Until US campaign laws are re-written, we’re likely to be in for a lot more Russian-style intervention in our elections. That’s the conclusion of at least one scholar who’s studied a problem the full extent of which “shocked” her.
According to Young Mie Kim, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison currently working as a Fellow at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, DC, “[T]he biggest issue here are the loopholes.” Because current campaign regulations fail to address social media platforms adequately, there was and is no legal bar to either Russians trolls–or the far more numerous American “dark money” groups-from using them to distract voters and sow divisiveness. Meanwhile, effective voluntary efforts to filter messages aren’t likely to be forthcoming from tech giants like Facebook, either.
If Kim is right, we will continue to see social media being used to polarize voters until campaign regulations are tightened. All the more reason to develop an online civic platform that can counteract its worst effects in the meantime.
An expanded discussion of Kim’s findings and a reference to the published version of her study were published in Wired.
