News Analysis: How hackers, social bots and data analytics shaped the U.S. election

by Chen Yanbei, Guo Shuang

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- Information technology and data science have played prominent roles in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The presidential candidates spent millions of dollars on data analytics in order to target specific voters while social bots attempt to manipulate discussions on social media; hackers meanwhile are causing further turmoil by leaking emails.

DATA ANALYTICS

With our lives becoming more digitized, data analytics has become an increasingly important tool in U.S. political campaigns to reach out to voters.

The Democratic Party embraced data science early on. Since the 2008 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee began gathering data sets of voters, which included information about "which magazines they subscribe to, whether they like to vote early, and how likely they are to open certain emails," wrote a recent report on Statistics Views.

During this election, the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton hired about 60 analysts under the guidance of the statistician Elan Kriegel, Clinton's director of analytics. Kriegel was also Barack Obama's battleground states analytics director in 2012.

"(Data analytics) tools help campaigns identify how to most effectively allocate their resources (and) be smart about how and when to target their voters," commented R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology, in an interview with Xinhua.

During the democratic primaries, Kriegel's analytics team was "responsible for deciding where and when to place each of the 60 million dollars that Clinton invested on TV ads," wrote the new report, by optimizing the "cost per flappable delegate." The report attributed Clinton's success over Bernie Sanders to the efficient use of data analytics.

By contrast, Donald Trump's republican campaign was less open about its data operations than its rival. Back in May, Trump told the media that he felt data analytics was "overrated," and that he planned to win the election solely by his own personality. Trump did not invest on data analytics during the primaries, but did start spending millions of dollars in the summer at the insistence of his close advisors.

SOCIAL BOTS

Not only did the campaigns analyze massive amount of voter data, they also actively influenced people's opinions by manipulating social media.

"Many recent papers have demonstrated how people's opinions are swayed by what they read online, (and) bots can contribute to that effect," said Emilio Ferrara, a research assistant professor at the Information Science Institute of the University of Southern California.

A recent study by Ferrara and his colleague Alessandro Bessi found that nearly one fifth of all 20 million election-related tweets they collected between mid-September and late October were from "social bots," automated computer programs that are designed to pose as real people, sometimes without disclosing their true artificial identity.

The computer scientists found that Twitter accounts identified as pro-Trump bots have mainly been tweeting positive messages, increasing the republican nominee's popularity, while only half of pro-Clinton bots were spreading positive messages, with the other half criticizing the democratic nominee.

With online and open-source social bot tools readily available, political parties, local, national and foreign governments and "even single individuals with adequate resources could obtain the operational capabilities and technical tools to deploy armies of social bots and affect the directions of online political conversation," said the scientists.

The scientists were not able to identify the masterminds behind the bots, and they are worried that the presence of these bots can negatively affect democratic political discussion and endanger the integrity of the presidential election.

HACKERS

Hackers added even more turmoil into this year's already unusual election.

Large numbers of emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, were released in batches on the WikiLeaks website, revealing embarrassing private discussions within the Clinton campaign.

By analyzing some of the leaked emails, some speculate that Podesta fell into the trap of a "phishing email" back in March, which posed as Google's account-services department and directed him to a fake website to give his email password.

In October, the Obama administration officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere with the elections, by hacking the computers of political organizations including the Democratic National Committee.

"The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations," said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security in a joint statement.

The accusation was dismissed by the Kremlin. Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, also denied that the Russian government or any other "state parties" could have been the source of the Podesta emails.

Last summer, in an interview with Bloomberg, Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand-based founder of MegaUpload, said that Julian Assange would be Hillary Clinton's "worst nightmare" in 2016.

"I know where Hillary Clinton's deleted emails are and how to get them legally," the German millionaire tweeted on Oct. 27, adding that they "are all stored in the NSA (National Security Agency) spy cloud in Utah."