SOCIAL NETWORKS 2
4/17 AGE OF TRUMP
see fake news, conspiracy, AI bots
troll
online privacy
do w need Big 4 node?
capt 918
see punk loop vuln
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-sociophysicist-explains-how-to-save-the-internet-from-clutter-lies-and-garbage/
Once upon a time, the internet was seen a wondrous fount of knowledge and information, empowering users and spreading democracy. This utopian view resonated widely with early adopters in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, but it resonated much more broadly around the world in 2011, during the Arab Spring. There were always dark shadows noted by observers, as in Gene Rochlin’s 1997 book, “_{Trapped in the Net}_,” but collectively we’ve been blindsided and bewildered by how different the online experience has become — how much of a marketplace for rumor, fear, conspiracy theories and polarized worldviews, all watched over by purportedly neutral platform manipulations bringing us exactly what we’re told we want.
Could it be possible to recover that original promise? In a way, that promise was always naïve, as illuminated by Paulina Borsook’s 2000 book, “_{Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech}_.” As Borsook notes, it took more than half a century of government investment to make the internet’s commercial incarnation possible, contrary to Silicon Valley’s self-serving mythos. But democratic theory, history, philosophy and psychology is far richer than libertarians suppose, and there is a much more sober, realistic version of that promise — one that, for example, scientists collaborating worldwide have experienced for more than a generation now.
So could something like that become possible for all of us? A new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour strongly suggests that it could, and lays out an initial framework for what it might be like, reshaping things from the bottom up: “_{How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online}_.” As the abstract explains, the problem can be simply put:
The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web?
Framed like that, this is a scientific problem, susceptible to scientific solutions. Of course, knowing that solutions exist and implementing are two different things: Consider theclimate crisis. For a better understanding of how such a future could come to be, and what some specific steps would look like, Salon reached out to lead author Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. This interview has been edited, as is customary, for clarity and length.
AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER
What struck me first on seeing your article was that it’s not reactive, but rather affirms a positive, arguing that behavioral science “can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online.” So before talking about the paper itself, I’d like to ask about what informs your positive approach.
I think a bit of forward-looking is probably necessary. We need to be careful we don’t get into a whack-a-mole game. So, I was searching for more sustainable solutions, and you get end up getting less reactive and trying to find solutions that come from the bottom up, to think about how to change the system itself.
Were there any previous examples in internet history that were resonant for you?
One of the rare examples of online environments that promote truth — one of the shining examples — is Wikipedia. This was an inspiration, to think about how different this website looks, compared to Amazon, how it’s designed and how things are arranged.
Your paper draws attention to the asymmetry between what platforms know about users and vice versa. How do you characterize that asymmetry, and what negative consequences result that you propose to address?
The asymmetry probably comes out of dependencies we live with in this information-rich world. It gives the human brain too much to process, so we must rely on some kind of curation. That’s what the platforms do for us. That’s probably why they are successful. Google and Facebook are skyrocketing, successful, because we really, really depend on them to navigate through this information world.
Additionally, “intransparency” contributes to it. We get recommendations that we cannot really follow where they actually come from, what factors contribute to them. So we are getting increasingly dependent on intransparent platforms, where we have to rely on trust. And the remedy we propose is increased transparency, and giving back a bit of autonomy to the user.
To improve the online environment, you identify available but untapped cues and two kinds of behavioral interventions — “nudging” and “boosting” — that employ these cues. The cues differ in different contexts, so let’s start with the interventions. Folks may have heard of them, but just to be clear, what do each of them do?
They are both classic behavioral interventions, so they’re more umbrella terms. They both interact with the decision process. “Nudges” do that mainly or exclusively through the choice architecture. So whenever parts of the choice architecture are emphasized to steer behavior or influence behavior, that’s nudging. In our case, we just try to draw the attention of the reader to some piece of information that might be good for them — that will be the broad class of nudging.
Boosting goes a bit further into the educative direction. So it’s not education, but it’s pieces of the environment or external tools that help the decision-maker, within the process of making the decision, to acquire some competencies. Often in this context, we refer to digital media literacy as a competence that a boost would help the user to acquire or develop. That can be done through the environment, by giving useful hints that you can remember, and then you use them even if the hints are missing. So you can actually incorporate that boost and take it along with you. Second can be external tools, like rules of thumb that you can actually use to evaluate sources of information.
One aspect of boosting you mention is “self-nudging.” Could you explain what that is?
Self-nudging is when you yourself change your environment in a way that nudges you to a certain behavior that you want for yourself. An alarm clock is a self-nudge, a very elementary one. If you want not to browse certain apps so often, you might delete them from your phone. Or if we want to eat less sweets, we might not buy them. So we ourselves change our choice architecture so we make decisions that we want to make. That’s a boost, in a sense, because self-nudging itself is a competence. If you’re good at designing your own choice architecture, your own environment, to the choice you want to achieve, that’s what we call a competence. That’s why we would classify it as a boost.
You discuss what you call “endogenous” or “exogenous” cues as being important in interacting with the internet. Give me some examples.
Endogenous cues are cues that describe the content itself. So when we talk about an online article, that would be the characters that appear in the article, the relationships that may be the part of the story, stuff like that we would call endogenous cues. And of course, it can be helpful to evaluate the truthfulness of the story. If the characters do not exist, or the story doesn’t have a logic it’s evidence it might not be true.
Exogenous cues, on the other side, are context-dependent. So they do not regard the content of the article itself, but for example, the source of the article, who has written the article, which other outlets or sources the article cites. Where did it come from? How did it reach you? Who else has recommended it for you? Things like that. So the context around the story itself is an exogenous cue.
In the paper, you focus your attention on exogenous cues. Why is that?
We just experience how difficult judgments are about the content itself. There are extreme cases where you should make a judgment — maybe when it’s about violence — but you always run into the danger of either censorship or the accusation of censorship when you’re making judgments about content itself. So when you make a judgment about context, I think this is more robust against accusations or dangers of censorship. If you only provide more context, that could allow people to make the judgment themselves, without you or a third-party fact-checker or a platform or anyone else to make that judgment for you. That’s going in the empowerment direction — we want to let people make these choice decisions themselves. That’s why we focus on exogenous cues.
You examine three different contexts: online articles, algorithmic curation and social media. I’d like to go through each of them with you, to understand the challenges you identify and how to propose to meet them. Let’s start with online articles. What are the challenges they present? And what cues are available?
The main challenge we think we are facing here is the overabundance of articles, of content being produced. There’s a multitude of sources, a high number of articles reaching us and also the consumption patterns have changed. People do not consume a whole newspaper as one piece, and they do not subscribe to one newspaper for a long time. Some do, but we much more consume them on an article basis. So, we are moving from long-term decisions to rather short-term decisions, and we have this huge information overload at the same time.So that makes it very difficult to make decisions about the trustworthiness or reputation of the source. So that’s the challenge with news articles online.
And what kinds of cues are available?
We can check if the publisher has an “About” section on the website, or if it’s a known publisher one can check for an external validation by making a Google search and finding reports of the same story. But one can also check if the article cites external evidence, if there are other articles of this article’s type, if they are clearly marked and if they come from other publishers and not just themselves. These would be some exogenous cues that one can check on — which, by the way, are not always readily accessible, which adds to the challenge of information overload.
So how can nudging and boosting be used to make things more transparent?
Nudging can be used to draw attention to the external cues, so the sources that an article is citing could be listed on top of the article with a very clear color, or something. Or there can be a warning message if there are no external sources cited. There one can actually be inspired by Wikipedia, which often has warning messages with articles if there are not enough sources or if quality is lacking in the sources. That would be a very simple nudge. You can go a bit further when you think about sharing an online article, and then a warning message could require you to click a second time to confirm that you want to share the article even though it doesn’t cite any external sources. So the main process of the nudges in this context would be to draw your attention to the external cues.
A boost would be more like a tool: In the article show a decision tree — that’s a tool that has been used to improve medical decision-making — by having, like, three or four questions that one can go through systematically to evaluate the trustworthiness of an article, for example. It can become like a cognitive tool kit. A person can remember this cognitive process and it will help them anytime they encounter an article, for example.
The second context you discuss is “algorithmic curation,” the often opaque process by which things are delivered to us on the internet. What are the challenges that presents and what cues are available?
We talked about transparency here. Usually the problem is that a lot of things end up on my newsfeed and it’s often very unclear for what reason, and these algorithms that source the news feed, for example, are hidden. They are not known to the user. It becomes extremely difficult to understand why a specific article is ending up in the newsfeed. We do not know — this gets back to asymmetry — what they know about many other people who are consuming similar content, for example. That makes it extremely difficult for us to understand this curation.
The biggest challenge in the whole paper is that it’s very unclear what cues could be available. But if you think about a less sophisticated algorithm — not a machine-learning AI algorithm, but rather a simple, rule-based algorithm — that could help provide cues. Because if it’s just a linear combination of a few factors that source my content — which, for example, could be recency, and how many of my friends have engaged with this article, and a preference that I have, for sports or something — that could be displayed. So there would be cues that in principle a platform with a rule-based algorithm could show and help people understand much better why some things came up and others not.
So how can nudging be used here?
When we talk about nudging in this situation, we’re very close to just information providing. So the factors that led to the decision could be displayed more clearly, or displayed at all — that would already help. Another nudge that would help would be a clear separation, even a visual separation, between different types of content. Currently in the newsfeed, everything is very blurred — so a post from my friends looks very similar to a commercial, or something from a politician or political party or a company. So these different entities and players could be much more clearly differentiated. That would change the choice architecture, to help us understand, for example, which is a paid ad and which is not. This is not in the best interest of the platform, because making an ad seemingly appear within the posts of my friends makes it much more personal than if I realize that’s an ad. But I think we should make that newsfeed more “overviewable.”
And how can boosting be used?
If the newsfeed is more transparent, it could also be customizable. Of course, you can customize the feed in a way by following certain people and outlets, but you cannot determine the order or frequency. So that would be possible, to actually change your preferences and say, “I want to see more sports and less politics,” or “More from my friends and less from news.” That could allow the user to do self-nudging, so if I want to be more informed I can increase the amount of news I want to get. That gives the user back a bit of agency, at least.
So moving on, the third category is social media. What are the challenges they present? And what cues are available?
The challenge here is that we certainly have access to a huge number of other people, and we can communicate with them in different forms, but this kind of communication is like nothing we are used to. It’s difficult to have a feeling for what the numbers mean, social metrics — likes for example, or uploads, downloads or shares. We only see one number, the number of likes, for example. But there could be much more information available that could help us access the real consensus. We have access to such a large group of people, we can feel that even a very weird conspiracy theory, for example, is actually believed by many others. Two hundred seems like a very big number of other people believing it. So, you might actually think you are right in the middle of the conversation when actually you are on the outskirts of the discussion. That would be the challenge.
So how can nudges and boosts be used here?
A nudge in this context would be quite simple. It would be having just additional social information — these are sometimes called social nudges. If we know what others are doing, this is influencing our behavior quite heavily.One example would be to show what the average reading time of other people were on this article, on a newsfeed in social media. That information would give us a hint that something is clickbait,or that most people just stayed on this article for a few seconds or just a minute, and that would help us make a decision to maybe not click on those things. So that’s one thing. But also we can provide more information what other people on this network are doing not only around my direct neighborhood, but rather on another side of the network so I can see other opinions, so we can have a feeling what the discussion is actually looks like.
Boosting has a more educated character, it would be more like a tool. One thing that would really help us is adding to social media posts a hint of trustworthiness. So if sharing is very narrow, often it’s a niche topic, not so trustworthy, and if it’s broadly distributed, and many people at each point share it, it might be more true. So that’s something one could teach people to learn, basically to understand the social spreading pattern. Currently we don’t have much access to this information, but if it were provided we could actually learn such patterns, and see if someone was, for example, replicating posts several times, artificially amplifying the message, or if someone was picking up an old story from someone very far away in the network and trying to push that. So that would be a skill that people could acquire with such a tool. They could see the social spreading pattern whenever they encounter something on social media, so they can actually learn what the patterns mean and get a feeling for social media and social dynamics.
In your conclusion, you write: “In our view, the future task for scientists is to design interventions that meet at least three selection criteria.” What are they and why?
First, of course, is the need to be transparent, because we said the core of the problem is he intransparency of the platform. So if scientists or regulators make new regulations, they have to be fully transparent for people to become trustworthy,I think that’s a second point. I was talking about the danger of censorship early on, and so that’s what we try to avoid here with transparency and trustworthiness, with cues providing context that cannot be confused with censorship. Because you never know who is in the end implementing such tools and if they are by definition not able to do censorship, there might not be a danger of that. And the last criteria, specifically, is that it can’t be gamed.What we mean here is that social media metrics that we have now are often gamed. So the “likes” are a very simple metric that can be gamed by increasing social engagement, by either paying for it or getting other people to click the “like” button, so it appears to be popular, but actually it isn’t.
If we come up now with new cues that should help people to assess the quality, there need to be protections. So, for example, if you have a very simple metric like the numbers of references that an article cites, that’s something that’s quite easy to game by just typing them into the article or something like that. So it has to go a bit deeper. It also has to show which articles are actually cited, for example, which would make it a bit more difficult to game. But that’s something you really have to think about and maybe even run experiments and check if it works and if anyone in the internet comes up with a solution to get around it — that’s something that happens a lot. That’s also in the conclusion: all these things need to be independently tested.
Yes, you say it’s important to examine a wide spectrum of interventions. This seems like an invitation to furthering empirical process, correct?
Definitely. The whole paper is a call for more research in this direction, more solution-oriented research, how to improve that environment. There’s a lot of empirical work to be done. These are just ideas and suggestions. So yes, it’s definitely a call for much more empirical work, and also independent from the platforms themselves.
Your focus is on what might be called normal users, not malicious ones. In fact, you argue that “it is not necessary that all or even the majority of users engage with nudging or boosting interventions.” Why are you confident in taking this approach?
We can never assume that everyone would engage with all the tools or interventions we are proposing. It will always be just a fraction. These external interventions are not making any judgments, they are getting people to make decisions for themselves. They of course cannot catch malicious actors who have an agenda, so they can only help people who by accident fall prey to their tactics. So that’s one reason. Another one is of course that we believe that we are very social beings. So, I was talking about Wikipedia as one of the examples of collective intelligence that actually has worked out. So that’s what we try to use as a parallel — once our online environments are more promotions of quality, in a collective-intelligence way, it will be pushed upward and reach people that would not have engaged with it before.
Finally, what’s most important question I didn’t ask and what’s the answer?
Well, one important question is “Who should do that?’ ‘Who would be interested?” I think the answer is that maybe the platforms have some interest in implementing such measures to improve quality, but it’s always important to keep in mind that they are commercial entities and that they have a certain goal, which is to maximize user engagement so they can make their ad revenue.
So it’s probably also the responsibility of a democratic society to participate in this process of designing our online world. We have now let the platforms do that for us for a very long time, for the 10 years or so that they been around. Now we think it’s about time that, as a democratic society, we should come up with our own solutions. The option space for doing this is huge. There are a lot of options that we have not even touched or thought about yet.
==
fox bs
Recently, an audit study from Northwestern University reviewed over 6,300 unique links from Google's "Top Stories" box in 200 search results during the month of November 2017. Fox News misconstrued much of the study's findings.
The study found that "just 20 news sources account for more than half of article impressions," and the top three sources with the most article impressions (CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post)accounted for 23% of all article impressions.
Fox used the findings to claim that left-leaning content media outperformed right-leaning media on Google. Sam Theilman, an editor of CJR's write-up of the study, corrected Fox's misrepresentation.
These claims and mischaracterizations are yet another version of the right-wing effort to brand the mainstream press, and in this scenario big tech, as biased against conservatives in an attempt to "work the refs" and receive favorable treatment.
==
see energy corps 2 for grafs and lnx
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap
all rhet
A new report by a British think tank estimates that since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies spent more than $1 billion lobbying to prevent climate change regulations while also running public relations campaigns aimed at maintaining public support for climate action.
Combined, the companies spend roughly $200 million a year pushing to delay or alter climate and energy rules, particularly in the U.S. — while spending $195 million a year “on branding campaigns that suggest they support an ambitious climate agenda,” according to InfluenceMap, a UK-based non-profit that researches how corporations influence climate policy.
InfluenceMap cites as an example ExxonMobil’s heavily-touted algae-biofuels research, which the oil giant says “offers some of the greatest promise for next-generation biofuels” with significant climate benefits and has made it the focus of its “The Tiny Organism” ad campaign.
InfluenceMap notes that “detailed disclosures from the company show its goal of 10,000 barrels of bio-fuel a day would equate to only 0.2 percent of its current refinery capacity.
"
[algae tiny vid]
Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins, author of the new report, said in a statement. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”
Today’s report updates the group’s 2016 report that estimated these companies spent $115 million a year lobbying against climate regulations — even policies companies said they supported.
“Say one thing,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, as he described InfluenceMap’s 2016 research on the floor of the U.S.Senate, “do another.”
The new estimates suggest that spending to influence climate policy by the five oil giants has increased sharply over the last two years.
It also comes as global banks are investing more in fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement. In addition, the five oil companies are spending heavily on finding and producing more fossil fuels — and putting only a tiny fraction of their budgets into efforts to transition away from climate-altering fuels.
“This spending accompanies the expansion of the companies’ operations with combined annual sales of over $1 [trillion] and profits of $55 [billion in] 2018, the vast majority of which is oil and gas related,” InfluenceMap wrote. “Combined capital investment will increase to $115 [billion] in 2019 but only about 3 percent of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.”
Lobbying One Message While Advertising Another
The report focuses on the world’s five largest listed oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron, leaving out state-controlled oil giants like Saudi Aramco and China’s Sinopec.
InfluenceMap examined the extent to which each company’s branding efforts and advertising campaigns focused on climate change.
Shell's branded content about its emissions scenario in The New York Times
Shell's branded content about its “Sky” emissions scenario in The New York Times.
“The research suggests that Total maintains the highest proportion of its branding activities on climate (29 percent),” the new report finds. “Following this, ExxonMobil, which has faced significant negative media attention in 2018, allocates 19 percent. Shell and BP followed with 16 percent and 14 percent respectively. Chevron appears far less concerned, using approximately 2 percent of its branding budget on climate issues in 2018.”
The think tank's research also looked at what the companies were saying to government regulators, either directly or through industry groups funded by the oil majors.
“Since Paris, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil have led in opposition to a range of climate-motivated policy stands,” InfluenceMap wrote. “For example, in 2018 both BP and Chevron have directly lobbied U.S. policymakers for a rollback on U.S. methane requirements.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the major constituent in natural gas.)
The report credits Shell and Total for becoming “more positive on a number of climate policy issues” since 2015, but adds that they “continue to support policies that will extend the role for fossil fuels in the energy mix and remain part of highly climate-oppositional trade associations.”
Mixed Messages and Industry Trade Groups
At times, the public stances of a corporation’s leadership stand starkly at odds with the messages from industry groups funded by that same corporation.
For example, on electric vehicles, Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden had a very direct and simple message in July 2018. “We need battery electric vehicles,” he said. And a year earlier, at the oil industry conference, CERAWeek, in 2017, he expressed support for “regulations that speed up investment in low carbon technologies and ? at the same time ? move consumer demand.”
Oil and gas lobbying on climate policies through trade associations. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019
In May 2018, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade group for oil and gas, pushed the U.S. Congress to move in the opposite direction by rolling back incentives for electric vehicles.
“American Petroleum Institute (API) opposes mandates and subsidies,” API testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, according to InfluenceMap’s new report. The fossil fuel trade group voiced its opposition for subsidies for electric vehicles, adding that “the level of market penetration achieved by electric vehicles should not rely on government interference.”
The report also notes the difficulty in tracking corporate lobbying in the U.S. given the rise of so-called “dark money” groups and the lack of transparency surrounding political contributions in the U.S. “Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539 [million] in the 2018 election cycle according to OpenSecrets.org,” the report says.
Social Influencers
InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies used social media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.
“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”
graf:
Oil industry spending on Facebook and Instagram ads leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Credit: InfluenceMap, 2019
All of this spending has implications for shareholders, InfluenceMap observed — and some shareholder groups appear to be listening.
“InfluenceMap’s research confirms a widely held suspicion that Big Oil’s glossy sustainability reports and shiny climate statements are all rhetoric and no action,” Catherine Howarth, Chief Executive of ShareAction, a UK charity focused on responsible investment, said in a statement accompanying the report. “These companies have mastered the art of corporate doublespeak — by boasting about their climate credentials while quietly using their lobbying firepower to sabotage the implementation of sensible climate policy and pouring millions into groups that engage in dirty lobbying on their behalf.”
DeSmog has reached out to ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Total, and Chevron for comment.
“We firmly reject the premise of this report. We are very clear about our support for the Paris agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society’s needs for more and cleaner energy,” Shell said in a statement provided to The Guardian. “We make no apology for talking to policymakers and regulators around the world to make our voice heard on crucial topics such as climate change and how to address it.”
:{
}:
“We have not been afforded the opportunity to review the data but we disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in ‘climate-related branding and lobbying’ that is ‘overwhelmingly in conflict’ with the Paris Agreement,” Chevron said in a statement provided to DeSmog, adding that the company was taking “prudent, cost-effective actions” and seeking “balanced and transparent” policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “We believe climate change is real and human activity contributes to it. We accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Updated: This article has been updated on March 22, 2019 to reflect a statement from Chevron.
==
NZ shooter
==
After every mass murder, journalists, researchers, and horrified members of the public turn to the internet as they struggle to understand why the perpetrator would take so many lives. Often, those searches paint a picture of a disturbed individual who has been radicalized in dark, online rabbit holes.
But on Friday, the suspected gunman behind the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings appeared to take the process of internet radicalization to a disturbing new level—turning the massacre itself another dark internet rabbit hole designed to draw the attention of like-minded people around the world while attracting new allies to his cause.
“This definitely is a real-life shitpost.”
“This definitely is a real-life shitpost,” said Joel Finklestein, a researcher specializing in the digital spread of extremist content at the Anti-Defamation League and the Network Contagion Research Institute.
Shitposting is an internet term for pumping out low-quality and often ironic online content to get a reaction from other people. Finklestein explained that the gunman—who live-streamed the killings and distributed a detailed manifesto full of references to far-right memes—was able to pull off an extreme and tragic version of what white nationalist internet shitposters do all the time: publish incendiary content to enrage and confuse their opponents.
As Finklestein points out, the Christchurch gunman clearly aspired to do more than spark widespread anger while taking dozens of lives. He also wanted to bring in new recruits. His social media accounts, which were promptly taken down, looked like they had been quickly fashioned into repositories of the message he was trying to spread. His Twitter account was only created in February, and he appears to have not posted anything recently on Facebook until Wednesday, when he unloaded a batch of links outlining his white nationalist worldview.
The gunman left a small archive of his thoughts and actions, live-streaming the shooting on Facebook and leaving a lengthy document explaining some of his motivations, all peppered with bits of trolling to confuse readers and maximize his reach. During the livestream of the shooting, he shouted, “Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie”—a reference to the popular Youtuber who has been criticized for veering too close to alt-right territory. His manifesto included memes popular on hate-filled internet message boards such as 4chan and 8chan; ironic nods to video games such as Fortnite and Spyro; and incendiary—and potentially misleading—praise for a conservative media figure.[tucker?]
It’s impossible to know the precise intent behind the manifesto, but it is filled with references that journalists with little 4chan experience could easily include in news stories or tweets in a manner that inadvertently gives more exposure to the shooter’s white supremacist goals. And more exposure means more potential converts—or, in the words of far-right internet posters, more opportunities to “red-pill” readers.
Becca Lewis, who studies online political subcultures at Data & Society, a digital research institute, recalled on Twitter how this happened with past coverage of massacres perpetrated by members of extremist internet communities. She pointed to how the term “incel”—which refers to “involuntary celibate” men, who often espouse misogynist rhetoric online—was virtually unknown until it was mentioned in media reports about murders carried out by people linked with that community. “Then any disillusioned young man could start googling his way down a rabbit hole just by using that search term,” Lewis noted.
Joan Donovan, another internet extremism researcher at Data & Society and Harvard, argues that the New Zealand gunman was deliberately trying to provoke a similar media reaction.
“The manifesto is bait. It is loaded with keywords that lead down far-right rabbit holes. Do not repost,” she advised on Twitter. “Most of the NZ shooter’s social media is new.It’s an attempt to get journalists to see a unified narrative.”
“He tried to meme himself into existence by producing a press kit and quoting memes and social media influencers while carrying out such violence,” Donovan told Mother Jones.
The Christchurch shooter also exploited an unwitting ally—technology companies who have proven themselves unable or unwilling to stop the spread of hate speech on their platforms. Even though the murder video violated YouTube’s, Facebook’s and Twitter’s policies, it still spread rapidly across their platforms. Social media users and reporters documented how even hours Facebook took down the original livestream, copies of the footage were still careening across the social networks. It was instantly accessible to anyone who could search for the gunman’s name on the internet’s most popular websites.
The result: a horrific event made all the more devastating by the perpetrator’s ability to turn some of America’s most profitable companies into distributors of his ghoulish white nationalist recruiting video.
==
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/how-white-power-went-viral/507473/
atlantic
no lnx
Sitting on the neon-lit stage, Dave McClure couldn’t contain himself. The 500 Startups founder and investor used his appearance at the Web Summit conference on Wednesday to loudly criticize his own industry for President-elect Donald Trump’s victory:
Technology has a role in that we provide communication platforms for the rest of the fucking country. It’s a propaganda medium and if people aren’t aware of the shit they’re being told; if they’re being told a story of fear; if they’re being told a story of other; if they’re not understanding that people are trying to use them to get to fucking office then, yes, assholes like Trump are going to take office and it’s our duty and our responsibility as entrepreneurs, as citizens of the fucking world, to make sure that shit does not happen.
He’s not the first to place the blame (or credit, depending on one’s view) for Trump’s unexpected win on digital platforms like Facebook, which allowed fake-news sites to proliferate and spread pro-Trump hoaxes such as, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.”
Facebook, where nearly half of Americans get their news, has borne the brunt of the ire, both for creating echo-chambers of partisan news and for failing to promote high-quality information over false drivel. But online extremism researchers say America’s misinformation problem is bigger than Facebook. They are also pointing fingers at sites like 4chan, Twitter and Reddit, online free-for-alls that lack Facebook’s relatively strict stance on hate-speech and have allowed racist communities to flourish in recent years. These forums have grown angrier and more multitudinous since Trump announced his candidacy, and while it’s not yet clear how much they contributed to the triumph of Trump, they certainly lined up behind him.
“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” the journalist Siyanda Mohutsiwa, who said she has been following the so-called “alt-right” forums on Reddit for years, wrote in a Twitter thread earlier this week. “These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”
Groups that oppose immigration and political correctness, such as neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the “alt-right,” have bloomed online in recent years. (It’s worth noting that these groups consider themselves distinct, and most don’t use the term “racist;” at most, they prefer the term “racialist.”) A study published in September by George Washington University extremism researcher J.M. Berger found “major American white nationalist movements on Twitter added about 22,000 followers since 2012, an increase of about 600 percent.” Berger found that people who followed white nationalists on Twitter referenced Trump “more than almost any other topic.”
The Nazi and white nationalist accounts in Berger’s sample rarely tweeted about Mitt Romney in 2012, but this year, “three of the top 10 hashtags for both white nationalist and Nazi datasets were related to ... Trump: #trump, #trump2016, and #makeamericagreatagain,” Berger wrote. The most common hashtag was “whitegenocide;” Trump retweeted a user with WhiteGenocide in his username in January.
(Trump’s campaign said the tweet wasn’t related to his personal views. In response to past stories about their white-power supporters, the campaign has said, “We have rejected and rebuked any groups and individuals associated with a message of hate and will continue to do so.”)
It’s impossible to tell how many people were motivated by racism to vote for Trump, who used anti-immigrant rhetoric and, occasionally, white-nationalist memes, all while telling black Americans he would “be your greatest champion.” Other issues, like abortion, the economy, and dissatisfaction with Obamacare also turned out Trump voters. But some Trump supporters were energized by concerns that people of color are somehow overrunning the nation, spreading violence and sucking up precious resources. Eight of 10 people who favor the deportation of illegal immigrants voted for Trump, according to exit polls, and Trump also performed better among voters who said their top issue was immigration or terrorism.
Early on, Republicans who felt white Americans were under threat preferred Trump to his rivals. In a Pew survey in April, those who felt it was “bad for the country” that in 30 years the U.S. will consist mostly of people of color were more likely to feel warmly toward Trump, as were those who felt Islam is violent. Other issues—homosexuality, family values, or economic fairness—didn’t polarize Republicans similarly.
Several mainstream platforms, including Reddit, Twitter, and even Google, all became fertile ground for white-power groups to discuss these ideas, voice support for Trump, and often, recruit new followers, according to Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors online extremism.
Reddit, for example, has long been a racist haven. Keegan Hankes, a research analyst for the SPLC, documented in Gawker how the racist subreddit “GreatApes” was formed in 2013 and grew into a larger network called "the Chimpire," organized by a user calling themselves "Jewish_NeoCon2." Their mission statement, riddled with Nazi references and n-words, mentioned expanding their “sphere of influence.” At the time Hankes was writing in 2015, the Chimpire had grown to 46 subreddits, including two dedicated to discussing Trayvon Martin and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. One of the subreddits, CoonTown, had 3,287 subscribers, ranking it within the top 2 percent of subReddits, Hankes wrote. CoonTown was later banned, but other “WhiteRights” subReddits persist.
Certain corners of Twitter have also become cesspools of white supremacy, Beirich said. In the Washington Post in September, Jonathon Morgan, a researcher of violent extremism, described how alt-right Twitter accounts appear to have become more virulent throughout the year. “The social media content of the alt-right in July was 25 percent more radicalized than it was in January,” he wrote. “And the rate of radicalization is increasing exponentially.” In January of this year, for example, the accounts Morgan monitored rarely mentioned Jewish people. By July, the word “Jewish” in these forums “implies a belief in large-scale conspiracy, racial antagonism and even explicit support for Hitler,” he wrote. The Anti-Defamation League also found an uptick in anti-Semitic tweets in the first half of this year.
For some, even a simple Google search can be a pathway to radicalization. Dylann Roof, who allegedly killed nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year, was indoctrinated almost entirely online, according to the SPLC. In his manifesto, Roof described typing “black on White crime” into Google, ending up on a racist website, “and I have never been the same since that day.” The third result in a Google search for “Martin Luther King,” for example, is a white supremacist site, “MartinLutherKing.org,” which paints the civil-rights leader as a fraud. (Regarding that site, Google has said, “Our search results are generated objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”)
“Racist propagandists have motivation to put that stuff out,” Beirich told me. “The anti-Semites can flood an area, and there’s no contradictory evidence. There aren’t people out there trying to prove that Jews aren’t running the government.”
Beirich said white supremacists, far from talking amongst themselves online, do try to bring new followers into the fold. Academic literature suggests online white-supremacy groups grow rapidly after launching and use social issues of the day, such as illegal immigration, to build bridges with potential new recruits.
...
Morgan suspects racist forums on mainstream sites like Reddit might be attracting users who are not active white supremacists—at least not at first. “I think it’s a similar pattern to people who end up in jihadist extremism,” he told me. “It’s people who are ostracized and disengaged, threatened by the mainstream culture. To them, it feels good [reading these subreddits] ... it validates the kinds of things you’re not supposed to stay in polite society.”
Unlike ISIS, which targets specific new fighters, Berger writes that white nationalists promote the idea that they are the enlightened ones. They have taken the so-called “red pill,” a Matrix reference to seeing things the way they “really are”—in this case, that widely accepted values, like tolerance and multiculturalism, are actually deeply flawed.
Beirich believes Trump’s presidency may serve as yet another recruitment tactic for these groups. Trump’s past comments about refugees and immigrants, “makes it less ostracizing to agree with racist sentiments. This is in the White House now,” she told me, adding hypothetically, “So why shouldn’t you? What’s wrong with hating Muslims?”
-=
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/03/15/New-Zealand-mass-shooting-illustrates-failure-of-tech-companies-to-prevent-radicalization-/223153
Discussing the shooting at two New Zealand mosques that left at least 49 dead at the hands of an anti-Muslim extremist, NBC reporter Ben Collins noted that the alleged shooter showed signs of “getting radicalized by these same algorithms” on tech platforms such as YouTube that previously influenced other mass shooters.
YouTube has a serious radicalization problem because its algorithm sometimes pushes far-right content via recommendations, which Collins noted can cause people to “go down rabbit holes” and “maybe they start as racists and they end up as extremists,” leading to harassment, racist violence, and terrorism. Collins also compared the alleged Christchurch shooter’s reported announcement of the attack on far-right message board8chan to the alleged Pittsburgh, PA, shooter’sannouncement of his attack on Gab, a social media platform that is a hotbed for white nationalists.
The alleged New Zealand mosque shooter livestreamed the attack on Facebook, and it was also shared on YouTube and Twitter, but the social media platforms have struggled to remove the video. Tech companies have been ill-equipped to proactively deal with this kind of content, in some ways leaving the task of combating it to the most affected communities.
...
==
http://rachelcarson-wiki.lt.ucsc.edu/wiki/Counter-History#Technology
Social Networks
Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now 2018 ***; NYT review.
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread 2018 by Cailin O'Connor (Author), James Owen Weatherall.
Antisocial Media Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan argued that Facebook is undermining democracy. UVa 7/18.
Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now 2018 ***; NYT review.
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread 2018 by Cailin O'Connor (Author), James Owen Weatherall.
Antisocial Media Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan argued that Facebook is undermining democracy. UVa 7/18.
==
ON SOCIAL MEDIA, "GOOD HYGIENE" CORRECTION WITH LINKS TO LEGIT SRC/INFO ACTUALLY AMPLIFIES MISINFORMATION?! EG
http://www.alternet.org/media/how-misinformed-tweet-was-manufactured-major-right-wing-news
Buzzfeed News analysis found that the top 20 fake political news stories in circulation during the election got more clicks, views, shares and reactions on Facebook than the top 20 real news stories. The vast majority of those fake stories—all but three—were “overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton,” meaning they pinged around the conservative webosphere, where they were accepted without question by millions and then passed to the next gullible consumer.
Paul Horner, among the most prolific and successful fake news writers, recently told the Washington Post that Trump voters and other “right-wing Republicans” were almost single-handedly responsible for the $10,000 he pulls in every month, because they “post everything, believe anything,” and continue to share fake news even when they find out it isn't true. That might explain why so many fake news stories seem specially tailored for the conservative news reader.
One of Horner’s most popular stories was a fabricated interview with a made-up person who said he’d been paid to protest Trump ahead of the election. During the campaign, multiple members of Trump’s team retweeted the story, even though many sources pointed out it wasn't true. The ludicrous idea that anti-Trump demonstrators are each paid thousands of dollars by billionaire George Soros—who plays a starring role in pretty much every right-wing conspiracy—has now become conservative gospel.
Eric Tucker, a marketer in Austin, Texas, was probably very familiar with this rumor when he recently sent an erroneous tweet that launched a viral right-wing story.The New York Times decided to examine how Tucker's tweet became a major topic of conservative discussion, following its online travels step by step. On the evening of November 9, just as protests against President-elect Trump were erupting all over the country, Tucker tweeted the photo and message below to his tiny group of 40followers.
[img]
According to the Times, Tucker heard about anti-Trump demonstrations in Austin hours after he saw the buses in the photo, and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear (except that if you look for boogeymen everywhere you will find them), assumed a connection between the two. The Times confirmed that Tucker’s photo actually features buses booked for employees of Tableau Software, which was having a conference in the city. (Tucker told the Times he did a search for nearby conferences but didn’t find anything.) Roughly four hours after the original tweet went out, it ended up on :{Reddit:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. “BREAKING: They found the buses!” the header reads. “Dozens lined up just blocks away from the Austin protests.” The thread of comments that follow indicate subreddits full of Trump supporters who, riding high on an election victory, are ecstatic to have a new conspiracy they can hang on the left.
“Alex Jones is based in Austin,” one commenter declares. “Let him know, and his crew can check it out.”
That’s followed by a lot of wishing the worst on Soros, complaints about “cucks,” suggestions thatJames O’Keefe get involved, and a lot of assumptions rooted in racism and paranoia. “Busing in violent mobs? Please tell me how this isn't inciting treason,” one person demands. This inexplicably devolves into a conversation about Obamaphones.
By the morning of November 10, the story appeared on right-wing message board Free Republic, where a user linked back to the original tweet. Here’s the point at which things quickly build momentum, picking up the pace across right-wing echo chambers. According to the Times, that same day, “Facebook pages like Robertson Family Values, which is named for but not affiliated with the stars of ‘Duck Dynasty,’ and Donald Trump Commander in Chief 2020, linked to the Free Republic discussion.” A Times screengrab of a Free Republican Facebook post repeating the Reddit message shows 307,616 shares. The paper also cites 5,000 shares of each of the aforementioned blog posts.
By now, the story had trickled upward to local news outlets. When the Austin-based affiliate for Fox called Coach USA North America bus companyto get more information, they were told by spokesperson Sean Hughes that the company wasn’t involved in any protests. Hughes even sent the station a statement clarifying that buses were in town "for a conference” and that “at no point were Coach USA buses involved in the Austin protests." The television station’s website, now empty of most of the content that appeared there, still features photos of the buses taken by Tucker, with a caption that poses thisleading question: “Were tens of thousands of protesters across the U.S. paid to walk the streets, hold signs, and chant anti-Trump sayings?”
That evening, Gateway Pundit, a major conservative blog, posted a story with the headline, “Figures. Anti-Trump Protesters Were Bussed in to Austin #FakeProtests.” They used Tucker’s original pictures, and according to the Times, linked the nonexistent busloads of fake protesters to “Soros money.” Three hours later, President-elect Trump or someone on his team took to social media to tweet about the fake story to his 16 million followers.
“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” the message reads. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
As of this writing, the tweet has more than 71,000 retweets and 240,000 likes.
[img]
On November 11, a spokesperson for Tableau, the tech company that rented the buses for its conference attendees, sent a statement to the Austin American-Statesman. The newspaper, in turn, published an article debunking Tucker’s original tweet and all of the stories that followed. Included was an interview withEric Tucker, who praised Alex Jones and stated, “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”
Later in the day, according to the Times,Tucker sent a tweet that acknowledged the possibility his first suggestion may have been “flat wrong.” There was alsoa Snopes article declaring the rumor false. Instead of stopping the fake news dead in its tracks, the case essentially turned into proof that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," as the old saying goes. Also, the internet loves a lie that supports its political agenda. According to the Times, “Mr. Tucker’s initial tweet continued to generate thousands of shares on Facebook through Free Republic and pages like Right Wing News and Joe the Plumber.”
[IMMUNE TO CORRECTION]
On the night of November 11, Tucker put up the tweet below, which shows his original message updated to carry a bright red “FALSE” across it. The corrected tweet, as of this writing, has a paltry 60 retweets and 66 likes. He told the Times that moving forward, "I can assure you I’m going to try my best to be balanced with the facts and be very clear about what is opinion and what is not." He also said that knowing what he knows now, he “might have still tweeted it but very differently. I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement.”
The same night, Tucker finally trashed the tweet that started it all. While that’s been scrubbed from social media, its impact isn’t going anywhere. Neither, coincidentally, is President-elect Donald Trump.
==
https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-republican-party-has-abandoned-reality
no lnx vid
Here's Why the Republican Party Has Abandoned Reality
It's Trump's GOP now.
By David Akadjian / Daily Kos September 16, 2018, 7:58 AM GMT
This year, the Republican candidate for governor in Georgia was decided in a special runoff election between Brian Kemp and Casey Cagle, the top two finishers in the Republican primary. Before the runoff election, Casey Cagle was secretly recorded talking about the craziness of the Georgia Republican primary. He said:
:{
}:
The problem is in a primary—and you and I are just talking off-the-record frank—they don’t give a shit about those things. Okay. In the general election, they care about it. Okay. But they don’t care about it in a primary. This primary felt like it was who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.
:{
}:
Kemp quickly pounced on these remarks and used them to win the runoff by 40 points—which, ironically, validated Cagle’s remarks.
Here in Ohio, I saw the same thing in our race for governor. The entire race was about who was the most conservative. Mary Taylor called Mike DeWine a “liberal” and DeWine said Taylor was a criminal, so “lock her up.”
You’ve probably seen something similar in a race where you live. Conspiracy theorists are falling out of trees in Republican primaries.
So why is this going, on and what can we learn from it?
Politicians are cowards
Almost a year before the 2016 election, Devin Nunes spoke with The New Yorker about then-House Speaker John Boehner’s ouster.
Nunes told the author that one of the biggest changes he’s seen since his arrival in 2002 is the _{rise of online media outlets and for-profit groups }_that spread bad or even false information:
:{
}:
I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation.Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.
:{
}:
Today, the calls and emails are 90 percent about the bad information and conspiracy theories, and only a small percentage are about things that are actually true.
Of course today, we know Nunes as the point man from the House Intelligence Committee who keeps trying to push the lie that it was Hillary Clinton who actually colluded with Russia. Nunes is also a global warming denier even as Fresno, the largest city in his California district, experienced a record consecutive days with highs that topped 100 degrees.
Nunes is now one of the leaders in disinformation.
Why?
Because Fox News and other right-wing conspiracy media outlets have made him famous. His fame has brought in $7.4 million in campaign donations, the most of any California Republican. This is also three to seven times any previous amount he’s raised.
So … conspiracy away!
In three years Nunes went from Freedom Party critic to one of the lead conspiracy theorists in Congress. Along the way, he threw out every principle he once might have had.
He’s not a leader. He’s a Fox News puppet.
[vid]
Devin Nunes calls his own paper, The Sacramento Bee, ‘fake news’
It’s important to understand that this is not just true for Nunes, but for most politicians
It’s easy for liberals to see this with Devin Nunes because he’s a lying conspiracy theorist Republican.
The mistake we often make, however, is seeing Democratic politicians differently. They’re not conspiracy theorists like Nunes. But they also don’t tend to be leaders like we want them to be. They have to get elected, too. So they will do what it takes to get elected.They will champion causes that are hot-button issues in the media. They will talk about what they think they can talk about in order to win. If an issue is going to hurt them politically, they may avoid it.
The simple model for what they’re doing looks like this:
Social change -> political change -> policy change
Social change is cultural change. It is what is popular in the public mind. Political change is winning elections. And policy change is when politicians write legislation.
Politicians will do what those who get them elected want.
If we look at someone saying this on the Democratic side, it looks like Barack Obama in 2009 talking about health care. Obama took a page out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s playbook. FDR once met with a group of activists who wanted support for new, bold legislation. After listening to their arguments, he then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.”
...
==
https://points.datasociety.net/media-manipulation-strategic-amplification-and-responsible-journalism-95f4d611f462
no many
linx
https://points.datasociety.net/media-manipulation-strategic-amplification-and-responsible-journalism-95f4d611f462
Go to the profile of danah boyd
danah boyd
researcher of technology & society | Microsoft Research, Data & Society, NYU | zephoria@zephoria.org
Sep 14
Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism
This is a crib of a talk that Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas on September 13, 2018. For a video of the talk, click here.
In early September 2018, Facebook and Twitter were accused during a Congressional hearing of having anti-conservative bias. This should sound familiar to many of you in this room as you too have been accused for political purposes of being the "liberal media." The core of this narrative is a stunt, architected by media manipulators, designed to trigger outrage among conservatives and pressure news and social media to react.
It works. Over the last two years, both social media and news media organizations have desperately tried to prove that they aren't biased. What's at stake is not whether these organizations are restricting discussions concerning free-market economics or failing to allow conservative perspectives to be heard. What's at stake is how fringe groups can pervert the logics of media to spread conspiratorial and hateful messages under their false flag of conservatism.
Accusations of anti-conservative bias are not evaluated through evidence because reality doesn't matter to them. This is what makes this stunt so effective.News organizations and tech companies have no way to "prove" their innocence. What makes conspiratorial messages work is how they pervert evidence. The simplest technique is to conflate correlation and causation. Conspiracy makers point to the data that suggests that both journalists and Silicon Valley engineers are more likely to vote for candidates from the Democratic party. Or that they have higher levels of education than the average American and are more likely to live in Blue states.
As my colleague Francesca Tripodi points out, accusing tech of anti-conservative bias also leverages and reinforces a misunderstanding of how search engines and social media work. As she notes, "People believe Google is weighing facts instead of rank-ordering results that match the entered keywords." When the goal is to drive a wedge among the public, it's not hard to encourage people to see bias.
Contemporary extremism is designed to increase polarization. One tactic is to twist frames. For example, "ideological diversity" has been deployed to suggest that people who hold conservative viewpoints experience a loss of opportunity similar to those who have faced systemic racism and sexism. But this isn't about the history of economic inequality in the US. It's a dogwhistle. It's about using nominal conservatism as a cloak to promote toxic masculinity and white supremacy. It's about extremists using conservatives. And it's about intentionally twisting historical pressure to diversify newsrooms and Silicon Valley to open the Overton Window. Fundamentally, it's a technique to grab power by gaslighting the public and making reality seem fuzzy.
Don't get me wrong. Journalism has historically played a central role in shaping public discourse. Through editorial processes, news organizations have served as gatekeepers and chosen what to amplify. And many critics have challenged the media's power to do so over the years. Ideally, newsrooms reflect the norms of society, but that doesn't mean that this has worked perfectly in the past. Furthermore, this process has gotten a lot more complicated in the last 25 years as new tools for amplification have emerged.
As we sit here today, both news organizations and tech companies are struggling to figure out their role in the distribution and promotion of different kinds of speech. Like universities and think tanks, they are being pushed into a corner that they don't understand. In response, and out of fear of being accused of anti-conservative bias, conference promoters are inviting speakers to the stage to share messages of toxic masculinity and white supremacy under the rubric of hearing "both sides." News organizations are profiling extremists as legitimate voices to perform a version of neutrality that is rooted in false equivalency. And social media companies are hesitant to ban people who flagrantly and hatefully violate their terms of service out of fear of being painted as censors.
How did we get here? The stark reality is that we all got played. And we're continuing to get played.
Freedom of Speech
In the United States, the First Amendment of the Constitution is sacrosanct. So let's remind ourselves of precisely what is said:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Congress shall not pass laws curtailing the freedom of speech. Congress shall not pass laws curbing the freedom of the press.
Of course, in the public imaginary, the First Amendment has turned into the colloquial notion that no one?-?not news media, not social media, not teachers, not conference organizers, not universities?-?should engage in any act that in any way limits someone else's ability to speak. As a result, it's common for someone to accuse someone else for violating their first amendment, even though that's absurd. No one person is Congress.
This misinterpretation of the First Amendment becomes unoperationizable fast. A conference like this one only has so many speaking slots. Not every voice?-?or every perspective?-?can possibly be represented. The same is true for the front page of a newspaper. Editors must make curatorial decisions. Choosing what to amplify is not the same as curtailing someone's ability to speak.
Choosing what to amplify is not the same as curtailing someone's ability to speak.
The dot com bubble's obsession with e-commerce obfuscated the Silicon Valley obsession with building tools for online community, communication, and information access. The commitment to free speech in tech goes way back. In the 1970s and 80s, geeks built Usenet and BBSes to amplify their voices among each other without having to rely on a printing press. They (problematically) imaged themselves as extending the American frontier, not being new governors. After the bust, social media and search engines took center stage. While we can now look back at an esoteric passage of the 1996 regulation known as the Communication Decency Act (CDA-230) as the key to enabling platforms to be platforms without fear of legal prosecution, the stark reality is that no one who was building early blogging software or social network sites imagined they were doing anything other than giving people at platform to speak. They saw these tools as a gift, designed to allow people to connect in new ways, a natural extension of zines and pirate radio.
My peers built blogging tools so that they could share their perspective on the issues of the day, even as esteemed journalists dismissed us as "web diarists." Recognizing a long history of ethnic media challenges to mainstream news media, my peers worked hard to open up the range of voices that could be heard. Tools like Slashdot, Global Voices, andredditwere all designed to increase the range of voices that people could hear. We realized that niche communities could propagate online, even if they couldn't build large enough audiences to deserve mainstream media coverage.
Never in their wildest imaginations did the creators of major social media realize that their tools of amplification would be weaponized to radicalize people towards extremism, gaslight publics, or serve as vehicles of cruel harassment.
Over the last 25 years, the tech industry has held steadfast to its commitment to creating new pathways for people who historically have not had access to the tools of scaled communication. Yet, at this very moment, those who built these tools and imagined letting a thousand flowers bloom are stepping back and wondering: what hath we wrought? Like the ACLU and other staunch free speech advocates, we all recognized that we would need to accept a certain amount of ugly speech.But never in their wildest imaginations did the creators of major social media realize that their tools of amplification would be weaponized to radicalize people towards extremism, gaslight publics, or serve as vehicles of cruel harassment.
Aiming for Search
In early August, major technology platforms finally accepted that they needed to ban a well-known conspiracy theorist who was strategically, intentionally, and flagrantly violating their terms of service. Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube removed numerous podcast and video channels he operated. These sites had previously given him warnings for violating community guidelines, but he didn't care. What worried the tech companies the most was that blocking him would feed into his agenda. They had watched it happen before.
[From Francesca Tripodi's Medium post "No, Big Tech Isn't Silencing Conservatism."]
In the summer of 2016, Twitter had finally blocked a different provocateur after he flaunted his violations of their Terms of Service and engaged in a sustained racist harassment campaign. He knew how to turn any effort to call him out for his harmful behaviors on its head in order to imply that it was actually him who was being oppressed. So, when he was banned from Twitter, he cried victim, arguing that he was banned for having conservative beliefs. News outlets struggled to respond to his claims, but gave him tremendous air time and ink. In the process, they made him famous. During the 2016 RNC Convention, he publicly thanked Twitter for helping him become a celebrity. Even after losing a book deal, being banned by major platforms, blocked from speaking, and being publicly shamed for his own words, this provocateur is still far more powerful in shaping views than he was before he was banned from Twitter.[MILO?]
After the conspiracy theorist was kicked off of major platforms in the thick of August, a frenzy of news stories emerged, reporting on the removal, dissecting the decision, challenging other technology platforms to remove his content, analyzing the responses of tech leaders, and more broadly debating the politics of free speech and the internet. TV newscasters spent hours bringing in experts to analyze the situation.With each news article, the conspiracy theorist and his channel were named. Not surprisingly, this gush of free advertising benefited the conspiracy theorist. Curious to learn more, thousands of people downloaded his App, found his website, and otherwise sought out his messages to see what he was all about. News outlets have been quick to highlight that the ban cost him significant revenue, which is true. But that wasn't his priority. His goal is to produce stunts that motivate people to see the media as a tool of censorship. He wants to cultivate a network of people who will engage in self-investigation. In other words, his goal is to convince people to look.
Media manipulators have developed a strategy with three parts that rely on how the current media ecosystem is structure:
1. Create spectacle, using social media to get news media coverage.
2. Frame the spectacle through phrases that drive new audiences to find your frames through search engines.
3. Become a "digital martyr" to help radicalize others.
These steps rely on the relationship between social media, news media, and search engines. Let's dive into this through an example.
Proselytizing Conspiracy Theories
It's not clear who first asked whether or not themassacre at Sandy Hook was a hoax,but that notion was circulating on talk radio among well-established conspiracy theorists within days of the mass shooting. The conspiracy connected multiple well-trodden frames, most notably the presence of a deep state that wanted to limit access to guns and the idea that the news media was operating on behalf of the Obama administration. As conspiratorial thinkers and other digital actors obsessed over the story, they devised a term to dismiss the people who appeared on TV. They called these people "crisis actors."
This concept is linked to an earlier phenomenon that Whitney Phillips documented: RIP trolling. In various message boards, people lamented what they called "grief tourism," referring to the tendency of well-meaning people to post messages on someone's page after they died even when they didn't know that person. In response, trolls used cruel commentary, sick jokes, and harassment to attack anyone who added to the media spectacle surrounding a person's death. RIP trolling was a form of harassment, but it was also a way of mocking how social media and news media created spectacle around death.
By labeling those who had witnessed terroristic gun violence "crisis actors," conspiracy theorists didn't simply seek to undermine those who were sharing their stories. They wanted to troll the news media. Some had a political agenda; others simply wanted to mock the media for its "grief tourism."But collectively, they wanted to seed doubt in the public about the honesty of the media's reporting.
Phrases like "crisis actor" don't spread naturally through word-of-mouth networks, even on social media. To get them into the public lexicon, media manipulators must convince major media amplifiers to work on their behalf.Over the last six years, networks of online antagonists have jumped on every mass tragedy to manipulate the media and propel this term into the mainstream. They use fake accounts on social media to talk with journalists, to ask journalists if there is any truth to the idea that witnesses are really crisis actors. They deface Wikipedia entries.They try to manipulate trending topics and autocomplete on search.But algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.
Manipulators aren't trying to get journalists to say that witnesses to gun violence and terrorism are actually crisis actors. Their goal is to get the news media to negate that frame?-?and negate the conspirators who are propagating that frame. This may be counter-intuitive, but when news media negates a conspiratorial frame, the people who are most open to such a conspiracy will want to self-investigate precisely because they don't trust the news media. As a result, negation enables a boomerang effect.
Algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.
Propelling the term into public lexicon is only the first step. Sure, it's fun to celebrate an effort to manipulate major newscasters. But a secondary goal is to get people to search for a term that they've never considered before. Once news media starts negating the concept of a crisis actor, searches for that term spiked. What did they find when they did that search? For example, in the first days after Parkland, they found blog posts and online conversations staged to mock the news media and gaslight the public.
For example, a video from the aforementioned conspiracy theorist focused on crisis actors opens with: "Are we saying the shooting didn't happen? Are we saying they're all actors and that they're faking that something happened? No. The media is saying that. What we're saying is [that] 'School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist dad, Hogg's Father in FBI appears to have been coached.'" This particular video then continues on to imply Anderson Cooper is a well-known CIA operative and describes how CNN fakes things… all to build the case that David Hogg is fundamentally a Democratic Party operative. Viewers may not believe everything, but they are initiated into frames that they've never considered. And that's the point of triggering people to search.
Using search to your advantage relies on what Michael Golebiewski at Bing calls a "data void." When people search for a phrase that does not have natural informative results, it's easy for manipulators to control the results. Take, for example, "did the Holocaust exist?" If no one produces content to combat that frame, what people get when they search for that phrase is conspiratorial. Media manipulators design and exploit data voids. They galvanize around phrases, create digital content around that phrase, and then work to push those phrases into the mainstream lexicon by using news media's instinct to cover something new. When it came to "crisis actors," they knew what search results would appear at the top, especially on YouTube.
Google and Bing rely heavily on legitimate news content to cover up data voids about breaking topics. But YouTube is a disaster. First, there's a lot less content on YouTube, which means that problematic content surfaces to the top faster. Second, YouTube isn't simply a search engine; it's also a recommendation engine that encourages people to view more videos and go on a journey. This is great for music discovery, but not so great when manipulators game the recommendation system to create pathways to extremist content. Third, while newsrooms and text creators have gotten smart about SEO on Google and Bing, they're weak withYouTube, even though it's the primary search engine for the under-25s.
My colleague Becca Lewis is about to release a report that shows how media manipulators have leveraged data voids, recommendation processes of YouTube, and potential recruits' interest in self-investigation to walk people from quasi-mainstream debates to extremism. Through the use of comments, linking, and strategic cross-participation, those who are curious to self-investigate follow breadcrumbs that were designed to promote conspiracy and hate. Unfortunately,most media making organizations don't think about the networked nature of videoor the importance of creating high quality, easily findable content on YouTube.
Data & Society Researcher Rebecca Lewis's upcoming report, to be published Tuesday, September 18.
In addition to playing with algorithmic systems, media manipulators exploit a psychological process known as "apophenia." By creating connections between random ideas, manipulators warp the cultural imaginary. By inviting people to see artificial patterns, they engage potential recruits to see reality in their terms. As part of the indoctrination process, they want those who are self-investigating to start to see media manipulators as being persecuted for revealing a reality that others seek to suppress.
Digital Martyrdom
Martyrdom exists in most ancient religions. People have died violently and symbolically for their faith so that others could pursue the religious ideals that the martyr believed. In modern times, martyrdom has become more complicated. On one hand, there has been a rise of what can be understood as political martyrdom, as people have taken their lives to raise public awareness to a cause. On the other, we've seen the proliferation of mass murder to terrorize be committed under the false pretenses of religious martyrdom.
When we speak of martyrdom, we speak of death or the end of mortality. Given the grave nature of these acts, it's hard to draw on this concept metaphorically. But given the perversion of martyrdom in the last 20 years to maximize fear within society, I feel it is only appropriate to also speak of the kinds of digital martyrdom that we are seeing emerge.
Most social media users who are given Terms of Service violation warnings quickly change their behavior. This is not the case for media manipulators. They know the rules, intend to flaunt them, and actively dare platforms to mess with them. They believe that being digitally crucified is to their cause's long-term advantage, especially if media outlets will cover their digital execution. So they push and they push, they hurt other people and refuse to respond appropriately to restrictions. They bend the rules, leverage irony to their advantage, and engage in rhetorical games so that it's hard to pin them to the wall. They know what they're doing.
They've learned that the key to their success is to become newsworthy in your minds.
Their practices remind me a lot of what a hateful homophobic Kansas minister used to do when he protested the funerals of LGBT people and picketed gay pride events. He knew the law, but he also knew how to trick those who opposed him into violating the law. Just as lawmakers struggled to devise laws that would stop his hateful actions, tech companies struggle to find policies that will prevent toxic abuse. Media manipulators know how to exploit the edges. And they know to argue that tech companies aren't supporting free speech when they do get banned. More importantly, they've learned that the key to their success is to become newsworthy in your minds.
Journalistic Idealism
I've never met a journalist who entered the profession for nefarious reasons. Hell, I've never met a journalist who entered the field to make money either. Like educators, most journalists are passionate about giving people access to information. Most espouse the ideals of journalism in a democracy. And let's be honest, that idealism is essential for surviving the constant flood of attacks.
Journalistic idealism is very familiar to me. It's easy now to lambast major tech companies and accuse engineers of doing evil things for money, but the tech industry that I entered in the 1990s was full of idealism. Full of a belief in changing the world for the better.
The downside to embracing idealism is that it's hard to be reflexive, hear criticism, or be challenged. This is why accusing journalists and engineers of anti-conservative bias is so effective--neither want to see themselves as biased. So they twist themselves in knots to challenge such a critique. As a result, I recognize that it's hard not to get defensive when someone like me suggests that you might be part of the problem, whether you're a journalist or engineer.
Understanding the vulnerabilities in news media that manipulators see can help you strengthen your approach.
I was wary in preparing this speech of being too critical of a profession under fire. But I'm hoping that you can hear what I'm saying. Because our democracy depends on you recognizing that you are being manipulated. Understanding the vulnerabilities in news media that manipulators see can help you strengthen your approach.
ROI Capitalism and Journalism
Given this, we need to talk about capitalism. In this country, we are socialized into a narrative of capitalism that no longer exists. The capitalism of yore emphasizes how efficient markets can enable innovation and growth, while yielding all sorts of social benefits. Capitalism always required people to take financial risks, but over the last 40 years, we've seen the rise of a new set of financial instruments that are divorced from the services and products that are being produced. The finance sector has become an increasingly extractive instrument enabling a new genre of capitalism that emphasizes short term return on investment. This version of capitalism is corrosive and, without proper checks and balances, it has shaped every sector in society.
To complicate matters, it's not just financiers that depend on the system that has been set up. We all do. University endowments, pension funds, and 401Ks are wedded to this financial system. We all want the stock market to keep going up. But quick return-on-investment style capitalism has costs. It means that every public company is under pressure to make more money quarter after quarter. Consider a company like Facebook under this model. Sure, Zuckerberg might have a controlling share of the company, but his ability to keep engineering talent is dependent on increasing the stock price. To do so, Facebook has three options. They either need to find more users, make more money per user, or diversify their portfolio of money making services. Only so much of that can be doing without tripping over the edge into exploitation.
But it's not just Facebook that's beholden to this form of capitalism. The news industry has also been undermined by the financial sector. When you ask most folks about why journalism is currently struggling, they quickly point to the tech industry. There's no doubt that Craigslist and Google altered the advertising industry or that the internet and mobile phones changed how people consumed information. But the financial precarity of the news industry began long before these changes. Hedge funds and private equity started taking over newsrooms in the 1980s. They weren't interested in the news business. They wanted your precious real estate. It wasn't in their interest to shut you down right away, but they aren't committed to your sustainability either.
Most Americans do not trust journalism. But this isn't because of your reporting. It's because you're an abstraction. It's because of the loss of local journalism.
Many newsrooms twisted themselves in knots to appease financiers--cutting costs, ending pensions, reducing staff, etc. But it was never enough, was it? Publicly traded companies in the United States are not valued for having a double bottom line. If you're not making more each quarter, you will eventually collapse in this financial context.Trying to appease, the industry doubled down on advertising, failing to recognize how the water was starting to boil. So when sweeping changes to advertising happened, it was easy to blame tech for the downfall of journalism. But it wasn't tech. It wasn't simply your financial model. It was the entire financial infrastructure that financialized capitalism enabled. While there are ways in which newsrooms can be financially sustainable,the healthy practice of investigative journalism is not compatible with the ROI that the Street expects.
I don't know if the private equity and hedge fund firms that exploited local news organizations recognized how much society would pay for the loss of local journalism. But I know that we're feeling that pain right now. Most Americans do not trust journalism. But this isn't because of your reporting. It's because you're an abstraction. It's because of the loss of local journalism.
While he attended all of the sessions of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington did not participate in any of the debates that took place. Except one. After an early draft of the Constitution suggested that members of the House of Representatives should each represent 40,000 people, he argued that the number should be reduced to 30,000. He knew that the delicate American democracy depended on people knowing their representatives and felt that any number greater than 30,000 would create an elite governance class and trigger distrust in the public. Today, each member of the House represents more than 700,000 people. And most Americans do not trust our federal government.
Trust is rooted in networks. If you don't know a journalist--or know someone who knows a journalist--why should you trust the profession? Thirty years ago, most people knew someone in their community that worked for a newspaper. That is not true today.
Why did TV news develop such great gravitas in the middle of the 20th century? Many Americans felt like they knew Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. TV anchors came directly into your living room. Psychologists refer to this as parasocial interaction, where the audience feels as though they know someone as real people. That's a great trick for working around actual social networks. It's the reason for news commentators' success. It's also why all sorts of pundits, conspiracy theorists, and toxic commentators have created regular podcasts and YouTube channels.
You won't be able to earn the trust of the American public by doubling down on your rigorous reporting. Or by focusing on the brand of your organizations. Or by trying desperately to appease those who accuse you of "anti-conservative bias." You will only earn the trust of the American public when you once again become a part of the American fabric. When people in communities around this country know you. When they understand your practices because you are part of their communities. When you are a part of their everyday lives.
You will only earn the trust of the American public when you once again become a part of the American fabric.
In short, you must actively seek to understand the social graph of the American public and build a relational campaign of direct engagement that isn't that different than what innovative politicians are trying to do. Or what my colleague Nancy Baym highlights has been necessary for musicians. In order to be effective journalists, you need to find a way to be a part of the social fabric of America and you need to knit that fabric together through your connections. That's the innovation that's most critical?-?and most unfamiliar?-?to those in the news business.
Strategic Amplification
In the meantime, you face another challenge. If manipulators are trying to use you to help polarize American society, how do you not take the bait? How do you not allow the trust problem to worsen?
First, recognize that the rubric with which you decide what to devote time to is not neutral. I don't mean this in a condescending or pejorative sense. I mean: own the fact that what makes something newsworthy is subjective. It depends on the power of the actors involved. It depends on the norms of your audience. It depends on the implications for specific communities or countries. Many of you have honed muscles to focus on some stories and not others. Yet, you must also find a hook to make a newsworthy story relevant to your readers. You must navigate business interests alongside the recognition that an exhausted public might prefer junk food. Furthermore, because your organizations are rooted in an industry and culture of competition, you're under pressure to be attentive to what others have deemed newsworthy. There be dragons everywhere. But like a yogi or jedi, your challenge is to constantly improve your awareness of the pressures and adversaries you face and evolve your strategy for navigating them.
Next, recognize that, in a networked era, every organizational and communicative process is exploitable. When journalism was the primary information gatekeeper in society, it was hard for a story to "break" without journalists being involved. But now, just as algorithmic manipulators have learned to engage in search engine optimization and game Twitter's trending topics, media manipulators have figured out how to trick you into telling their story. Accept this and outsmart them.
Case studies are often valuable for seeing traps. So let's look at one. In 2010, an extremist anti-Islam pastor named Terry Jones began using social media to publicly threaten to burn the Qu'ran in order to draw attention to his belief that "Islam is of the Devil." His goal was to attract the attention of mainstream news media who, by and large, initially ignored him. Bloggers and smaller news venues did not. He leveraged the coverage of lesser-known bloggers, along with the algorithmic systems underpinning Yahoo! News to put pressure on journalists to cover the story as newsworthy. Eventually, it worked. As this escalated, the media then covered Secretary Clinton stating, "It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida with a church of no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention." By this point, religious and political leaders were publicly asking him to cancel his plans. He vowed not to burn a Qu'ran, but then the media coverage faded. So, in March 2011, he oversaw the burning of the Qu'ran, which was of course covered by every news outlet who were primed to give him attention. Violent protests broke out in Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of at least 12 people, including at least 7 United Nations workers.
Not all media are created equal. Yes, a blog post can go viral. But when a major news outlet chooses to cover a story that had only received oxygen from bloggers, they amplify the message to wider audience. Mainstream news decisions matter. Even in a world of social media. What you choose to amplify has significant ramifications in what people discuss, share, and self-investigate. In her brilliant report "The Oxygen of Amplification," my colleague Whitney Phillips used journalists' own words and experiences to detail hownews media has been hijacked to amplify the messages of hate groups using the exact same techniques that both marketing firms and the hateful pastor used.
As Joan Donovan and I struggled to offer advice to journalists in light of media manipulation, we pulled on threads of history. She uncovered details about how newsrooms learned to respond to their recognition that when they covered the KKK in the mid-20th century, they served the goals of hate rally organizers. I was more obsessed with the history of the Werther Effect,which makes it very clear that how a news outlet covers a death by suicide can affect the likelihood of copycats. (Side note: as a board member of Crisis Text Line, I'm very frustrated by how Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain's deaths were covered.) The scholarly literature describes the technique journalists can use to minimize harm as "strategic silence." So we used this term. Yet, no matter how much we emphasized the strategic component of this practice, those in the news business consistently reacted with outrage that we were arguing that they should be silent.
Case in point. When I broached this topic with the publisher of an esteemed newspaper, he told me that the Pentagon is regularly telling him not to publish things and that it's his responsibility to make sure that the public hears what it needs to hear. I completely agree with him. But when the Pentagon is breathing down his neck, I can promise you that his lawyers have been called and that he and his editorial team have dotted every i and crossed every t. They're careful because they've made a very hard call and they get the cost of doing it wrong. They've made a very strategic call. And they want the public to hear a message clearly.
In other words, news organizations already engage in strategic amplification. You regularly choose to cover stories that are too critical, too newsworthy to ignore. And you've thought long and hard about how to tell that story because you don't want any slip-up to undermine your goal of conveying crucial information to the public. My wish is not to silence stories, but for you to recognize that it's as important to be sensitive to frames that benefit media manipulators as it is to be attentive to the ones that upset governments or corporations that might sue you.
You're in the business of strategic amplification. There are all sorts of things that are effectively silenced in the process. Some aren't deemed newsworthy. Cats sitting on people's laps. But there are also newsworthy stories that don't get covered because it's hard to convince the public that it matters. All of you covering Syria know that what's unfolding in Idlib is a disaster in the making, but finding the angle to make this front page news is bloody hard. If you can recognize your agency and power in choosing what to amplify, what's the value in amplifying messages designed to polarize, radicalize, or bolster those peddling hate?
How you tell a story also matters.I would argue that you can effectively cover stories without serving the agenda of extremists if you understand what they're trying to do. Let me give you a concrete example.
When a 25-year-old struck terror on the streets of Toronto by driving a van over people, the incident was unquestionably newsworthy. Journalists scrambled for clues. Soon after, an angry Facebook post emerged, suggesting a connection to an earlier shooting in California. What connected these two young men appeared to be a shared misogynistic attitude. They both seemed to have participated in online forums full of angry men who feel as though someone else is to be blamed for their loneliness. They typically blame feminists, arguing that they should have a right to "a woman" and that feminists have taken that away from them.They advocate for enforced monogamy and reject the idea that rape is a bad thing. Their hateful views are supported in toned down forms by more legitimate figures, including a university professor at the University of Toronto, across town from where the act of vehicular terrorism took place. They are also connected through a term, a term that journalists latched onto and amplified to magnify the seriousness of the terroristic act. A term that most of the public had not known prior to the media coverage. A term that invited your readers to go searching and find a world of deep toxicity that only grew after Toronto.
I understand that the term "incel" was provocative and would excite your readers to learn more, but were those of you who propagated this term intending to open a portal to hell? What made amplifying this term newsworthy? You could've conveyed the same information without giving people a search term that served as a recruiting vehicle for those propagating toxic masculinity. Choosing not to amplify hateful recruiting terms is not censorship. You wouldn't give your readers a phone number to join the KKK, so why give them a digital calling card?
In my mind, this is about smart reporting. You don't need to send people to data voids or offer free advertising to hate groups to tell the story of a terroristic act rooted in toxic masculinity. I get that you feel that it's important to cover "both sides" of a story. But since when is intolerance and hate a legitimate "side"? By focusing on bystanders and those who are victimized by hate, you can tell the story without reinforcing the violence. Extremists have learned how to use irony and slippery rhetoric to mask themselves as conservatives and argue that they are victims. Ignore their attention games and focus your reporting on the wide range of non-hateful political views in this country that aren't screaming loudly to get your attention. There is no need to give oxygen to fringe groups who acting like the bully in the 3rd grade classroom. Inform the public without helping extremists recruit. This isn't about newsworthiness. And it's unethical to self-justify that others are using the term. Or that people could've found this information on social media or search engines. Your business is in amplifying what's important. So don't throw in the towel.
A Theory of Power
In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the remedy to bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. At the time, there was widespread agreement that speech can and must be curbed when it presented a "clear and present danger." In Whitney v. California, Brandeis argued that it was unjust to prosecute a woman who was accused of helping the Communist Labor Party promote a violent overthrow of the government. He felt that political speech--even dangerous speech--was essential to democracy.
Because of cases like this, Brandeis became known as one of the greatest advocates for free speech. But while Brandeis believed that anyone had the right to express their views, he did not believe that anyone had the right to be amplified.
:{
}:
More importantly, he didn't believe that anyone who had the means to shove a message down someone's throat had the right to do so. In a 1932 case known as Packer Corporation v. Utah, Brandeis argued that Utah had the right to place restrictions on billboard advertisements by the tobacco industry. He argued that billboards must be treated differently than magazines because the former had "captive audiences." In other words, people could choose whether or not to view a magazine, but to avoid a billboard, they'd have to intentionally divert their eyes.
The media landscape has changed significantly over the last 86 years, but the nuance in Brandeis' arguments lives on. Brandeis recognized that the key to sustaining a commitment to free speech is to have a rich understanding of how people can abuse their power or manipulate the system to control what others hear. He also recognized that as the media landscape changed, so must our approach in enabling the First Amendment.
Now, more than ever, we need a press driven by ideals determined to amplify what is most important for enabling an informed citizenry.
This country was premised on the necessity of a free press. Journalism is an essential part of our democracy, not because of its financial power, but because of its ability to inform the public to enable self-governance. The press' unique role in our country is rooted in its historically unique capacity to amplify information. Yet, just because the news media is no longer the only gatekeeper does not mean that its responsibilities to democratic governance can be ignored. Now, more than ever, we need a press driven by ideals determined to amplify what is most important for enabling an informed citizenry. Not what will get clicks or appease hedge fund masters. We need voices who are information stalwarts, determined to explain complex issues to the public.
I'm not suggesting that you ignore where the public is. To the contrary, start with their questions. Create explainer videos. Help people connect the dots between Syria and climate change by strategically linking content together so that people can follow the paths through compelling evidence-based content and learn more about hard topics.
Many of you have thoughtfully critiqued the tech industry for amplifying disinformation while claiming that its platforms are neutral actors in the information landscape. There is indeed nothing neutral about an algorithmic system. Algorithmic systems fundamentally function by creating networks and enabling others to do so. And the moment that an algorithmic system affects what information people access, someone will work to manipulate that system to achieve their information goals.
You are not algorithms. But you are also not neutral. And because you have the power to amplify messages, people also want to manipulate you. That's just par for the course. And in today's day and age, it's not just corporations, governments, and PR shops that have your number. Just as the US military needed to change tactics to grapple with a tribal, networked, and distributed adversary, so must you. Focus on networks?-?help connect people to information. Build networks across information and across people. Be an embedded part of the social fabric of this country.
Democracy depends on you.
This talk builds on the amazing work of many people at Data & Society, including and especially the Media Manipulation team. Data & Society would also like to thank the News Integrity Initiative, Craig NewmarkPhilanthropies, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for supporting our work in this area.
MediaManipulationTechnologyJournalism
ref
https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/
The Oxygen of Amplification
Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators
Whitney Phillips
PUBLISHED 05.22.18
cf exec report
The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups.
Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.
After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of **editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm**.
As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.
This work is the first practitioner-focused report from Data & Society’s Media Manipulation Initiative, which examines how groups use the participatory culture of the internet to turn the strengths of a free society into vulnerabilities.
==
mma
Right-wing “journalist” Laura Loomer was de-verified on Twitter in 2017 after she exploded in an unhinged anti-Muslim meltdown, which prompted her to compare the site to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. Today, she joined other conspiracy theorists—including Alex Jones—on Capitol Hill and made her presence felt at hearings featuring Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Allegations that Twitter and other major social media platforms have discriminated in the enforcement of their terms of service to target conservatives have for the past year been bubbling out of the conspiracy theory fever swamps of the internet—where right-wing activists have been subject to suspensions and bans as platforms move to combat misinformation—into the GOP mainline, where they have inspired Congressional hearings. Aside from a handful of anecdotal stories about terms of enforcement errors, no tangible evidence exists to prove that tech companies are actually doing what the conspiracy theorists—and now GOP members of Congress—have claimed.
Today, representatives from Facebook and Twitter were called to testify before the House and Senate about misinformation on the platform and the way enforcement is carried out. The hearings attracted a swarm of right-wing media figures who work in the conspiracy theory media market, including Infowars’ Jones, One America News’ Jack Posobiec, alt-right troll Chuck Johnson, and Gateway Pundit’s Cassandra Fairbanks. These conspiracy theorists did not go quietly.
Jones spent a brief moment lambasting CNN’s Oliver Darcy, whose reporting on Infowars’ de-platforming has led Jones and his colleagues to target him with a smear campaign alleging that Darcy is anti-American and working on behalf of the communist Chinese government. [pix twit]When Twitter’s Dorsey exited the Capitol after the morning meeting, he faced a scrum of reporters intermingled with conspiracy theorists. As Dorsey entered his vehicle, Loomer yelled at him: “You unverified me and called me a white supremacist! I’m Jewish!You violated my First Amendment right.” Jones rambled about something to do with CIA and Barack Obama.
When Dorsey returned in the afternoon, he headed to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for a personal grilling from Republicans based on the unsubstantiated claim that his website is systemically censoring conservative voices. While Dorsey repeatedly denied that his site discriminates against conservatives, he received a second dose of Loomer’s antics.
About an hour after the afternoon session began, Loomer interrupted the House hearing by bellowing that President Trump must “help us before it’s too late because Jack Dorsey is trying to influence the election, to sway the election so that Democrats can steal the election.” Rep. Billy Long of Missouri began rattling off like an auctioneer while Capitol Police escorted Loomer out of the chamber[pix]
But as HuffPost’s Ashley Feinberg rightfully pointed out, while Rep. Long and his GOP colleagues may have enjoyed ridiculing Loomer, the conspiracy theories pushed by Loomer and her ilk are the basis of today’s largely pointless meetings.
Tags: Alex JonesCassandra FairbanksCharles JohnsonJack PosobiecLaura Loomerconspiracy theoriesMediatech companiesGateway PunditInfoWarsOne America News
==
aha post jones de-platform: -->
Cohn Syndrome: interpret all as attack?] deny everything, counter-attack --> amplify? tolerance/addiction --> constant escalation? in echo bubble, no balancing info/ fdbk FB social media algorithm amplifies the sensational (eg hothouse v stabilized Earth)
addiction is systemic, amplifying feedback, but also symptomatic of system degredation, eg opioids
==
==
Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have removed Alex Jones and his Infowars website from their platforms. Apple removed five of Jones’ six podcasts, saying, “Apple does not tolerate hate speech.” Facebook said it removed Jones’s pages because he was “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” Alex Jones regularly spreads far-right-wing conspiracy theories. He’s being sued by the parents of the elementary school children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting for claiming the massacre was a hoax staged by gun control advocates.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-our-brains-are-best-defense-against-foreign-election-interference
...However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale.
Old goals, new techniques
More than 2,400 years ago, the Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu made it an axiom of war that it’s best to “subdue the enemy without fighting.” Using information – or disinformation, or propaganda – as a weapon can be one way to destabilize a population and disable the target country. In 1984 a former KGB agent who defected to the West discussed this as a long-term process and more or less predicted what’s happening in the U.S. now.
The Russians created false social media accounts to simulate political activists – such as @TEN_GOP, which purported to be associated with the Tennessee Republican Party. Just that one account attracted more than 100,000 followers. The goal was to distribute propaganda, such as captioned photos, posters or short animated graphics, purposely designed to enrage and engage these accounts’ followers. Those people would then pass the information along through their own personal social networks.
Starting from seeds planted by Russian fakers, including some who claimed to be U.S. citizens, those ideas grew and flourished through amplification by real people. Unfortunately, whether originating from Russia or elsewhere, fake information and conspiracy theories can form the basis for discussion at major partisan media outlets.
As ideas with niche online beginnings moved into the traditional mass media landscape, they serve to keep controversies alive by sustaining divisive arguments on both sides. For instance, one Russian troll factory had its online personas host rallies both for and against each of the major candidates in the 2016 presidential election. Though the rallies never took place, the online buzz about them helped inflame divisions in society.
The trolls also set up Twitter accounts purportedly representing local news organizations – including defunct ones – to take advantage of Americans’ greater trust of local news sources than national ones. These accounts operated for several years – one for the Chicago Daily News, closed since 1978, was created in May 2014 and collected 20,000 followers – passing along legitimate local news stories, likely seeking to win followers’ trust ahead of future disinformation campaigns. Shut down before they could fulfill that end, these accounts cleverly aimed to exploit the fact that many Americans’ political views cloud their ability to separate fact from opinion in the news.
These sorts of activities are functions of traditional espionage: Foment discord and then sit back while the target population becomes distracted arguing among themselves.
Fighting digital disinformation is hard
Analyzing, let alone countering, this type of provocative behavior can be difficult. Russia isn’t alone, either: The U.S. tries to influence foreign audiences and global opinions, including through Voice of America online and radio services and intelligence services’ activities. And it’s not just governments that get involved. Companies, advocacy groups and others also can conduct disinformation campaigns.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations are ineffective remedies. Further, social media companies have been fairly slow to respond to this phenomenon. Twitter reportedly suspended more than 70 million fake accounts earlier this summer. That included nearly 50 social media accounts like the fake Chicago Daily News one.
Facebook, too, says it is working to reduce the spread of “fake news” on its platform. Yet both companies make their money from users’ activity on their sites – so they are conflicted, trying to stifle misleading content while also boosting users’ involvement.
Real defense happens in the brain
The best protection against threats to the cognitive dimension of cyberspace depends on users’ own actions and knowledge. Objectively educated, rational citizens should serve as the foundation of a strong democratic society. But that defense fails if people don’t have the skills – or worse, don’t use them – to think critically about what they’re seeing and examine claims of fact before accepting them as true.
American voters expect ongoing Russian interference in U.S. elections. In fact, it appears to have already begun. To help combat that influence, the U.S. Justice Department plans to alert the public when its investigations discover foreign espionage, hacking and disinformation relating to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. And the National Security Agency has created a task force to counter Russian hacking of election systems and major political parties’ computer networks.
These efforts are a good start, but the real solution will begin when people start realizing they’re being subjected to this sort of cognitive attack and that it’s not all just a hoax.
Richard Forno, Senior Lecturer, Cybersecurity & Internet Researcher, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
==
https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/how-trump-used-facebook-2016-and-why-thats-coming-every-important-race-year
...
Parscale do for Trump in 2016 that is setting the standard for 2018?
“If I had to characterize what the Trump campaign did, theyautomated Facebook’s best [advertising] practices at a very large scale. I think that statewide campaigns will try to do the same kind of thing in 2018,” said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics. “I’m wondering if any new technology is going to come out of the resistance. It’s possible. I think a lot of what you are seeing is training and capacity building.”
In other words, Democrats are playing catchup to Republicans, compared to 2016, when their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee—under a series of chairwomen—were more focused on older media platforms like TV, rather than new platforms like social media.
To begin to understand how Parscale, an online advertising specialist, went from building websites for Trump products, to running Trump’s online messaging and fundraising in 2016, to assisting the RNC with small donor outreach in 2018, to being named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, you have to examine how Parscale used Facebook.
Consultants like Delany are quick to say they can’t tell you how the Trump campaign’s messaging specifically affected voters when they cast ballots. But they can say how Parscale used Facebook, which revolutionized how national campaigns targeted and messaged likely voters.
The Trump campaign took voter files from the Republican Party, which had people’s electoral histories—age, gender, address, party registration and voting histories. They took more personalized data by Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm run by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, which boasted it had psychological profiles of every voter. (On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for not deleting data taken from the social network in 2016 to create its voter profiles. The Guardian reported Cambridge Analytica's data was culled from 50 million to 60 million Facebook user profiles it had stolen before it joined the Trump campaign.)If you roll back the clock to before the internet, a baseline emerges showing how much has changed. When I was press secretary on the 1990 campaign that first elected Bernie Sanders to the House of Representatives, I remember picking up a half-dozen TV ads for the campaign’s final stretch. Bernie looked at the stack of 30-second videos and said his future rested on those tapes. That was a statewide race in a rural state with small media markets, but compare its scale to what Parscale and Facebook did for Trump.
It’s no secret. An October 2016 in-depth report by Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg for Bloomberg.com laid out the basics. It started with indentifying persuadable voters in swing states, and then sending messaging poking at their biases and personality types. More recent reports, such as this weekend's Guardian report featuring a Trump campaign whistleblower, added more detail showing how powerful Facebook's user profiles were in 2016.
The campaign put all that voter profiling data into Facebook’s advertising supercomputers, which had its own deep profiles of users based on their pages, communications and networks. Facebook provided staffers to every major campaign in 2016 to facilitate this process. From that data merging and data mining, Parscale oversaw an operation that identified 13.5 million Facebook users in 16 states that it deemed were persuadable. It targeted those individuals with the kind of personality-driven content that social media emphasizes—more opinion, belief and bias than facts.
The Trump campaign didn’t just send out original content, noted Melissa Ryan, who writes the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. “The Trump campaign put out relatively few ideas of their own,” she explained on Medium.com. “Instead they chose to validateand amplify the conversation happening online. They didn’t need to confirm or deny anything, they simply gave Trump’s army their megaphone… [It] put their supporters one content front and center, taking a backseat in their own campaign.”
“They were banking that people are more likely to believe something from an unofficial source that seems true rather than to believe something from an official source that actually is true,” Ryan explained. “Once they realized there was no line to cross, they went all in using social media to bully and intimidate others, spread misinformation, and mainstream the language of hate. Those who spoke out were met with a flood of abuse, and that abuse was organized. Their targets had few places to turn as tech companies turned a blind eye, and law enforcement was of little help.”
By late October, days before former FBI director James Comey announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified emails, the Bloomberg reporting team said Parscale’s crew of subcontractors had determined “which social media ads [messages, memes, shares, etc.] were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences.”
Facebook allowed Parscale to build and target what it calls “custom audiences,” as ex-Facebook executive Antonio Garcia-Martinez explained in a Wired piece, “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads.” Its custom audience consisted of all the impressionable voters—Trump enthusiasts on one hand, Democrats dubious about Clinton on the other—who could be encouraged to vote or encouraged not to.
Then the campaign used another Facebook advertising feature built atop that preliminary customization called “Lookalike Audiences.” It targeted another wider circle of Facebook usersin the swing constituencies in swing states. Some of this was to keep Trump’s base engaged. Some was to discourage three key columns of Clinton supporters from voting. As Bloomberg noted, “idealistic white liberal, young women and African Americans” were the targets of Trump’s three voter suppression campaigns.
Garcia-Martinez, the original product manager for "Custom Audiences,” explained how the Trump campaign targeted audiences and then fed it content, often propaganda from other online sources. This explains how Breitbart.com temporarily had more traffic than Fox News in the campaign’s final weeks. But Garcia-Martinez’s explanation also alludes to platform features that are designed to be psychologically engaging and provoke emotional responses. It starts with creating political echo chambers filled with like-minded associates.
“We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences,” he wrote. “One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.”
Colin Delany, the online media consultant and author on the topic, is quick to point out that it’s impossible to trace how all this messaging affected voters’ behavior when they cast their 2016 ballots. That’s because the thread Parscale could observe—whether messaging recipients liked, commented on or shared his handiwork—was broken as voters put down their devices and picked up ballots.
But Delany said there was another metric that confirmed how powerful and engaging Facebook was before 2016’s Election Day. It helped raise a fortune for Trump.
“Now one of the main things with Facebook is this is one of the few operations that I’ve heard of that’s been able to raise a significant amount of money by targeting people on Facebook,” he said. “Now my suspicion is that almost all the money actually got raised by email. But they would identify and recruit the people via Facebook.”
“If you can get them to respond to the first fundraising pitch and give you $5, then you are in their email program. Or you get them to sign a petition. You get them to do whatever it is that gets them the email address,” Delany said. “The small donor lists that the RNC is using to pretty good effect right now comes out of the work that Parscale did for Trump. If you want to look for results, I think you can look to social media fundraising.”
Seen from that metric, there’s no denying the political power of social media. With 10 days to go before Election Day, Bloomberg reported that Parscale’s operation raised $275 million from 2.5 million small donors. That’s more than the nearly $238 million raised by the Sanders presidential campaign from his grassroots base. Think about that: Parscale’s operation outraised Bernie’s operation—but Parscale isn’t bragging about it.
The Clinton campaign, as many political insiders and former Facebook executives have said, didn’t use Facebook as aggressively. In one intriguing series of recent tweets, these tech and political insiders said that Democrats in general rely more on TV ads than online messaging, partly because political consultants can earn more that way. They also said her campaign was relying on dated internal assessments by Facebook (from 2010) about its affects on voter participation, and that overall, its campaigns discounted—and didn’t sufficiently study—“observational political science,” or how voters responded to social media provocations in focus groups.
These cringe-worthy observations are part and parcel of political campaigns, which are like startups that rapidly pop up and then mostly disappear after Election Day. Political campaigns are perpetually in search of messaging and fundraising infrastructure they can use; just as institutions like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have created infrastructure seeking new users. Garcia-Martinez, reached by email, said he was stunned by how little political professionals—and academics who study politics—know about advertising.
“My recent [Wired] piece tossed me into a few threads with political/election/academic Twitter, and I found it a very strange world,” he wrote. “Very punctiliously following strict experimental protocols and the scientific method, and also not knowing the first f**king thing about how to advertise on Facebook (their studies measure what they can as outsiders, which isn't much). It is a leap of faith to just assume Facebook ads work for politics.... but without question, they work for more commercial direct-response advertisers.”
His takeaway: “Parscale is hailed as this genius, but all he did is what any reasonably savvy ecommerce operation would have done, and that set him way beyond Hillary and the supposedly ‘best and brightest.’ Which is why, as Delany and Graves, campaign media consultants and columnists, said, social media will be at the center of 2018’s elections for control of Congress and constitutional offices in swing states.
Steven Rosenfeld
==
==
OMFG RW ju jitsu?!
privacy
never connect petit to social media before, aha
Avaaz worries about the scope of the subpoena, as it would also include the names and email addresses of members who have signed Monsanto petitions. GM Watch noted that one of its petitions calling for a moratorium on glyphosate garnered more than 2 million signatures.
The subpoena was issued as part of a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto in which plaintiffs around the country claim that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup.
Avaaz is now fighting back and is raising funds for the defense effort. The group will be represented by the New York firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, LLP.
"This is big," Avaaz writes in a new petition. "[Monsanto's] a $50 billion mega-corporation, infamous for legal strong-arm tactics like this. They have unlimited resources. If they get their hands on all our private information, there's no telling what they'll use it for."
Emma Ruby-Sachs, Deputy Director of Avaaz, said Monsanto's demand for internal communications is a "violation" of first amendment rights.
"There are millions of people around the world who have a deep and genuine concern that Monsanto's glyphosate is making us and our environment sick," she added. "That is the sole reason our members have called on governments to regulate it based on independent science. We're not going to let this legal attack slow down that essential work one bit."
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- Monsanto's Fingerprints All Over Newsweek's Opinion Piece, a Hit ... ›
- Carey Gillam on Monsanto, Cancer and the Corruption of Science ... ›
- Monsanto's Roundup Faces European Politics and U.S. Lawsuits ... ›
==
mma 2/18
Study: Trump supporters spread most of the "junk news" A new Oxford study shows that most "junk news" on social media is spread by Trump supporters. As Media Matters visiting fellow Melissa Ryan shows, this is a huge structural problem that ends up infecting the entire media ecosystem. Take for example the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, which research shows was driven both by Russian-linked bots and Trump supporters on social media. That it was trending on social media gave it a push to be covered by mainstream outlets. Nowadays, there often seems to be way too many things for the news to cover; that Trump supporters have figured out a way to game that without the media really understanding how is a huge problem. |
==
https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/russian-hacking-isnt-biggest-threat-2018s-elections-its-conspiracies-spread-silicon
Americans who care about democracy and voting should stop jumping to conclusions about Russians hunkered down in Moscow cyber-bunkers, and instead look at what’s happening on these shores asshoddy journalists and Silicon Valley’s content curators are doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.
Last week, a mini-drama played out in the world of American elections, Russian interference and vote-hacking conspiracies that was a microcosm of the same online dynamics that tilted and force-fed American voters seven times as much Hillary-hating propaganda on YouTube as comparable anti-Trump content.
This snapshot reveals that little has changed in the misinformation engines driving the attention economy. This is the frail state of American democracy today, where the most powerful content curators, opportunistic partisans, poorly informed journalists—and yes, overseas adversaries—are funneling and amplifying “divisive, sensational and conspiratorial” content, as one authoritative report put it, further undermining already shaky public confidence in voting.
:{“Russia probably realizes, despite what a lot of people in the progressive community and other communities probably think, it’s really hard to change the outcome in a race; to change it [the count] to what they might want to occur,” said a former Justice Department lawyer who now advises state election officials. “That [theft] would require a lot of Americans engaged in an active conspiracy here on the ground; thousands of people.”
“But for less money and risk, they can get us to do their job for them,” he said. “They can get us to doubt our own election system; to doubt the machinery of American democracy.}: And they have been enormously successful in that. And I think the NBC piece [this week] is part and parcel of that. When you talk about, hysterically, risks that everyone has known about for nearly a year, and you don’t talk about all the work that’s been done since then, you don’t interview a single election official, you’re basically trying to put people into a state of hysteria about how their vote is not going to count. That’s really damaging. That’s going to undermine our democracy.”
Misinformation Engines
Americans received more bad news about voting this week. But amid all the news—such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying that Russia was already interfering in 2018’s elections but giving no details—one sloppy report stood out and ignited a stream of copycat and increasingly conspiratorial posts amplified by the web’s content-pushing algorithms. On Wednesday, NBC News aired an "exclusive” interview with Jeanette Manfra, the Department of Homeland Security cyber security head, who reported that Russia had not targeted, but “penetrated” state voter systems in 2016.
First, NBC didn’t understand what she said. “NBC chose to interpret that statement to mean ‘several states’ were successfully penetrated. We are still only aware of one state voter registration system that was penetrated and that office made a public statement at the time,” the National Association of Secretaries of State noted on its website. Moreover, Manfra said nothing new. She repeated her testimony to Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2017, even using the same words.
Nonetheless, journalists who don’t know how voting works, nor what Russia did and didn’t do in 2016's elections, went wild. They quickly said what’s most alarming and factually unsupported: that Russia all but stole the vote for Trump, or offered slightly less hyperbolic variations of that conspiratorial theme.
Esquire’s piece ominously opened, “We are inching ever closer to the revelation that the actual vote totals were hacked—some very smart people are already there, by the way—and, once that happens, I don’t know where we go from there.” The Huffington Post began, “The Russian government successfully obtained access to U.S. voter registration databases in multiple states.” Under Reddit’s reposting of the NBC video was a discussion filled with gripes about how dysfunctional our elections are, all escalating and pointing to the conclusion that the system is rigged, surely hacked and democratic hopes are a mirage.
Esquire offered no proof that the 2016 vote totals were tampered with—because there is none. That’s not what election officials and technical advisors have said. Huffington Post got it wrong because Russian hackers only got inside one state’s voter registration system, not multiple states. And most of the gripes on Reddit were due to political parties running primaries and caucuses in anti-democratic ways, or elected partisans who twist the rules of voting to benefit their base.
What Did Russia Do?
These misinformed reports raced around the internet aided by algorithms that target content for people using sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. That dynamic, an accelerating spiral in which misinformation and fiction outruns and outperforms reality, is what arch partisans—as well as Russia—tapped in 2016 to influence voters. Yes, Russia got inside Illinois’ registration database—a non-competitive blue state in the presidential year. But its hackers didn’t tamper in a way that impeded polling place voting. That’s what Russia achieved on a technical level and what top federal and state officials are trying to prevent again.
Russia also achieved a propaganda coup undermining the public's faith in American elections, which fits Putin’s longstanding scorn for western democracy. But pointing the finger of blame at Russia for other 2016 snafus hasn’t panned out. In North Carolina, some election integrity activists thought the scrambled poll books in Durham County were due to Russian interference. That suspicion came from the fact that the Florida-based contractor programming the voting machines had been identified as a target of another Russian phishing scheme that summer. Yet a deep post-mortem found another explanation: someone failed to delete poll book data from that spring's primary before setting up the machinery for November’s vote. That mistake, in less than a half-dozen precincts, in turn, incorrectly told poll workers that people had already voted.
The problem there wasn’t Russia, but a voting system where too many key features are privatized and managed by contractors protecting those trade secrets: the black box software running voting systems.
But back to the bigger picture. Nobody has found any proof that Russia accessed the separate computing systems that tallied 2016 votes, numerous consultants for state election officials and federal authorities have repeatedly told AlterNet. Yet in 2018 we are living in a world where the spread of misinformation reigns, whether it is coming from media seeking greater audiences and ad revenues because suspense and conspiracy sells, or whether it's amplified by Silicon Valley’s giant content curators that have programmed their algorithms to elevate “edgy and hateful content [because it] is engaging,” as an authoritative investigative report in the Guardian put it.
What's clear is who and what is on the losing end of this escalating dynamic: any citizen who believes in the hope of democratic institutions like elections, despite their numerous flaws, from clumsy bureaucratic injuries to partisan betrayals.
Needless to say, there was other bad voting news this week; news that should have been given top billing by all these writers promoting the fable that Russia could have stolen 2016 for Trump and is back at it in 2018.
On Thursday, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School released a report declaring America’s electronic voting machinery is “crumbling.” The report red-flagged 41 states for systems that are more than a decade old, which is beyond the reliable lifespan of most computers, making “our elections more vulnerable to breakdown and malfunction, but to hacking as well.” The Center issued a similar warning in 2015, calling on Congress to allocate several hundred million dollars to update the machinery. But that didn’t happen then and it has not happened since, including in the two-year budget passed this week by Congress.
What Really Matters Now?
In today’s world, beyond raising awareness about the dark side of the attention economy, little is being done to substantively counter the reality that propaganda and paranoia are outrunning the facts, reality checks and better, more nuanced, information. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Youtube might publicly decry the use of their platforms to spread propaganda and fake news, but they are not changing their targeted advertising systems that target and deliver that content and reap them billions every quarter. Meanwhile, shoddy reporting that uses conspiracy theories to generate viewer traffic isn’t helping.
Whether incomplete reporting (Tillerson’s warning) or distortions presenting nothing new (NBC), or paranoid speculation built on those vapors (Esquire), election officials contacted by AlterNet say these kinds of narratives are eclipsing the steps now being taken to make voting in 2018 more secure and to better audit vote counts. But those granular steps won’t matter if the public doesn’t believe the results and is quicker to trust what flies around cyberspace at the speed of light.
What’s been happening, and what people may start hearing about in coming weeks as 2018’s first primary elections approach in March, is the result of unprecedented cooperation between the Department of Homeland Security and states to protect voting from cyber attacks. What Tillerson was apparently referring to when he said Russia is already trying to interfere in 2018’s elections, was government voting systems—like computers across federal and state governments—are constantly being probed and targeted by overseas adversaries. That may be escalating, but it's not a new trend according to a state election director contacted by AlterNet.
Beyond this new federal-state cooperation, which was launched by the Obama administration, the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) will soon issue new voluntary voting system guidelines, which set higher standards for cyber security and audits to make sure votes are accurately counted. While these standards are voluntary, most states follow some or all of them, and the private sector voting machine vendors typically adopt all of them.
Meanwhile, a handful of states, like Colorado and Rhode Island, are implementing better post-election audits. Other states are moving away from paperless voting, which Virginia did a few years ago. Louisiana is looking at this, dependent on funding, and so is Georgia, in a pilot project. Some of the pressure to do so—echoing what election integrity activists have long argued—is that the Election Assistance Commission push for better audits means using ink-marked paper ballots.
But back to 2018’s elections and Russia. Unlike years past, better security and audits are the predominant focus for top election officials, who next weekend meet in Washington, D.C. The agendas for the National Association of Secretaries of State and National Association of State Election Directors both reflect this priority.
While it remains to be seen how effective these steps will be, it’s a fact that it would be a colossal task to hack the statewide vote totals in a state like Michigan, with more than 1,600 different local and county election jurisdictions, each with separate voting systems, compared to targeting swing voters in swing counties on social media for edgy campaign messaging. (In Wisconsin there are 1,852 election jurisdictions; these are the two states that had the closest Clinton-Trump margins in 2016.)
In 2016, Russia’s biggest impact was through propaganda, spreading messaging that pushed American voters’ hot buttons, not tinkering with the machinery. That’s why this week’s microcosm, in which election hacking conspiracies eclipsed real news was noteworthy. It is a mirror of what’s happening in our political and media culture, and points to the shape of things to come. In a year when midterm elections are poised to rebalance political power in America, undermining confidence in voting is the fastest lane to political chaos and unrest for Republicans to reject those results.
The stakes, as the ex-DOJ attorney said, “is people start doubting our own election system and they do not participate anymore. And it’s what the election officials right now are fighting so hard against. They are working so hard to get the message out that they are on the job. They are working harder than ever. They are coordinating with the feds. They are trying to get the funding they need. So they can make sure that all future elections, even if the threat increases, that they can address it.”
That’s why this week’s obsessive, incompetent reporting on Russian hacking—and the way it was amplified and spread online by Silicon Valley algorithms—presents real dangers to America’s already imperfect democracy and system of voting and elections.
“We’re doing Russia’s work for them,” the attorney said. “I don’t think NBC is working for Putin. But because it’s easy clickbait to say Russia’s penetrating our election systems, even though this is literally the same language that [DHS cyber security director] Jeanette [Manfra] used for her testimony back in June. There’s no one happier right now than Vladimir sitting on his throne in Moscow. This is exactly what he was hoping for. It’s working.”
Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).
https://www.alternet.org/media/what-can-be-done-about-attention-economys-dark-side
...
The Attention Economy
Those outside Silicon Valley’s innermost circles cannot access or evaluate the algorithms powering Facebook’s news feeds and advertising-driven content placement, or YouTube’s engine that recommends other videos individual users might like. However, panelists at the Commission’s Stanford University session were exceptionally articulate and forthcoming about the nature and goals of the algorithms, better described as brain-mimicking artificial intelligence.
:{One of the most outspoken explainers and critics wasTristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google—his company was acquired by it in 2011—who now runs a non-profit,**Time Well Spent**,which seeks to improve Big Tech’s impact on society. What this under-40, ex-CEO said was as stunning as what looked like a blasé reaction from his industry colleagues.
Harris said the attention economy, or the media on everyone’s smartphones and computers, is not just the endless marketing we all see. There’s a deeper reason why many established news sources can be supplanted by shadowy propaganda on major platforms, why facts can be outrun by opinions and lies, and why narrower tribal loyalties can usurp democratic institutions.
Harris pointed the finger of blame at the heart and circulatory system of Silicon Valley. Its artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to trigger brain responses and be addictive, he said. They power a business model loosely called online advertising, but that is a superstructure that cashes in by targeting and provoking shared interests, via curated content. But it also separates society into disconnected spheres.}:
“There’s the public rhetoric about what [information] technology ought to do and what the positive intentions are. But then there’s the reality, if you actually go inside the companies, and hear the engineers and designers talk about their daily objectives, everything comes down to what’s going to hook people to staying on the screen,” Harris said. “No matter what the positive intentions are, 2 billion people do wake up in the morning right now and they have one of these things in their pockets, and they do use one of a handful of services. As my colleague Roger McNamee, who is [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg’s mentor likes to say, there’s 2 billion people who use Facebook, that’s more than the number of followers of Christianity; 1.5 billion people use YouTube, that’s about the number of followers of Islam. These products have more influence over our daily thoughts than many religions and certainly more than any government.”
When John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus in 1966, he created an international uproar. The band received death threats and had to stop touring. But when Harris said Facebook was more popular than Jesus and YouTube served more people than entire continents, these breathtaking assertions barely raised eyebrows. That scale underscores why high tech’s biggest successes are facing a reckoning, from congressional inquiries on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, to new calls to break up tech monopolies under anti-trust laws, to solution-seeking forums like the Knight Commission.
Harris studied how brains make choices at Stanford and went on to create technologies and a company that tapped the “invisible influences that hijack human thinking,” as his bio puts it. But that technology now poses an existential threat to humanity, he said, because it’s growing beyond the ability any one company—or handful of attention economy monopolies—to control.
“We’re a species that…can study our own ability to be manipulated,” he said. “We have to talk about the advertising-based business model, which, paired with artificial intelligence, poses an existential threat. We have to get really serious about this. If you think about where are the most powerful AIs in the world located right now? Arguably, at two companies: Google and Facebook. The most powerful AIs in the world.
“Instead of pointing them at a challenge like climate change, and saying, let’s solve that, or pointing it at drug discovery for cancer, and saying, let’s solve that, we have pointed the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world at your brain. And we basically said, play chess against this brain and figure out what will engage it the best. And so every time we open up a news feed, we’re playing chess against a supercomputer that’s designed to see 50 million steps ahead on the chessboard of your mind, and figure out what will perfectly engage you.”
The results are not always pretty, he said, a remark others echoed.
“When you think about the global consequences of this—the fact that this supercomputer is doing this in languages, and in countries, the engineers and the companies don’t even speak [or live in], which is how you get the Rohingya genocide in Burma. And how you get some fake news pod creating certain deaths in India, in South Sudan. The engineers can’t put this thing back in the bag. We have created exponential impact without exponential sensitivity.”
It’s even worse than that, explained panelist Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, which specializes in niche social networks. She repeatedly said that there is a race in Silicon Valley to break Facebook and Google’s information monopolies that involve algorithms teaching—programming—themselves to execute a range of tasks, including bringing content to people who will be hubs in their own information networks. (Silicon Valley calls this "machine learning.")
While she lauded the virtues of more competition, she and others described artificial intelligence as being at a threshold where the ability to get the biggest players in a room to agree to solutions would not be possible. That’s because artificial intelligence is becoming so decentralized that the ethical problems highlighted by Harris will be beyond anyone’s ability to rein in—because Silicon Valley and Big Tech isn’t a monolithic entity.
“There’s actually a scarier thing happening, which is today you can talk to two companies. Somebody shows up from Google. Somebody shows up from Facebook and wants to have the conversation, because they have the monopoly over attention today and over the advertising revenue,” she said. “The natural progression of software and where technology goes is it bends toward decentralization. It bends toward distributed technologies. Who do you talk to at that point?”
Bianchini gave an example that underscored why traditional anti-trust laws and government regulation are hopelessly outdated and ill-equipped to deal with the attention economy’s dark side. She cited Napster, which allowed music lovers to share audio files, so the recording industry sued and shut it down.
“We were able to shut down Napster and the next thing that happened was Bit Torrent [software], where there was nothing to shut down. That is where the world is going.”
What Would George Orwell Do
....
Now comes the Republican campaign to justify the killing of net neutrality by the FCC. Rep. Marsh Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has introduced legislation that allegedly “aims to ultimately end the heated debate around so-called 'net neutrality' regulations.”
As Breitbart News explained in its “exclusive interview” with Blackburn:
The FCC’s Obama-era net neutrality regulations controlled the Internet as a public monopoly, which conservatives argued diminished the freedom of the Internet and led to rampant censorship of conservative and alternative voices by content providers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
The notion of “net neutrality” as a thwarted liberal conspiracy doesn’t have anything to do with Mueller and bears little relation to reality. But it nicely corroborates the master narrative that Trump is protecting the country from demonic liberals, from Silicon Valley to Washington, who won’t let America be America....
overview
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/social-media-not-good-democracy
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tinders-data-more-treasure-trove-selfies
==
left right not mirror/symmetrical
social media bots
http://www.alternet.org/media/democrats-unsolvable-media-problem
As we learn more about how Russia used social media as part of its campaign to help elect Donald Trump, what stands out is how easy it was. Spend $100,000 onFacebook ads, create a bunch of Twitter bots, and before you know it you've whipped up a fog of disinformation that gives Trump just the boost he needs to get over the finish line. Even if it's almost impossible to quantify how many votes it might have swayed, it was one of the many factors contributing to the atmosphere of chaos and confusion that helped Trump get elected.
As new as it might seem, this is just the latest manifestation of a broader problem that goes back a long way, one of the degradation of truth, a conservative electorate taught to disbelieve what's real and accept whatever lunatic things their media figures tell them, and liberals who can't figure out how to respond.
In the latter, I don't exempt myself. I've been thinking seriously about this problem since the 1990s, when I first went to graduate school to study political communication. And I still don't have the answer to what we ought to do about it.
On a recent episode of the podcast "Pod Save America," Hillary Clinton described the problem as she saw it:
The other side has dedicated propaganda channels, that's what I call Fox News. It has outlets like Breitbart, and crazy InfoWars, and things like that. In this particular election, it was aided and abetted by the Russians and the role that Facebook and other platforms played. We are late to that. We did not understand how a reality TV campaign would so dominate the media environment, and I confess, I was trying to do everything I could to build on the success of President Obama's campaign, I had a lot of people you guys know involved in the campaign, we were really proud of it. But boy, it was tough to break through. So I think the Democrats can do a lot, but they are still going to face a very difficult media environment. And we've got to figure out how we're going to break through. Obviously, more podcasts, more other ways of communicating so voices can be heard and real positions can be understood is part of it, but we're still at a disadvantage.
She says liberals were "late" to it and didn't "understand" the kind of collective madness that would overtake the broader media environment, which may be true. But if you could go back in time to two years ago and give them advice, what would you tell them to do? Would calling attention to the Russian manipulation have mattered? What would you advise them to do about a news media possessed by the idea that Clinton's email management practices were the most important issue of the campaign? How would you tell them to respond to the fact that the GOP candidate was perfectly willing to tell dozens of lies every day and repeat them over and over no matter how many times he had been fact-checked?
At the heart of the problem is that when it came to what conservatives were willing to believe and act on, 2016 was simply an exaggerated version of what had come before. This is where Clinton is right that even if liberals come up with "more other ways of communicating so voices can be heard," it won't be enough.
That's because liberals have plenty of ways of communicating. There are huge numbers of liberal websites, and magazines (Like this one! Subscribe today!) and even radio and television shows out there where their perspective can be heard. But the effect they have on their audiences is of a profoundly different character than what conservative media achieve.
There's a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It's not merely about the conservatives' and liberals' respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It's that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it's all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It's the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.
Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don't do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.
Hearing that message thousands of times over the last couple of decades has left them not only uniquely vulnerable to fabricated stories and ludicrous conspiracy theories, but with an immunity to the kinds of sober refutation of those lies that mainstream media, with the noblest of intentions, attempt to carry out. Who cares if The Washington Post's Fact Checker or PolitiFact says that the story my aunt just put up on Facebook about Hillary Clinton is completely bogus? They're just liberal media! As the Russians discovered, those stories can be injected into the electorate from anywhere and they spread like a malignant virus, eventually infecting even some who aren't already devoted to the right-wing cause.
Not long after the election, NPR spoke to a man in Los Angeles who had hit upon a money-making scheme in which he'd create bogus stories under official-sounding but nonexistent publications like the "Denver Guardian." Stories aimed at ginning up conservative outrage—people are buying pot in Colorado with food stamps! An FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton was murdered!—quickly went viral, spreading to thousands or even millions of unsuspecting eyeballs. But he couldn't duplicate his success with the other side. "We've tried to do similar things to liberals," he said. "It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out." And now conservatives have a president who feeds their gullibility and contempt for anyone who tries to distinguish between what's true and what isn't.
The optimistic take on all this would be to say that it only matters at the margins. After all, despite the best efforts of the conservative propaganda machine and his own relentless fabulism, Donald Trump's approval ratings are in the 30s. Your uncle may tune in to Fox and watch Sean Hannity tell him that Trump had the biggest inauguration crowd in history and criminal immigrants are killing and raping all our white women, but he was never going to vote for a Democrat anyway.
And as media change, disinformation will change with it. Twenty years ago it was Jerry Falwell sending out hundreds of thousands of copies of a videotape called "The Clinton Chronicles," which accused Bill and Hillary of running drugs and having their enemies murdered. Today it's Russians spreading bogus stories on Facebook about Hillary Clinton having Parkinson's disease. Twenty years from now it will be computer generated holo-fabrications of a Democratic nominee kicking a puppy placed into our VR brainstreams. A certain number of conservatives will believe it all, and liberals will still be asking themselves how they can fight back. And we still won't have the answer.The trouble is that even if it matters only at the margins, sometimes the margins matter a great deal. Like they did in 2016, where the candidate who got nearly three million more votes lost the electoral vote.
Paul Waldman
==
left right not mirror/symmetrical
social media bots
http://www.alternet.org/media/democrats-unsolvable-media-problem
==
==
https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-18-2017/
we think our friends curate FB but lots of it, so FB filters it (invisibly picks winners; aim is to keep you clicking)
https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-18-2017/
Ralph spends the whole hour with journalist Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, about how the Big Four, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are attempting to dominate every aspect of our lives and minds.
fake news, info bubbles
==
escalator fake news
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine
...
The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine
By Alex Kaplan [1] / Media Matters [2]
April 6, 2017
For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.
Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement [3] have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials [4] and websites like Facebook [5] and Google [6] are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead [7] news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website [8] Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories [9] and leading [10] harassment campaigns [11].
These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.
And that brings us to Rice.
On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described [12] member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium [13] that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit [14] -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars [15], and spread via posts on 4chan [16] and Reddit [17].
img
As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter [18], Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted [12]Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich [19] for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).
...
e claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake [20], who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors [21] hyped [22]the [23] allegations [24], dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”
[imgs]
Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion [25], saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio [26] and Fox News show [27], where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."
As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention [28] or for not presenting it [29] the way they would. Although some [30] mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others [31] have also suggested [32] that Rice [33] could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves [34]as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.
Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.
This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them [35]. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence [36] and acceptance [37] in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping [38] the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.
This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory. In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory [9] that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among [9] fake news [39] purveyors [40] and was pushed by [9] Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity [41] and the Independent Journal Review [42]. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed[43] it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report [44].
This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand [45] this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them.
==