Galatasaray Üniversitesi İletişim Dergisi

Öz

Did
the utilization of big data change everything about how information circulates?
Our digital data have been kept in big warehouses that we name ‘big data’. All
the things that we do in virtual life leave a digital footprint and thanks to
machine learning algorithms; in our newsfeed, we mostly face contents, which
are similar to the subjects that we looked for before. Big data are being used
for manipulating people to buy new products, to travel to new places, to read
new books, etc. However, as it emerged in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica Scandal
of Facebook, sometimes those technologies construct a threat for democracy. The
underlying reason is that in our days, big data and AI algorithms have been
used by political campaign managers to manipulate and/or persuade people
through diffusion of promoted ‘false’ contents. The aim of this study, by doing
a descriptive analysis of very recent historical events like the failure of
Microsoft’s AI Tay and Youtube’s effects on the presidential election in
Brazil, is to define very current digital threats against democracy.
Additionally, to better describe and discuss these digital threats we did
semi-structured interviews with four experts who work on AI algorithms, big
data, and social engineering. Our analyses and findings that we gathered from
semi-structured interviews showed that there are several digital threats in the
post-truth era that we live in like digital manipulation, violation of data
privacy and misuse of big data, personalized search engine algorithms that
create filter bubbles, the ease of production and diffusion of fake contents.