2, and $3 (and a custom amount).

Because of the anchoring effect, we're drawn to pick the middle option, even though that's a large amount more than the suggested tip percentage. Nir Eyal gave an example of his taxi ride to explain this:

Nir Eyal:

The vendor knows you likely won't pick the least expensive amount - only cheapskates would do that. So even though 15 percent is squarely within the normal tipping range, by making it the first option, you're more likely to chose 20 percent. Picking the middle-of-the-road option is in-line with your self-image of not being a tightwad. Therefore, you tip more and you're not alone. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission reported tips increased from 10 percent to 22 percent on average when the new payment screens were turned on.

Note: this isn't an example of online manipulation, but rather an illustration of the power of defaults. If anchoring and defaults make it easy to increase physical tips, then think about this example next time you're confronted with a pricing decision online.

Conclusion: The Blurred Line of Right or Wrong

So online manipulation exists, clearly. What, then, do we do about it?

A common answer might very well be: "Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware)."

That, however, places a lot of responsibility on the irrational side of the consumer's mind. That's where knowledge (via articles like this and archives like darkpatterns.org) comes in handy; if you can detect deception, you're more likely to avoid it.

Then there's the question of the difference between manipulation and marketing, which I never really answered. That's a tough question for anyone to answer. I like Roger Dooley's answer to it, though:

Roger Dooley:

"My response to the "manipulation" question is always, "If you are being honest, and if you are helping the customer get to a better place, it's not manipulation and it's not unethical."

In today's age of enforced transparency for business, manipulative tactics that deceive the customer simply won't work. They will be quickly exposed and, with consumer voices amplified by social media, cause far more damage to the business than any short-term benefit."

There are certain tactics here that are used prevalently, by large companies, but are by a large majority viewed as unethical. Therefore, dark patterns and online manipulation is a complex ethical decision, one that hinges on the balance between doing what's right and doing what's effective.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Online Manipulation: All The Ways You're Currently Being Deceived

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a fine line between online persuasion and manipulation. In university, most classes, at least in the humanities and social sciences, dealt at least in partial with the morality of the lessons we learned. Especially in marketing and communications classes, there was the line between persuasion and propaganda.

# data[].attributes.headline
Wikipedia: Broad Search - Media Manipulation

# data[].attributes.subject
Wikipedia: Broad Search - Media Manipulation

# data[].attributes.body
Great starting point; Media Manipulation and how it can influence you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Media manipulation is a series of related techniques in which partisans create an image or argument that favours their particular interests. Such tactics may include the use of logical fallacies, psychological manipulations, outright deception, rhetorical and propaganda techniques, and often involve the suppression of information or points of view by crowding them out, by inducing other people or groups of people to stop listening to certain arguments, or by simply diverting attention elsewhere.