If you haven’t been living under a rock the last couple of years, you will know that social media is such a powerful tool that can be used to get news, see the latest trends, and connect with anybody in the world. It can also create a community of people, by the thousands and millions, that can be influenced by misinformation on the internet. Even though technology runs our lives nowadays, I believe it’s important that people stick to what they believe in and not be mis influenced by “fake news”. I believe Confucianism best backs up my argument because the main goal of Confucianism is to create a harmony between a relationship. This is because in Confucianism, one’ role is important in relationships. In this case I want to look at the relationship between Facebook and its users and how Facebook used misinformation and bias to their advantage during the 2016 election to misinform users. So, in this case analysis, I will argue that Confucianism shows us that Facebook did engage in information warfare because of misinformation, and further that they were partly responsible for the election outcome because of their power to change people’s political views.

            In Prier’s article, one of the big topics he talks about is the spread of fake news in social media and how propaganda can easily penetrate mainstream media outlets. Social media is like a hives nest for these media outlets to spew out propaganda and have it reach out to many people at the click of a button. This gives these media outlets the power to post whatever propaganda they’d like, even if it’s a false narrative. This also applies to the news outlets.  In 2016, Facebook was already years ahead of the game as they had already tried different propaganda techniques during the 2012 presidential elections. Facebook is like the epicenter for fake news profiles, Facebook even ran ads on their site that spread misinformation to its users during the 2016 elections. In fact, millions of dollars were invested by Facebook going into these so called “dark ads” as they were called. Confucianism tells us how to best live our lives based on the overall path we walk. This includes things like the relationships we have with people, and your role within certain relationships. Facebook has millions of users that have a relationship with them, whether users hate Facebook, love using Facebook, or have accounts but don’t really care about Facebook, people who have accounts with Facebook subconsciously have a formed relationship with them. In Confucianism sometimes the role or relationship can change based on circumstances over time. A good example I can give you on this is when I first got my Facebook account, I used to love it. I was always on Facebook posting my status or playing Facebook games. Over time, I have realized that Facebook isn’t the company I thought it was, and how it could be misinforming me or just simply making me waste my time on it, so now I barely use it and despise Facebook. Facebook is a powerful tool, and they know they have the power to do things like change the results of an election, spreading fake news is one of the ways they can do this, and Prier did a good job covering this topic.

            Something else Prier talks about in his article is about Russia and how they use social media to their advantage by running their own propaganda and showing it in a way to get Americans to think a certain way. It’s a way for them to do things like rig elections and spread misinformation on the web. Social media is the perfect place to do that since it’s easy to access and easy to post propaganda on, like running ads meant to deceive your way of thinking. In the Facebook example, a lot of the ads that took users to different pages were run by Russian operatives who had complete control of all the traffic and data that was entering and exiting their site(s). There were even some cases of Russian trolls commenting on American forums, trying to instigate something that would make people change their views to lean more towards these troll’s views. This relates to Confucianism because it takes a lot of skill in social engineering to convince someone that you’ve never met or seen before, convince them enough to change their viewpoints on certain things. That is something these Russian operatives are very good at and in the 2016 election, a lot of the ads and pages that were most popular on the topic seemed to be Russian operated. This is a good lesson for people as well to take into that you are your own person and to not let a discussion or argument with someone on the Internet change your perception.

            In Scott’s article he talks about the ability to link devices from the most complex to the most banal poses and how that poses a huge risk for individual and national security at all levels. The way nowadays it’s very easy to edit videos and create “fake news” edited media is a huge issue that we should take better control over. If not, in the upcoming years politics, cyberbullying, and cyberstalking are going to get darker and crueler than now. In the case of Facebook, many of the articles and media that was being shown around the 2016 election time was fake news, either edited news or just completely made-up crap that was intended to skew the public into a certain perspective. I believe it’s just wrong that people take advantage of the power to mess with the way people think and make decisions and have these ads running to try to change elections. In Confucianism it’s best believed that our very best selves depend on how well our relationships are with people and the roles those people play in our lives. What I mean by this is, if we take the Facebook example, if Facebook makes no attempt to remove false information from their website, they will have many of their customers be falling into a misinformed trap so to say. Facebook is probably letting this type of propaganda run on their platform because it gives them money (greed is usually the root of all problems) and it removes that sense of trust they had with their customers. People rely on Facebook, for some this is where they get their news from. So, it’s important that Facebook works on making sure everything they have on their site isn’t misleading, unfortunately in reality, that is not the case. Many things are misleading and with today’s technology, you don’t know what’s fake and what’s real anymore.

            He also talks about how some cyber warfare should be considered cyber conflicts as things tend to overlap and issues that aren’t as big as they seem tend to be put in the same category as much worse situations. I think the spreading of false information and information gathering to rig elections is bad, just how bad is it on the grand scheme of things? One way people can look at it is if it messes with an election, that could cause someone that didn’t legitimately win the election a chance to hold a high or the highest position of power and that would affect the country for the next four years, another way you can look at it is at least these attacks don’t harm people physically and most don’t even know it’s happening to them. It’s like a scale and you’re trying to measure out how bad the attack is based on how that could affect people. Confucianism talks about how depending on what your role is in a relationship should dictate what’s expected and I believe that is somewhat true when it comes to users and social media too. If your social media platform is filled with propaganda and misinformation, you could expect a higher number of users to be misinformed on current topics.

            I believe the Facebook case was an act of information warfare. You have many users who use the site every day to get news from different pages and the possibility of there being misinformation or fake news is very high nowadays. I think Confucianism best fit this topic because there are formed relationships between user and the social media platform, and each has a role to play in the relationship. In this case your role is either the user or the service and it’s up to the service to do better at making sure false information isn’t getting to the user, especially if it’s on important things like presidential elections and politics. This Facebook case was a poor case of information warfare that was created out of greed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook got paid by Russian operatives to run these ads and not say a word about it.