Automated Epistemology: Bots, Computational Propaganda & Information Literacy Instruction

Abstract

Computational technologies have vastly replaced our prior modalities of information seeking. Social media platforms have become the first choice of many information seekers. Increasingly, these platforms are also becoming vehicles for coordinated, manipulative disinformation campaigns. These campaigns of computational propaganda have resulted in an information environment in which the assignment of authority and trust in information sources has become increasingly opaque. This epistemic process of information evaluation has increasingly become the purview of automated algorithmic systems that we as human beings tend to falsely implicitly trust to provide us with the most accurate information available. Propagandists have begun to exploit the algorithmic components of these systems as well as human cognitive deficits in order to manipulate public opinion, control the narrative of public discourse, and flood our information ecosystems in order to work towards the manufacture of false consensus on a wide range of political and cultural issues. This work aims to review and synthesize the literature on computational propaganda, how it manipulates our human cognitive deficits, and how information literacy can be utilized in order to correct for the resultant epistemic failure.