a column by Sergei Guriev, Nikita Melnikov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Information and communication technology has no doubt had a positive economic impact globally, but its political bearing is less clear.
This column shows that the proliferation of mobile technology reduces citizens’ confidence in their current governments, especially in places where news broadcasting is censored but the internet is not. Furthermore, by reducing the cost of reaching voters, the internet has also led to increased support for both left-wing and right-wing populist movements.
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Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Monday, 11 November 2019
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Digital Propaganda: The Tyranny of Ignorance
an article by Cassian Sparkes-Vian (University of the West of England, UK) published in Critical Sociology Volume 45 Issue 3 (May 2019)
Abstract
The existence of propaganda is inexorably bound to the nature of communication and communications technology.
Mass communication by citizens in the digital age has been heralded as a means to counter elite propaganda; however, it also provides a forum for misinformation, aggression and hostility.
The extremist group Britain First has used Facebook as a way to propagate hostility towards Muslims, immigrants and social security claimants in the form of memes, leading to a backlash from sites antithetical to their message.
This article provides a memetic analysis, which addresses persuasion, organisation, political echo chambers and self-correcting online narratives; arguing that propaganda can be best understood as an evolving set of techniques and mechanisms which facilitate the propagation of ideas and actions. This allows the concept to be adapted to fit a changing political and technological landscape and to encompass both propaganda and counter-propaganda in the context of horizontal communications networks.
Abstract
The existence of propaganda is inexorably bound to the nature of communication and communications technology.
Mass communication by citizens in the digital age has been heralded as a means to counter elite propaganda; however, it also provides a forum for misinformation, aggression and hostility.
The extremist group Britain First has used Facebook as a way to propagate hostility towards Muslims, immigrants and social security claimants in the form of memes, leading to a backlash from sites antithetical to their message.
This article provides a memetic analysis, which addresses persuasion, organisation, political echo chambers and self-correcting online narratives; arguing that propaganda can be best understood as an evolving set of techniques and mechanisms which facilitate the propagation of ideas and actions. This allows the concept to be adapted to fit a changing political and technological landscape and to encompass both propaganda and counter-propaganda in the context of horizontal communications networks.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
Cloaked Facebook pages: Exploring fake Islamist propaganda in social media
an article by Johan Farkas, Jannick Schou and Christina Neumayer (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark) published in New Media & Society Volume 20 Issue 5 (May 2018)
Abstract
This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions.
This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general.
Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics.
Abstract
This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions.
This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general.
Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics.
Wednesday, 4 April 2018
The art of the big lie: the history of fake news
an article by Phil Tinline published in the New Statesman
From the Reichstag fire to Stalin’s show trials, the craft of disinformation is nothing new.
We live, we’re told, in a post-truth era. The internet has hyped up postmodern relativism, and created a kind of gullible cynicism – “nothing is true, and who cares anyway?” But the thing that exploits this mindset is what the Russians call dezinformatsiya. Disinformation – strategic deceit – isn’t new, of course. It has played a part in the battle that has raged between mass democracy and its enemies since at least the First World War.
Letting ordinary people pick governments depends on shared trust in information, and this is vulnerable to attack – not just by politicians who want to manipulate democracy, but by those on the extremes who want to destroy it. In 1924, the first Labour government faced an election. With four days to go, the Daily Mail published a secret letter in which the leading Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev heralded the government’s treaties with the Soviets as a way to help recruit British workers for Leninism. Labour’s vote actually went up, but the Liberal share collapsed, and the Conservatives returned to power.
Continue reading
From the Reichstag fire to Stalin’s show trials, the craft of disinformation is nothing new.
We live, we’re told, in a post-truth era. The internet has hyped up postmodern relativism, and created a kind of gullible cynicism – “nothing is true, and who cares anyway?” But the thing that exploits this mindset is what the Russians call dezinformatsiya. Disinformation – strategic deceit – isn’t new, of course. It has played a part in the battle that has raged between mass democracy and its enemies since at least the First World War.
Letting ordinary people pick governments depends on shared trust in information, and this is vulnerable to attack – not just by politicians who want to manipulate democracy, but by those on the extremes who want to destroy it. In 1924, the first Labour government faced an election. With four days to go, the Daily Mail published a secret letter in which the leading Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev heralded the government’s treaties with the Soviets as a way to help recruit British workers for Leninism. Labour’s vote actually went up, but the Liberal share collapsed, and the Conservatives returned to power.
Continue reading
Sunday, 4 February 2018
Twitter to tell 677,000 users they were had by the Russians. Some signs show the problem continues.
an article by Eli Rosenberg for The Washington Post [grateful thanks to ResearchBuzz]
Twitter says it will notify nearly 700,000 users who interacted with accounts the company has identified as potential pieces of a propaganda effort by the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.
The company on Friday also disclosed thousands of accounts that it said were associated with the Kremlin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and the Russian government, adding to numbers that it released to Congress in October.
Twitter said that it had identified 3,814 IRA-linked accounts, which posted some 176,000 tweets in the 10 weeks preceding the election, and another 50,258 automated accounts connected to the Russian government, which tweeted more than a million times, while acknowledging that “such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere”, in a news release Friday afternoon.
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Twitter says it will notify nearly 700,000 users who interacted with accounts the company has identified as potential pieces of a propaganda effort by the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.
The company on Friday also disclosed thousands of accounts that it said were associated with the Kremlin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and the Russian government, adding to numbers that it released to Congress in October.
Twitter said that it had identified 3,814 IRA-linked accounts, which posted some 176,000 tweets in the 10 weeks preceding the election, and another 50,258 automated accounts connected to the Russian government, which tweeted more than a million times, while acknowledging that “such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere”, in a news release Friday afternoon.
Continue reading
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