Put Away Your Smartphone to Understand Tech's Impact on Elections
Students wishing to understand the chaos of national politics might listen to Cody Buntain, a new assistant professor in the Ying Wu College of Computing informatics department, who said it succinctly: "Look away from the phone."
Buntain joined NJIT this year to teach computer ethics and to research how computing systems can be built more resilient against misinformation campaigns.
The question everyone asks him, whether it's ordinary citizens or a U.S. Senate subcommittee on intelligence, is whether the 2020 election season will suffer the same debacles of outside influence as the 2016 edition. He said that's the wrong question. The right one is a matter of who, not if, because it's definitely happening.
"Trying to prevent someone from manipulating the online ecosystem is, from my point of view, a non-starter. There's too many motivations," he explained. "We don't know what the Russians are going to do. We know somebody's going to do something. The most likely thing is it's going to be somebody domestic."
Buntain noted that success for a misinformation campaign can be measured not by the outcome of an election but by the lasting damage done to the electorate's faith in the system. Interference through social media in 2016 proved that it doesn't take much to influence an election. "That becomes problematic from a functioning democracy standpoint," he said.
Buntain's current research involves tracking bias in social spaces. For example, he is studying a theory that if a user stays on YouTube long enough, then the viewer will eventually see videos for conspiracy theories. Experts call this a radicalization pathway. Buntain said it's simpler to call it a rabbit hole as The New York Times did. But whether that result is inevitable, and what if anything YouTube algorithm designers can do about it, is open to debate.
He noted that the simple adage of being careful who you listen to applies strongly in the digital world. He observed that it's intellectually healthy and helps avoid confirmation bias if you read news from reputable sources that differ from your own perspective; that it's good to be skeptical and keep in mind that extreme or niche accounts from the left, right, or any other perspective are not likely to scoop real news ahead of credible and well-funded professional news organizations; and that news isn't fake just because people object to it.
Millenials are better than senior citizens at distinguishing between fact and fiction, although people 65 and older are more likely to have real-world friends who can talk them back to Earth, Buntain said. However it's a good idea for everyone, not just young people, to have more face-to-face conversations and spend less time passively absorbing Facebook or television. Research indicates that Facebook is improving its quality of news content while Twitter is worsening, he added.
"You'll get a different set of views if you ask people, or basically engage around politics in a significant way, with people who may not necessarily be engaged online. Pay attention locally," he said.
Laura Pople is an NJIT social psychologist teaching a course in cyberpsychology, the study of technology's impact on human behavior, which is vital to understanding the controversial role of social media in political campaigns. The roots of this field date back to early computing. Today, "We're no longer talking about a society where technology is the add-in but rather the landscape in which we exist," she said.
NJIT has the first cyberpsychology program in the state, and Pople's class has all 36 seats full this semester. Students will learn what it means it means to be cyber-savvy, how to understand the minds of those who seek to deceive us online, and how to grasp its impact on society. They'll also examine topics such as online addiction, in which research is still evolving for how to identify symptoms, along with bullying and internet security.
An interesting question is how governing will differ when iGen natives are old enough to run for office. Pople joked that her crystal ball knows better than to attempt a prediction, although perhaps hints may be found in campaign strategies such as that of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who won her seat this year at age 29 based partly on trouncing the incumbent in understanding of social media.
For now, simply getting students to vote would please Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, director of NJIT's Murray Center for Women in Technology. Her office helped about 100 students register last year, hosted debate viewings, and produced town-hall discussions about current events. They're planning to repeat that process in 2019-2020. Pew Research Center, a nationwide non-partisan organization, announced in May that millennials voted in record amounts for the 2018 federal elections, reaching 42% compared to 22% in 2014. Generation Z saw 30% turn out. The two generations combined for 30.6 million votes, which was a quarter of the total votes cast in 2018. These generations will be 10% of eligible voters in 2020, the researchers stated.
Sarah Aladly, a sophomore studying chemical engineering, lived in Egypt during the 2016 election cycle. Social media is exploding there, but the government places strict limits on critical comments. "It's really more hectic. It's more of a dictatorship. You can't say your opinion out loud," she said. Here in the U.S. she plans to vote in 2020, learn about the issues by talking to people who know more, and avoid media influence.
Freshman information technology major Tyrell Michuki said he mainly got political information from his father in 2016 and now understands that much of what's on social media is fiction or outright manipulative. Another freshman, mechanical engineering major Griffin Pawelec, said students in his Scotch Plains, N.J. high school were bullied for supporting Donald Trump -- illustrating that bad behavior goes both ways.
Whether conversations occur online or offline, Buntain said he thinks reducing polarization is the key to increasing citizen awareness and improving civility in political discourse. "Can we expand standard deviation so there's more overlap? I think that would be a massive impact for good results.