Today’s technological age, with the incessant flood of information, is inevitably victim to malicious content in the form of fake profiles and fake news on social media. The rapid dissemination of news across the world has woken us up to the realization that such malicious incidents are occurring every day, giving us an intimation that the Internet’s Dark Triad is upon us.
2017 saw the Russians interfering with the US presidential elections by sponsoring fake social media accounts and placing advertisements on Facebook, YouTube, and Google. Although policymakers were understandably angered at these platforms’ inability to restrict such attacks, we must recognize that they were mere facilitators providing a convenient platform for a much larger propaganda process by the Internet’s Dark Triad: spear phishing, trolling, and fake news. It is this triad that we need to understand and stop.
The tip of this triad is spearphishing, which is malware-laden email attachments and hyperlinks that when clicked grant backdoor access into the individual’s computer and systems. The other end of this triad is online trolling campaigns, which involve nation-states hijacking online conversations by flooding message-boards with counter-narratives. And the final dark anchor is “fake news” which is the latest form of online propaganda aimed at distorting information and spreading speculative views as real news. The same phony social media profiles create these fake news items along with being used for trolling. And as this fake news becomes a part of spirited conversation topics, facts get added and it leads to the creation of even more sensational content, spinning into further news cycles. This is in fact how the Russians infiltrated the US elections, seeding in divisive political arguments, counter-narratives, and conspiracy theories through fake news websites and trolling campaigns. The Russians made many among us rethink our democratic processes which ultimately influenced the elections. Thus, with such harmful consequences, we are in dire need of a mechanism that stops this triad completely.
To find out these mechanisms and more information, please click on https://www.arunvishwanath.us/2017/11/30/its-not-just-fake-news-it-is-the-internets-dark-triad-we-should-be-worried-about/