Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Inoculating Students Against Digital Media Manipulation In The Algorithmic Age, Robert Berkman

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Propaganda, media manipulation, and bias in the news is not, of course, a new issue. However, in today’s hyper accelerated digital and social information environment, there are novel and more powerful methods being intentionally employed to convince media consumers to place their attention on, click, read/watch and believe content that was created to serve a very specific pre-existing agenda. These actors who create this agenda based news—whether political, commercial, or otherwise—today leverage machine learning, big data, behavioral psychology, knowledge of algorithms, social media user behavior, and networking theory, to created what has come to be rather dramatically called “weaponized” information. …