Idiocracy
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How hateful alt-right trolls hijacked your timeline
You don't need to get attacked by a pro-Trump troll-bot horde to know that social media is a battleground for propaganda farms. It's pretty obvious, and miles of speculative digital ink has been spilled saying as much. An Oxford study this week is getting more of that ink spilled, confirming what we already knew. But no one's spelled out what it actually means. The Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, certainly tried. That's the paper everyone's talking about this week, by the way. It looked at case studies from researchers in nine countries, interviewed 65 experts, and analyzed tens of millions of posts across seven different social media platforms during moments of heightened government propaganda activity: elections, political crises and national-security incidents.
