Network Propaganda and the Asymmetry of Disinformation

Today's deepfake research consisted of reading roughly half of a fascinating book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. There's not so much there about deepfakes per se; the book is only from October 2018, so news about deepfakes was still rolling out.

Benkler, Faris, and Roberts (BFR) instead give an overview of the media landscape (news, social, and other online) for the past five years or so--before, during, and after President Trump's election, in other words. The book is thus far wonderful in terms of establishing a solid foundation for the kind of inquiries about deepfakes, irony, and information literacy I'm interested in. The authors provide an up-to-date survey of media studies of propaganda and internet communication. And they stabilize a few key terms in ways that will prove useful to me. The distinctions between misinformation (mistaken or unintentionally misleading info), disinformation (intentionally misleading information), and propaganda (manipulative communication to obtain behavior compliant with the propagandist's goals), for example, has been pretty well established elsewhere. But they elaborate and expand on the interaction of these terms in original ways.

One innovation, for instance, lies in their specification of what manipulation means in a propagandistic context: "Directly influencing someone’s beliefs, attitudes, or preferences in ways that fall short of what an empathetic observer would deem normatively appropriate in context" (BFR 30). I find this more intriguing than convincing. The media studies tradition they're grounding themselves in seeks to retain the negative implication of propaganda while distinguishing it from less objectionable forms of communication. In practice, such distinctions often boil down to propaganda being "what the baddies do" and communication or advocacy being "what we good guys do." The notion of an empathetic observer normatively judging between appropriate or inappropriate communications, though, seems a bit like this same old thing but with more steps. Who defines the appropriately empathetic observer?

Of greater use, I think, is BFR's putting mis/disinformation and propaganda into relationship with some newer terms. Bullshit comes from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, where he describing rhetoric that simply doesn't care about the truth content of its claims. Network propaganda is BFR's name for the architecture of media and media exchange that creates feedback loops where disinformation and propaganda thrive. Disorientation refers to an intentionally fostered, widespread ethos of apathy/helplessness in which information consumers feel unwilling or unable to distinguish truth from falsehood in political communication.

Having laid out these terms, BFR's methods of argument are both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, they survey trends of online media views and shares, mapping out how a bit of how the mediasphere operated and shifted over that time. Qualitatively, they tackle a few case studies of how certain news stories (Uranium One, Seth Rich, etc.) flared into life, spread, and were either ignored or installed as doctrine by partisan media ecologies.

What's fascinating here to me is how BFR push back against many of the easy or widely accepted ways of thinking about political communication in the Trump era. I'm certainly re-assessing many of my preconceptions in light of some of their arguments.

Their research, for instance, throws a bit of cold water on the notion that the 2016 election was entirely won due to the actions of Russian infiltration, white supremacist groups, or the attention/outrage cycles of online information exchange. All of these, to be sure, played a part. But in terms of magnitude of effect none of them outweigh the long-developing dynamics of media ecology in the US. It's difficult to say, for example, exactly how much effect Russian (or Macedonian) interference played in generating pro-Trump support. At several points BFR note that their snapshots of the mediascape in case studies don't change much when they control for known Russia-produced sites. White supremacist media (that is, media by explicitly white supremacist groups, agents, and sites) similarly got a load of attention from the left but seems actually to have had a distinct and attenuated impact on right-wing news exchange.

Most surprising to me, though, is their somewhat reluctant but nevertheless certain finding of an asymmetry of partisan media. It simply isn't the case that disinformation and propaganda spread equally across the political media spectrum. There's just more right-leaning disinformation proliferation than there is left-leaning disinformation. This is not, the authors rush to say, because right-leaning folk are less honest than left-leaning folk. The issue is not one of individual actors but of media architectures. The extreme right has built for itself a media ecology distinct and isolated from center and left exchange networks.

Those center/left exchanges have their share of fringe and extreme communicators, to be sure. But most left-leaning and center exchanges privilege sites and sources that value traditional journalistic norms of fact-checking and self-correction. When The New York Times gets a story wrong, The Washington Post or The Guardian will challenge it, and vice-versa. There's a sense of trust in these sources, an agreement that they are, if imperfect, at least trying to play by the rules of epistemic integrity.

The extreme right mediasphere, by contrast, sets itself up as opposing those sources (the "corrupt main stream media"). Led by Fox and Breitbart, conservative media exchanges tend to be more insular. They site other right-leaning sites. Their verification procedures are less concerned about the truth of a story and more concerned about whether the story puts their partisan identity in a good or bad light. "Is it loyal?" becomes more important than "Is it true?"

How do BFR know this? They point to quantitative and qualitative studies in which the center/left mediasphere privileges stories that disconfirm progressives' preferred narratives. When Huffington Post, for example, published a claim that Trump had raped a 13-year-old girl (a story that, while horrible, would fit progressives' negative views about Trump), this claim was examined and found to be unsubstantiated--by other left/center sources using traditional journalistic methods.

Media sources and sites within the right-wing sphere, however, have fewer incentives to reality-check stories that seem to embarrass Democrats or credit Trump. Thus, conspiracies about Seth Rich's "assassination" or the amorphous-but-ever-powerful "deep state" (or, now, about Democatic servers hidden somewhere in Ukraine)--these stories, once spread, become part of a never-challenged narrative on the right. To challenge their veracity is to endorse the anti-Trump main stream media, which (as right-wing pundits declare constantly) is irreparably liberal and corrupt.

This asymmetry of disinformation poses considerable challenges to the kind of depolarizing activities of groups like Better Angels who strive to reach across party lines without getting bogged down in debates about matters of fact.

But that's probably a matter for the rest of the book.

JF