Once upon a time not so long ago, we got our information from on-the-spot seeing events first-hand with our own eyes, from word-of-mouth, from the clicketty-clack of printing presses spewing out books and newspapers we handled one-on-one at given moments in time for mass distribution, then to the ethereal information transmissions on the airwaves to listen-to-radio and watch-TV, and then The Age of Information expanded exponentially and faster to the worldwide internet and The Internet of Things up-in-the-cloud (and everywhere else across the planet) in quick-burst flashing simultaneous instants of time 24/7/365.
We have rapidly gone from "Freedom of The Press" to almost immediate "Viral Moments"
THE TAKE-AWAY: Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need.
It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.
You don’t need fake accounts to spread propaganda online. Real people will happily do it.
By Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Reference: Renée DiResta The Atlantic
Renée DiResta: ". . .Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; what was generally reliable information is simply a matter of opinion.
In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda.
That term, however, comes with historical baggage.
> It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening.
> Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities.
> Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification.
It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society. . ."
The author doubles-down on two key prerequisites for creating a viral moment:
(1) an Extremely Online supporter base experienced in Twitter conflict, and
(2) a hashtag slogan expressing righteous indignation.
Here's what the author noticed in just one example she went into details about social media manipulation and trending lists
"At 11:57 a.m., a Twitter user withwho went by @Pondipper and had a modest 1,700 followers, jumped the gun: #PelosiMustGo. Tweet No. 1.
Buttar himself posted promptly at noon: “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?” he asked his 113,000 followers.
The tweet inspired several hundred replies and retweets, some encouraging him, others questioning him, others mocking him.
But anyone who engaged with Buttar’s post—whether to applaud it or scorn it—was telling Twitter algorithms to elevate it. My coffee cooled as the hashtag moved up Twitter’s rankings and began elbowing aside trends about AR-15s, golf, Donald Trump’s pardons, and then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. . ."
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BLOGGER NOTES: Here's a flashback to an earlier post from 2019
The medium is the message:Watching 50% of Humanity Go Online Over a Single Day is ... Mesmerizing
https://medium.com › insights-monash-university-ip-observatory › watchin...
Apr 14, 2019 - We present and analyse visualisations from the Monash University IP Observatory of internet connectivity through a single pseudo-24 hour day ...
And it turns out that everyone, everywhere, eventually switches off and goes to bed.
Well, almost.
Well, almost.
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Back to the sequence:
". . .In the previous few years, taking advantage of features like trending lists had become more challenging as social-media companies had gotten wise to the manipulation.
> By 2018, Twitter had already begun to discount postings from bot and sock-puppet accounts when determining which subjects were becoming popular.
> Facebook had kicked an infamous Russian troll factory off the platform, and then established integrity teams to look for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—that is, suspicious activity by networks of accounts that, in many cases, consisted of fake personas.
For tech platforms, cracking down on fake accounts, bot networks, and institutional trolls was easy to justify; the general public didn’t much care about the free-speech rights of fake people. But the rewards for successfully capturing public attention were still huge enough to keep authentic actors looking for creative ways to propel their message to the top of Twitter’s popularity charts. More and more, I noticed, ordinary people had been stepping up to spread messages that, in the past, might have been amplified by bots. . .But by contributing, they only amplified the messages of ideological enemies
. . .Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic: Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to damage-shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause...
> Some ampliganda takes off because an influential user gets an ideologically aligned crowd of followers to spread it; in other cases, an idea spontaneously emerges from somewhere in the online crowd, fellow travelers give it an initial boost, and the influencer sees the emergent action and amplifies it, precipitating a cascade of action from adjacent factions. . .
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE:
"In 1622, the same year that Galileo was reiterating his defense of the heliocentric model of the solar system, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith—known in Latin as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the Propaganda Fide for short—a body tasked with coordinating and expanding the missionary activity of the Catholic Church.
The Church was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation, kicked off just more than a century earlier, had divided the European continent into competing factions. The English and Dutch were spreading Protestantism to far-flung colonies in Asia and the Americas, while the printing press and rising literacy rates had shattered the Church’s monopoly on the divine word. The Propaganda Fide was intended to stem the losses, to draw waverers back to the one true faith. The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade,” Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas Prendergast write in the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. The term referred less to what Church representatives said than what they did; propaganda described their fervid mission to disseminate the Church’s view far and wide.
> Over the subsequent centuries, propaganda gradually acquired a secular meaning—information with an agenda, deliberately created to shape the audience’s perception of reality.
> The term also took on an antidemocratic connotation: Propaganda’s intent was to circumvent a citizen’s reason, to propel him via deceit or chicanery toward belief in a particular cause. Historically, many Americans have been loath to admit either spreading or falling for such material. During the two world wars, propaganda was what the Germans did; in the Cold War era, conservatives in the United States feared Communist domination of the media.
> Yet the notion that the powerful could manipulate the masses from the top down took hold on the left as well.
At the zenith of mass media, television networks and radio stations communicated unidirectionally to the public. The linguist, philosopher, and social critic Noam Chomsky argued in a 1988 book that the U.S. government was “manufacturing consent” for its policies with the help of complicit news outlets, whose economic incentives and ties to elites led them to abdicate their responsibility to inform the public. This line of reasoning gradually took on a conspiratorial undertone among its most sympathetic audiences: They are trying to control us.
> Since then, social media has ended the monopoly of mass-media propaganda. But it has also ushered in a new competitor: ampliganda—the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects of personal or ideological identity that their audiences hold most dear.
Of all the changes wrought by social networks, this ability of online crowds to influence one another is among the most important and underappreciated. In a postmortem analysis of the 2016 election, MIT’s Yochai Benkler described a “propaganda pipeline” whereby marginal actors on such social-media sites as Reddit and 4chan pass stories to online influencers, who in turn draw the attention of traditional media. Another scholar, Alicia Wanless, applied the term participatory propaganda, and Jennifer Mercieca, a rhetoric professor at Texas A&M, recently insisted, “We are all propagandists now.” The old top-down propaganda model has begun to erode, but the bottom-up version may be even more destructive.
Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry.
It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities. . ."
THE AUTHOR'S CONCLUSION:
"America’s political and civic norms have not adjusted to these conditions. We are surrounded at all times by urgency, by demands to take action. We may not be entirely sure why something popped up in our feed, but that doesn’t obviate the nagging feeling that we should pay attention. Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need. Regulators and members of Congress are attempting to sort out which guardrails our communication infrastructure might require, and the platforms that designed the architecture incessantly amend their policies in response to the latest media exposé of unintended consequences. In the short term, each of us becomes more aware of what we choose to amplify, and how we choose to participate. To adapt to the new propaganda, the public must first learn to recognize it.
I closed my laptop as #PelosiMustGo began to fall off the Twitter leaderboards. The next day, there would be new hashtags to track. Whether organic or contrived, they would be amplified by factions, curated and pushed out to the public by algorithms that reward engagement with yet more engagement. A giant web of interconnected users, each with an agenda, shouting at one another to pay attention. It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age."
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