Have you ever spoken with Donald Trump? Have you ever met him?
Statistically speaking, by far the vast majority of American voters have never seen, much less met, the candidates they will be voting for this fall. The only way we know them is through the media and advertisements.
This leaves a lot of room for third parties to interfere with the knowledge we derive about these candidates. And indeed, there is a terrible and fearsome foe that is rigging the U.S. elections.
I am not just referring to TikTok, the controversial app with ties far too close to the Chinese Communist Party. I am also referring to American social media companies, which the politicians are allowing to get away with this.
But let’s start with TikTok, which more than 170 million Americans use (including both of our presidential candidates). This is after clear evidence that China is using TikTok to spread disinformation, including anti-American propaganda.
Do you think it was a coincidence that Osama bin Laden’s “letter to America” went viral on TikTok shortly after the October 7 massacre of Jews by Hamas, and the day after President Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the subject?
TikTok is the single biggest carrier of disinformation in the U.S. It is responsible for the radicalization of two generations of Americans. It is as dangerous as it gets. And dozens of congressman and both of our presidential candidates (who used to advocate a ban of TikTok) are now dancing away on it for anyone who cares to watch.
In fact, it would be “politically insane” for Democrats to ban TikTok, given their need to reach young voters. Yet there is clear evidence that TikTok spread false information about the 2020 election to hundreds of thousands of American voters. Do you think it magically isn’t going to do it in 2024?
Perhaps it’s just common sense that a platform controlled by our biggest global competitor would be used against us. But even more insidious are the American social media giants that are allowing this same interference by foreign adversaries.
Apple, in the name of profit, has allowed innumerable apps that are little more than tools owned and created by Russia, China and Iran to infiltrate the American public. For example, FaceApp (the social media app that ages you) had about over 80 million downloads by American citizens, with the terms and conditions saying that the Russian-owned company, with connections to Vladimir Putin’s regime, could use their uploaded images “in perpetuity.” In other words, you can expect a few million Twitter bots at least, using real Americans’ faces and names, coming at you in the election disinformation cycle.
Grindr, a gay dating app, was sold to a Chinese tech firm in 2018. The U.S. is now forcing it to be sold back, citing a national security risk. The users of the app input their locations and even HIV status. Now all that information is potentially in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party — a perfect recipe for blackmail against U.S. civilian and military leaders.
The New York Times reported that Facebook gave access to more than 150 companies, a fact that Zuckerberg previously did not disclose, including giving Microsoft’s search engine Bing access to your data without consent and allowing companies such as Spotify and Netflix to read private messages.
At the top of the list is Yandex, the company behind what is essentially the Russian version of Google’s search engine. All that very private information (of millions of Americans) going directly to the Kremlin scares me. But what scares me more is that Facebook is defending this activity, citing “no evidence of abuse by its partners.”
Really?
Facebook claims it bans developers when it finds misuse. But I don’t trust Facebook even to know when developers are doing bad things, much less their interest in doing anything about it.
According to the Statistics Portal, Facebook has more than 200 million American users. Instagram has more than 100 million American users and Twitter has about 70 million. Although a fair number of these individuals will overlap, it is safe to say that statistically more than 60 percent of the U.S. population has most likely been exposed to foreign propaganda and influences.
These are just a few examples of the new tech war being brought to our doorstep under the guise of capitalism and some fun social media experiences. And this doesn’t even account for Facebook’s own clear political leanings.
People have noticed that the company’s application of suspension and account-deletion rules is not consistent between liberal and conservative accounts. Even as study after study supposedly proves that there is no political bent to what Facebook chooses to censor, Facebook refuses to release the data that would answer that question, meaning that any study you see is based on the wrong data. The data that is truly needed is a rundown of what posts are reaching the most people — a metric that Facebook simply won’t release.
If there weren’t a political bent to their censorship, then why wouldn’t they just release the data?
The question is not whether Russia, China and Iran are going to try to disrupt the 2024 elections, but rather, whether our government is going to let them. It certainly did in 2016 and 2020. I’m not sure why we think 2024 will be any different.
Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.
