Network Propaganda

Abstract

This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological.

Competing propagandas: How the United States and Russia represent mutual propaganda activities

“…Tensions between the ideal of democracy and practice of propaganda lead many political theorists to argue that democracies should be more deliberative (Dryzek, 2000;Guttman and Thompson, 2004). Globalization and convergence brought both concentrations of media power and diffuse interactive media (Hallin and Mancini, 2017;Shister, 2003), together favouring populism (Benkler et al, 2018). An Internet initially heralded as democratizing, increasingly raises concerns over enabling accelerated dissemination and targeting of propaganda from sources foreign and domestic (Briant, 2015a;Hindman, 2018;Zuboff, 2019).…”

The effect of watching political programs on islamic-based party political images among Muhammadiyah students

“…Therefore, television is often used as propaganda media, which is a tool to influence people to act the way we want [14]. This propaganda is often used before the election, which is the process of selecting and being elected to occupy certain government positions, which are used as a venue for democracy and are carried out with the principles of Direct, Free, Secret, Honest, and Fair [15].…”

Combatting hate and trolling with love and reason? A qualitative analysis of the discursive antagonisms between organized hate speech and counterspeech online

“…contexts (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018), this study makes a specific contribution to this field by examining how these global conflicts play out in the current political climate in Germany post the European border crisis of 2015-16. The produced knowledge can potentially enhance and improve organized counter efforts, thereby effectively undermining the destructive dynamics that currently thrive in online spaces.…”