It then turns to assessments of recent policy changes at the social media platforms, the role(s) of traditional media, and governmental responses. Facebook, for example, has a full record of every exposure of every user in the run-up to the 2016 election. Coverage of these latter announcements dominated all other topics in the days before the election. But we lack the data to know whether the much larger investments of the political campaigns in Facebook advertising in fact made a meaningful difference, and if so, whether the difference was in get-out-the-vote efforts to their own supporters or in disinformation campaigns aimed to suppress the major pro-Clinton voter blocks—women, young, and Black voters. Broad structural changes could well be accompanied, perhaps accelerated, by distinct individual and corporate actions intended to capitalize on them, and these will appear in retrospect to have made all the difference. Did the Russians hack the 2016 US presidential election, and will they hack the 2020 election? SSRC activities span more than 80 countries on 6 continents, Apply for research opportunities across the globe, Contributions fund research and scholarship worldwide, Live research from the digital edges of democracy. [email protected], t: Diseases of despair—alcoholism, opioid addiction, and suicide—in turn, have made white Americans with a high school education or less the only population in the advanced world to have seen its life expectancy decline since the early 1990s. One part of the answer focuses on material origins: the end of the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” its replacement by neoliberalism, and the spread of broad-based economic insecurity that followed. Author Yochai Benkler sits down with Kelly Born to discuss Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. While concerns over information quality have rocketed to prominence in recent years, those concerns have been fueled by political, social, and technological changes decades in the making. Evidence of activity vs. evidence of effect, Origins of distrust and disaffection: Putting disinformation in context of more structural drivers, Facebook announced its cooperation with the Social Science Research Council and Social Science One, longest time series regarding trust in any institution, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development documented, Hayek, Friedman, and others in the Mont Pelerin Society, for the broad middle classes in the advanced economies, a broad range of policy changes privatized risk, policies followed the demands of business and the wealthy, The Contagion of Stigmatization: Racism and Discrimination in the “Infodemic” Moment, Disinformation, Democracy, and the Social Costs of Identity-Based Attacks Online, The Challenge of Debunking Narratives: How TV News Failed on Trump’s Claims of Electoral Fraud, On Digital Disinformation and Democratic Myths. Nor have any of the agencies reporting Russian efforts to gain access to state-based electoral institutions made any claim that any of the actual voting procedures, much less machines, were compromised. But no independent investigators have access to that data. Americans over 65, and in particular those who read right-wing sites, were especially likely to consume fake news. Around the world, those elections are under threat from rival states and international networks of ideologically motivated radicals. Your story matters Citation Benkler, Yochai, Casey Tilton, Bruce Etling, Hal Roberts, Justin Clark, et al. As one conceives of what such a study might look like, the privacy concerns are genuine, and the difficulties of negotiating private arrangements are significant. Yochai Benkler (born 1964) is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. And like Facebook, it possesses a wealth of individualized information about users that could be used to make a similar assessment. +1 (617) 495 4089, f: Yochai Benkler ’94, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, has undertaken what may be the most scientific study on the topic to date, “Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” At root, we must continue our work, but be more circumspect about whether what we are finding is the proximate or root cause of the crisis of democratic societies in the early twenty-first century. Whether one locates the end of the “Golden Age” in the profit squeeze of the late 1960s, the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, or the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, it is clear that by the 1970s widespread economic anxiety of a form utterly unrecognizable in the early 1960s had settled in. In the 1970s, this meant that when the neoliberal program of deregulation and privatization was introduced, there was little resistance from center-left parties and no coherent alternative for defining the role of the state in the economy beyond mainline socialism. “The simplest disinformation is explicitly false or misleading information disseminated for political ends,” says Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who led a team that recently dissected the way disinformation is amplified. From 1984 to 1987, Benkler was a … Pew’s long series shows that this change was not an intergenerational shift. Gallup’s long-term data series, starting from 1973 (already well down the decline curve if we use the longer-term trust-in-government series), suggests an across-the-board decline in which trust in media does not stand out. Rather, most of the coverage involved the private server, State Department releases, and the James Comey announcements, most prominently the announcement in the week before the election that the FBI investigation was being reopened because of a computer found in a separate investigation of Anthony Weiner, and then the announcement that the investigation was again closed because there was nothing of note on the computer. It has been two and a half years since the 2016 presidential election, a year and a half since Facebook announced its cooperation with the Social Science Research Council and Social Science One on issues of research data sharing, and four months since Facebook launched its Ads database. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper. Cautionary Notes on Disinformation and the Origins of Distrust. Yochia Benkler joins the program. Here, the civil rights and women’s movements emphasized the repressive and unjust attributes of then-prevailing institutions, leading to significant loss of trust among their members; the New Left rejected most institutions and located the individual and self-actualization at the core of moral concern; the antiwar movement rejected the authority of the national security state; and the consumer and environmental movements attacked crony capitalism for its harmful impact on the human and natural environment. While Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was dominated by coverage of “emails,” little of that coverage was focused on emails that resulted from the two Russian hacks—the DNC and Podesta emails. The second part of the answer is more directly rooted in politics and changes in political culture. Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Just as Grinberg et al. And in principle, it should be feasible to build likely voter models to assess whether exposure to these kinds of illegal or questionable information operations has an impact on individual-level behavior, how large an impact, and in which states. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s that could have caused this nearly across-the-board decline in trust in institutions? But the politically inflected, asymmetric patterns of disinformation and propaganda in the American case should make us skeptical of these usual suspects. Even where we did find traces of Russian origins in campaigns that did make it into the mainstream, the propaganda pipeline ran through Infowars, Drudge, and Fox News. Some features of this site may not work without it. It is possible that in some other countries, technological shock played a more prominent role. And Facebook is further along in sharing its information than, say, Google. Complementing these broad changes in political coalitions, the successes of consumer, worker, and environmental campaigns in the 1960s drove the rise of organized business. But it does mean that solutions that focus purely on fighting symptoms and opportunists taking advantage of the disruption and disorientation of the past decade will miss their mark in the long term. JavaScript is disabled for your browser. According to the New Yorker, the Washington conventional wisdom presupposes a kind of symmetry between our polarized political parties. And we can only make that assessment by looking at population-level or representative samples of users and their patterns, rather than looking for evidence that the bad information is being produced out there. But we must also recognize that the firms have strong incentives to remain opaque about their role in the elections. The Great Inflation of the 1970s marked the end of broad public acceptance of the central role of government stewardship of the economy, the Keynesianism and dirigisme that marked the era from the end of World War II to the early 1970s. From 1984 to 1987, Benkler was a … Please share how this access benefits you. Faris, Robert M., Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. Our research reviews present the latest scholarship from the social sciences, and we aggregate news content and events from around the web. By Yochai Benkler • Politics • October 7, 2020 . This literature review addresses some of the contexts of misinformation, beginning with political polarization and the twin concepts of ideological echo chambers and filter bubbles. In the second part of this piece, I turn to a more basic version of the same question, a version that cannot be answered by any policy directed at Facebook or any other technology firm: To what extent can we claim that disinformation and propaganda are a core cause of the crisis of democratic society? Robert Faris is the Research Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Their opinions are their own, with minor edits by MediaWell staff for style and clarity. How Not to Cover Voter Fraud Disinformation. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts Abstract. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues. The first is governmental—the Mueller indictments against various Russian entities and individuals, the House and Senate investigations, and in particular the congressional testimony of Facebook, Twitter, and Google identifying Russian accounts that purchased advertising as well as Russian-operated accounts masquerading as American accounts aimed across the political divide. And the fourth are academic reports that look at specific campaigns and trace their Russian origins. Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, ... "Overall, this book is a necessary inquiry into the state of propaganda and disinformation networks today." DOI: 10.35650/MD.2004.d.2019. As we enter a new election cycle—as reports of Iranian interventions join continued concern with Russia—it is critical that we not overstate the success of these campaigns. I offer two cautionary notes to put our anxiety in perspective. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Instead, media coverage was dominated by the kind of reporting long decried by communications scholarship: a steady flow of pat distractions—horse-race coverage of elections, celebrity scandals, and patriotic pablum in time of war. 2019. Identifying Russian operations, for example, is plainly important, technically difficult, and discloses activities that we are interested in as a public. Elites, responsible not only for enacting and legitimating liberalization and globalization on the economic side of governing but also cosmopolitanism and pluralism on the identity side, present a challenge to both parts of the economic nationalism of the new right. ‘I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP's Digital Army’ by Swati Chaturvedi (Juggernaut … As such, elite institutions generally—not only professional media, but also academia, science, the professions, and civil servants and expert agencies—have come to serve as the active oppressive “other” of ethnonationalist politics. We focus on cross-border, coordinated disinformation campaigns. Small wonder that this broad middle class finds itself alienated and ready to hear from populists who blame immigrants and elites for their woes. Big business and banks, labor unions, public schools and the health-care system, the presidency and Congress, the criminal justice system, organized religion—all lost trust significantly, and most no less or more than newspapers. We spoke with the lead author of the mail-in voting study, Yochai Benkler, about how this disinformation campaign works, why it’s so insidious, and what can be done about it. MediaWell curates research and news on digital disinformation and misinformation. That we know we are the target of foreign information operations is important, and justifies investing in identifying and tracing these kinds of moves. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election is just the tip of the iceberg. The answers depend on what we mean by that question. No specific electoral outcome better serves Russia’s standard propaganda agenda—disorientation and loss of trust in institutions generally—than the generalization of disorientation and delegitimation of institutions represented by the present pitch of the debate over election interference. of a Disinformation Campaign The Harvard community has made this article openly available. A study that sets out to find fake news purveyors whose stories were widely shared will find them. Nationalist politicians have been harnessing anxieties over economic insecurity to the long-simmering anxieties over ethnic and racial identity, offering charismatic authority to replace technocratic authority (expertise), and atavistic solidarity as a way of pointing the finger at someone else, where the unattainable ideal of self-actualization had framed economic insecurity as the personal failure of those who suffered it. The pandemic moment has unleashed contagions of stigmatization and health misinformation, compounding the adverse health and socioeconomic effects of Covid-19 on marginalized communities. Google has a full record of exposure to YouTube videos and advertisements. The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. The secular decline of diverse institutions, the sharp change in the 1960s and 1970s, and the parallels in other countries require caution before proceeding on the assumption that discrete, intentional actors operating specifically on one institutional system (be they domestic supporters of the outrage industry like Rupert Murdoch and Robert Mercer or foreign intelligence services) were the core driving factor. Metadata ... Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. But they also reflect a visceral response to political outcomes that are far afield of what would have been considered the normal range of political contestation a decade ago. found that sharing of fake news on Facebook was rare, that it was concentrated among conservative and very conservative users, and that it was strongly associated with age, in particular among users older than 65. Benkler, Yochai and Tilton, Casey and Etling, Bruce and Roberts, Hal and Clark, Justin and Faris, Robert and Kaiser, Jonas and Schmitt, Carolyn, Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign (October 2, 2020). In one, Grinberg et al. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “Misinformation and Fact-checking: Research Findings from Social Science,” New America Foundation, February, 2012. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published a couple of years after the last lacemaking machine was shattered by the Luddites. 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