How govts across the world use cyber troops to manipulate public opinion

Aarohi Khanna
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

Social media importance can be gauged by the fact that Facebook now has a market capitalisation of $ 472 billion and has more than 2 billion users on the platform. There is Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube which also have a large number of users sharing content and views, discussing, debating or just consuming content every morning. Globally, social media exercises the highest influence on public discourse.

It is this function which makes it important for governments across the world to register their presence on social media. But do governments restrict themselves to only having a presence on social media or do they go beyond it? The Oxford Institute at the University of Oxford is trying to study this under the Computational Propaganda Research Project. A working paper titled “Troops,Trolls and Troublemakers:

A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation” studies how governments across the world, use organised teams to manipulate public opinion on social media.According to the report, social media has also become a tool of social control.

Governmentsnow deploy significant resources on social media “to generate content, direct opinion and engage with foreign and domestic audiences”.The paper discusses strategies, tools and techniques used for social media manipulation, how these teams are organised and their…..Read More

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