I don't know, guys - maybe I'm way diverged from reality, but I question the "effectiveness" of trolls/bots/mean people leveraging social media and accomplishing something significant. 126 million were "reached", but where they "turned"? I'm skeptical of the actual influence. Not saying it's not a legitimate concern about potential mal-influence, but I didn't see direct relationships between this activity and the polls during the election - the polls moved most dramatically from public/news reported information, if this stuff was effective we would've seen poll swings for no apparent reason, which we didn't see that.
I don't think it's really an issue of "turning" or not. It's just an effort to reduce the level of discourse. In other words, make people more apt to turn to confirming unsourced information, because it's plentiful and, well, confirming.
Well, in the case of the doctored Aziz Ansari picture, there was a percentage (however small or large it is) of people who straight up didn't vote because they thought Aziz Ansari was telling them they could vote with a # by text (and that's just the impact of one of some three thousand - I believe - now documented "ads" that were paid for by Russia).
Tao, specifically were there not three states that usually vote red who ended up voting blue? I read a really long piece about all this around Dec last year, though I'd have to go digging for it.
And to what H is saying, what is scary for me is that there's no regulation in place - the discussion of these issues with facebook, google, and twitter's legal counsels are
fucking laughably ignorant so far.
I'm all for innovation which leverage our species into more agreeable social interactions but, classically, this showing by the social-tech giants bears all the hallmarks of money-sickness.