Particularly revealing was a Sky News report on 16 May 2017 focusing on comments by Will Critchlow, chief executive of digital consultancy Distilled. Concerned about the UK’s lack of oversight on digital campaigning (for instance, parties are not required to publically record all their spending on social media), Critchlow warned about Facebook’s hyper-targeted, hyper-local messages that, due to their nature, are invisible to most people (including journalists). Other techniques are: (a) creation of fake pages to attract opponents, using this to plant cookies in their browsers and then delivering attack adverts; (b) rankslurs – namely, creating damaging websites designed to appear in Google’s search rankings for your opponents; and (c) impersonation – namely pretending to be a candidate’s aide on Twitter, then expressing plausible but damaging opinions.
Whether done by bots or human influencers, that people may be surreptitiously emotionally engaged in online debates is deeply worrying. There are precedents for such targeting of sentiment and feelings, not least the Facebook Mood study that revealed evidence of emotional contagion. This showed that exposure to a particular type of emotional content in users’ Facebook news feeds stimulates posting behaviour that reflects the emotional charge of that content. In other words, change the informational context and you can change behaviour.
http://www.electionanalysis.uk/uk-el...otions-online/