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The student voice of the Ohio State University
Thursday, February 22, 2018
thelantern.com
@TheLantern
Year 138, Issue No. 13
USG campaigns set to begin AMANDA PARRISH Lantern reporter parrish.272@osu.edu Undergraduate Student Government’s campaign season will officially begin at 8 p.m. Sunday and two pairs of candidates for president and vice president are on this year’s ballot. One campaign, consisting of second-years Jeremy Cronig and Ezequiel Herrera, ended its campaign Wednesday night before the official season kicked off. “It comes as a bitter-sweet sadness to say that Jeremy and I will be suspending our campaign effective immediately,” Herrera said in an email. “In short, it all comes down again to why we started, our mission, and making sure that our values and CAMPAIGN SEASON CONTINUES ON 2
COURTESY OF THE BROOKS CAMPAIGN
USG presidential candidate Reese Brooks (right) and vice-presidential candidate Reagan Brooks (left).
COURTESY OF THE MERCHANT-SEMMLER CAMPAIGN
USG presidential candidate Shamina Merchant and vice-presidential candidate Shawn Semmler.
Bots, deception, fake news: Whose responsibility is it to monitor social media? JERROD A. MOGAN Lantern reporter mogan.7@osu.edu Nick Davis said he spends “every day, all day” on Twitter and often uses the network to promote his favorable views of President Donald Trump. So, when he received an email in late 2017 saying he interacted with an account potentially connected to the Russian government during the 2016 election, he was not surprised. “I just kind of ignored the email,” said Davis, a fourth-year in natural resource management. “I don’t put too much weight into that kind of stuff.” Emails like the one Davis received are part of an ongoing effort by social media companies at the request of Congress to address the growing problem of misinformation on their networks. A majority of U.S. adults — 67 percent — receive some news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. Gleb Tsipursky, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State, said companies like Facebook and Twitter are responsible for the information shared on their networks. “Social media tries to get away from its actual role. They should be acting like a news agency,” he said, referencing how most news agencies verify information they spread. Roughly 1.4 million people received the same email as Davis from Twitter, according to its blog post about the matter. The emails were sent to those who
COURTESY OF TNS
Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, Twitter Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett, and Google Senior Vice President Kent Walker are sworn in before a hearing on Capitol Hill in November. had “certain types of interactions” with the nearly 4,000 accounts connected to the Internet Research Agency, a propagandist organization linked to the Russian government, according to Twitter. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s interference into the election, recently issued indictments for 12 employees of the agency. Davis said he doubts he interacted with a propaganda account and likely only saw a tweet from a Russian source, adding it didn’t affect his vote. Twitter also announced the deletion of more than 50,000 Russian-linked automated ac-
counts — or bots — that were programmed to tweet election material and push inflammatory messages related to immigration and the deportation of refugees. The tweets reached many Americans across the country. In fact, the involvement of bots stretched to the Ohio State community. Following the car-and-knife attack on campus Nov. 28, 2016, Twitter users took to the social network to voice their support for the university community by tweeting the hashtag #prayforosu. While many of the tweets were heartfelt messages of thoughts and prayers, some consisted of
racist messages and ideas, including those sent from Russian bots, according to a database published by NBC News. The users @_nickluna_, @cassieweltch and @thefoundingson are the tip of the iceberg consisting of more than 200,000 tweets sent from more than 2,500 bots during the 2016 election, according to the database. “I hope Trump will ban Somali refugees #PrayForOSU,” @ thefoundingson tweeted Nov. 28. “#MSM is the #FakeNews WE are the new #Media #PrayForOSU,” @_nickluna_ retweeted the next day. Tsipursky said it’s good that
Twitter is deleting bot accounts, but the lies they spread will persist. “Even though research suggests that [people’s] opinions are strongly informed by bot accounts, people don’t believe that about themselves, so they will ignore that sort of information,” Tsipursky said. Because Twitter is a private company, Davis said it’s under no obligation to prevent misinformation on its network, adding he believes if it decides to act, it should only delete bots. “They shouldn’t be trying to limit the speech of a person,” he said, even if that person is Russian “who’s trying to sway people.” However, Tsipursky said preventing the spread of fake news is not a threat to free speech. “How can we have any sort of society where falsehoods are treated equal to real truths?” he said. “Ideas are different than facts.” Tsipursky said Twitter has never been proactive about addressing the problem of misinformation on its platform, and researchers know fake messages are a much bigger issue than the company has admitted publicly. “It’s financially disadvantageous for Twitter to reveal as much of the misinformation on Twitter as is actually happening,” he said. Facebook has taken a different approach by allowing its users to vote on the trustworthiness of SOCIAL MEDIA CONTINUES ON 5