The Online Battle for Public Opinion

    The online landscape has allowed anyone to post their opinion, whether or not that opinion has evidence to back it up. This has then made an online battle for public opinion since there are so many diverging opinions. One of the largest key factors contributing to the online battle for public opinion is social media. If you have any form of social media, you will have seen someone at some point trying to make their opinion known. Having all of these opinions has led to opinions being spread that have no real backing. One example of this is the false information and opinions that were spread from the Russian Internet Research Agency's Facebook page. According to the article, Why do people spread false information online? The effects of message and viewer characteristics on self-reported likelihood of sharing social media disinformation by The National Library of Medicine, "over 30 million users shared and otherwise interacted with the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts, propagating them to their families and friends." (Buchanon, 2020) This shows that not only can the spread of false opinions affect society and democracy, but interpersonal relationships as well. They are affected since the majority of shares were between people in interpersonal relationships.

Here is the link to that article in case you want to look more into it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7541057/

    The IRA was so successful in spreading false information since the used the tactic of having people act as other people. They would have people make fake accounts acting like someone they were not so that people wouldn't be able to see that it was false information being spread. An ethical consideration someone should take when looking at the posts by IRA is to see who they might be hurting. If they notice it's hurting someone or something, they should consider not interacting with the post. Also, they could try to find another source on a similar topic and see how the opinions and information diverge. 

Sources:

Buchanan T. "Why do people spread false information online? The effects of message and    viewer characteristics on self-reported likelihood of sharing social media disinformation." PLoS One. 2020 Oct 7;15(10):e0239666. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239666. PMID: 33027262; PMCID: PMC7541057.

“Public Opinion and Polls in the 2020 Presidential Election.” CJMD, 4 Nov. 2020, cjmd.com.uw.edu/public-opinion-and-polls-in-the-2020-presidential-election/.