Three Oxford researchers honoured by Royal Society

The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in media, public institutions and science. Now, a new report from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University , has found that despite efforts to combat computational propaganda, the problem is growing at a large scale. "The number of countries where formally organised social media manipulation occurs has greatly increased, from 28 to 48 countries globally," says Samantha Bradshaw, co-author of the report. 'The majority of growth comes from political parties who spread disinformation and junk news around election periods. There are more political parties learning from the strategies deployed during Brexit and the US 2016 Presidential election: more campaigns are using bots, junk news, and disinformation to polarise and manipulate voters.' This is despite efforts by governments in many democracies introducing new legislation designed to combat fake news on the internet. 'The problem with this is that these 'task forces' to combat fake news are being used as a new tool to legitimise censorship in authoritarian regimes,' says Professor Phil Howard, co-author and lead researcher on the OII's Computational Propaganda project.