Cognitive Bias and Democracy
Foreign Influence and Social Media
At just about every level of American society, if a person is asked: "How do you feel about foreign influence in our political process?" Most people, if not everyone, will answer that there is no place in American politics for foreign influence. Public officials, activists, and journalists would probably be the most forceful in this opinion. Further, most people would agree that foreign influence in politics needs to be prevented and and if found it ought to be stopped.
- A great deal of journalism in this era of Social Media calls into question things like "did the Russians influence the 2016 election?" Reports on this topic often are written to highlight how bad this influence is and how the government and the social media companies ought to "Do Something." With this kind of criticism in play, services like Facebook are reporting that they are applying a growing amount of attention to this "problem."
Background
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment.[1] Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. -- Wikipedia