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Social Media and Politics 1 (Chadwick & Dennis (38 Degrees (founded in…
Social Media and Politics 1
DiResta
'Computational Propaganda’
Misinformation
false information is shared by users that genuinely believe it to be true, this is where conspiratorial news is shared, and unsubstituted fridge group theories emerge
Disinformation
Disinformation, on the other hand, is the ‘deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false’ designed to cause ‘confusion or lead[ing] the recipient to believe a lie’. Disinformation is where we should be mostly concerned because here, the intent is explicitly to disrupt deliberation and undermine democratic institutions
Disinformation can be spread through the use of bots, automated profiles or deceitful communications which work to create a false discourse designed to generate a ‘manufactured consensus’
The power to influence opinions lies with those who can most widely and e√ectively disseminate a message. If you control – or e√ectively game – the algorithms that decide dissemination, you control the messages people see.
And if you control the messages, you control the people reading them.
In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
These technologies will continue to evolve: disinformation campaign content will soon include manufactured video and au- dio. We can see it coming but are not equipped to prevent it.
If democracy is predicated on an informed citizenry, then the increasing pervasiveness of computational propaganda is a fundamental problem.
algorithms have inadvertently become the invisible rulers that control the destinies of millions. Now we have to decide what we are going to do about that.
Chadwick & Dennis
38 Degrees
founded in 2009
UK citizens’ movement
by 2015, attracted a membership of more than 3 million
not-for-profit political-activism organisation. It describes itself as "progressive" and claims to "campaign for fairness, defend rights, promote peace, preserve the planet and deepen democracy in the UK"
38 Degrees clearly does not belong in the crowd-enabled category but nor is it traditional collective action involving organisational brokering, heavy central coordina- tion and ideologically coherent collective action frames. 38 Degrees fits with the HMM type first identified in MoveOn in the United States (Chadwick, 2007; Karpf, 2012), and it has some overlaps with what Bennett and Segerberg (2013) term ‘organizationally- enabled connective action’.12
38 Degrees takes cues from its members’ digitally expressed multi-issue priorities, but it must also take cues from those who wield substantial influence in the media system: pro- fessional journalists working in mass audience outlets. We find this to be important not only because lack of integration with professional news media leads to lack of coverage for a cause – a prominent theme in social movement studies (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 1993; Gitlin, 1980; Rucht, 2004) – but more significantly because lack of coverage tends to undermine members’ collective sense of the efficacy of their actions and a campaign’s legitimacy.
The 38 Degrees central staff perform important filtering and gatekeeping roles, and their influence over the design of actions enables them to exercise significant power. At the same time, we need to be clear: 38 Degrees is not an elite-dominated think tank or lobbying group that relies only on professional media networks while ‘astroturfing’ its way through life, masquerading as a member-driven grassroots movement. The central team uses its power to provide structure to the inchoate, individualised and often affective responses of the members to matters of public concern.
38 Degrees’ central staff might be seen as ‘choreographers’ who set the scene by organising and struc- turing action while trying to minimise their influence on the wills of individual members.
We see the oscillations between choreographic leadership and member influence and between dig- ital media horizontalism and elite media-centric work as the space of interdependencies in which 38 Degrees acts. Interdependence with professional media, in particular, has not been adequately recognised in previous research.14 This matters because, as we have shown, when interdependence turns to dependence, it is more likely that a 38 Degrees campaign will lose momentum.
we need to be clear about the positive significance of the movement’s role in the mediated structures of contemporary British democracy
mediated structures: those institutions standing between the individual and his private life and the large institutions of public life” (1980). For each child, therefore, the institution of the family is a mediating structure between him or her and the school.
Fenton
New media influences on political practices
Politicians as televised personalities
'one cannot televise an entire political party. One can only televise an individual'
television has an intrinsic ‘personalizing’ nature
The shift to personality-based politics also modified political parties. Old- style party organizations comprising politically committed citizens were eroded. In their place came specialists (communication professionals, con- sultants and so on) employed to get celebrity candidates elected (1990: 87–9) so back-room policy staffers can get their hands on the machinery of power.
The ‘nationalization’ of politics
National TV news is a powerful vehicle for a ritualized and virtualized ‘coming together’ and ‘sharing’ in which ‘nations’ can imagine themselves as ‘existent’
The growth of a spin-machine
It was further predicted that the information age would activate citizenries and civil society. Instead, we witness an ever-expanding ‘spin industry’ underpinning politicians as actors.
Computers make it possible to define a specific niche group as a target audience; compose a message geared to that niche; and design public- ity material or even direct-mail letters with the appearance of being personally directed and even personally signed (whereas, in fact, they are mass produced).
The new media and revolutionary groups
Essentially, revolutionary groups have learned to use an array of new media such as personal computers.
Some revolutionary and oppositional groups also learned the arts of televisualized and informationized PR as vehicles for stirring emo- tions, creating favourable publicity and creating celebrity ‘struggle leaders’
New media and ‘grassroots lobbying’
New media provides an array of vehicles for PR. In the USA this spawned the growth of a new industry of ‘grass- roots lobbyists’ firms hired by interest groups, foreign governments and revolutionary groups to publicize public opinion on an issue.
This puts indirect pressure on US legislators and/or the White House. These grassroots lobby firms use the same new media and PR techniques as establishment politicians – e.g. computer- aided targeting of audiences; phone banks; and direct mail (using letters and videos).