FaceApp and Political Meddling
The notorious “FaceApp” has captured a lot of attention lately. The app, which allows anyone to see what they will look like as they age over 30 years, went viral on the internet. People were posting older versions of themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and everywhere in between. It’s a fascinating psychological phenomenon that everyone wanted to see themselves aged so drastically, but that’s another post.
As images of newly minted Seniors flooded the internet, troubling details began to emerge. By using the app, consumers were unwittingly allowing a company in Russia access to their images and maybe even their Facebook information.
The team at ePluribus began to research the app. Imagine our shock when the very first search result was a fake article from Russia!
The article stated that the app was from a company in St. Petersburg, FL instead of St. Petersburg, Russia. It even claimed that the app deleted your information, which it clearly did not. With all of the political meddling and interference America has faced in the 2016 Presidential elections (including Mueller literally testifying before Congress about his findings on foreign interference!), how have we allowed this to happen?
Creating articles is quite easy. Anyone can post to several news sites as opinions — sites intentionally designed to look legitimate and newsworthy. In the fraudulent example above, the homepage immediately presents reams of articles. The sheer volume of articles is overwhelming and must have been time consuming to create. The result: it is nearly impossible to tell the real from the fake, and millions of Americans end up trusting false information deliberately planted to mislead them.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that articles such as these provide real facts? And how does fake news impact the first amendment? According to the Harvard Law Review blog , we need to be careful that, in our rush to want to condemn fake news sites, we do not trample on our first amendment rights.
Yet Sunlight Foundation’s Christopher Gates in his “Eulogy for Poltiwoops” states that “shared conversations are increasingly taking place in privately owned and managed walled gardens” (i.e. Facebook or Twitter) which means that such conversations are subject to private rules. Speech is artificially constrained on these platforms, resulting in echo chambers of opinion.
As the 2020 Presidential elections are around the corner, do you think we’ve done enough to solve the issue of spammers, bots and interference from external governments?
Let your representative know your views at www.epluribus.io.
