Smart-Phones for Propaganda

Question R2 (QL4): The wide-spread, public access to smartphones has been a game-changer for the distribution and production of propaganda. Is there more data available about the types of apps (e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Viber) used on smartphones to distribute propaganda, and the methods through which this is accomplished?

Author | Editor: Ziemke, J. (John Carroll University).

Twitter & Facebook?

Todd Huffman and Ryan Paterson shared their analysis of the top fifty applications and services used over the last three months to spread VEO propaganda. Top on the list are applications for Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress, among others as shown in the Appendix. Our contributors also highlighted others: Fred Morstatter (ASU) flagged Telegram, as well as custom-made apps, while Randy Kluver (TAMU) remarks that alternative platforms tacitly supported by foreign governments (such as Wechat or VKontakte) “re-create the geographical and political divisions that most assumed were ending with the rise of a globalized world.” However, many authors argue that the issue is truly platform neutral, and that message circulation is just as effective in any number of other platforms. Rebecca Goolsby (ONR) additionally surmised that the way in which the question was asked explains the “Twitter and Facebook” answer received. Contributors felt that gaining traction on this issue first requires understanding how VEO’s leverage social media and vulnerable audiences to attain their goals. We turn to Rebecca Goolsby to elaborate on this issue.

“Anyone that is a true believer in X must also believe Y”

Goolsby asserts that a goal of any VEO is to transform, create, and reframe a conversation by deploying “side-step logic”, which amounts to: If you truly believe X, then you must also believe and support Y. The crafty use of this logical fallacy is what leads hyper-connected yet vulnerable audiences to leverage social media to recirculate and thus amplify the message. She says a VEO wants “to turn the conversation so that the audience believes if they support Healthy Kittens for America, then they must naturally support . And if you don’t support , how can you call yourself a Friend of All Kittens?”

Since the narrative is pitched to the target audiences’ deep biases, values, and worldview, the audience does not engage in critical thinking about the information. Because the audience emotionally ‘knows’ that X is true (and right) in its emotional mind, then it accepts the parasite narrative without thorough consideration of its origins, implications, or agenda. And since the audience finds that more and more of its trusted peers are echoing this information, critical evaluation is further suppressed.

At the same time, the VEO insinuates itself into the information networks of the target audience in a way that displays this vulnerability, repeating and amplifying the motifs and sub-narratives that reflect its agenda, until it is hard to find where the host narrative and the parasite narrative are differentiated. The target audience is then repeatedly exposed to the parasite narrative through covert means, using computerized amplification methods (e.g. botnets, fake news).

Audiences as unwitting vectors of amplification

How do the VEO’s reframe the conversation that makes this ‘logical’ side-step possible? By manipulating vulnerable audiences into recirculating this information for them. Messages are amplified by vulnerable audiences and paid intermediaries who recirculate these messages, drowning other views. Goolsby asserts that “the reason phones are a game changer is that it is the easiest and cheapest access to the Internet available to most of the world. Newer users–the newbies- – are not especially sophisticated in their understanding of news and fake information, but everyone has cognitive vulnerabilities–hot button issues–that can be exploited.” Nitin Agarwal (U. of Arkansas) elaborates on message amplification by noting that messages emerge in one medium but are then massively disseminated across several other platforms: “Strategies such as thread jacking, smoke-screening, hashtag latching, etc. are used to multiply the messages.”

Why share?

Youth in particular share or create these messages for a variety of different reasons. As digital natives, they want to be seen sharing insider information as a way to boast about privileged access to content from the frontlines. Youth compete to post information that shows just how enlightened they are about an issue relative to their peers, and to do so faster than anyone else. Jen Ziemke’s (John Carroll University) young students remark that when their friends spread information and pictures of weaponry and battlefield activity they do so “to make themselves look good amongst their friends who do not have such access to such exclusive content.” Still others share in order to feel like they belong to something, or to “feel cool,” or even to feel “morally superior to have shared something that helps craft one’s identity around an issue.”

Content Consumption & Recirculation

Many who end up sharing content start out by passively looking through media on their phone (their ‘feed’), mostly out of boredom, curiosity, or force of habit. For many, it is an obsession born out of an addiction to their phones. Their ritual includes checking several different feeds, nearly all of the time. They often do not start out with the intent to circulate something in particular, rather, they share based on the serendipity of their feed.

Snapchat, Instagram & YouTube

Ziemke’s interviewees report that youth generally prefer receiving messages via pictures and video rather than words, which is another reason they increasingly turn to platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube. “Pictures make you feel like a part of the battlespace” and powerful imagery “gets stuck in your head” in ways that narratives without visuals do not. Nitin Agarwal likewise finds that millennials are particularly vulnerable to YouTube messaging. Agarwal calls YouTube “the platform for crafting the narrative and setting the agenda.”

Another reason youth are moving toward other channels seems to be due to differences in the design and user experience across the platforms. Millennials report being tired of “all of this scrolling” and thus are likely to continue to move away from the Facebook and Twitter environment and towards Instagram, YouTube & Snapchat. Others remarked that Twitter and Facebook are quickly gaining negative reputations as increasingly full of garbage, spam and propaganda, and that many are drifting away from it, and turning to Snapchat and Instagram as platforms which have less “noise” in their feeds compared with the conventional channels.

It’s so easy

However, it is the ease of sharing that sticks with one young student of Ziemke’s, who relayed that what actually seems most important is simply how easy all of this is, which is independent of platform. Picking up his phone he noted that he could get access to anything he wanted in a moment through knowing just one contact. What stood out for him was the stupendous simplicity and ease with which the exchange of information can happen, literally in just seconds, and on a phone that is already in your hand.

The heart of the matter

What are the relevant important next steps one might suggest in light of these trends?

Willow Brugh of the Center for Civic Media cautions that simply shutting down the same tools that populations use when infrastructure collapses seems like a terrible idea. After all, these are the same tools that help vulnerable populations self-organize when living under repressive regimes.

Clearly there is an urgent need to solve the structural problems that contribute to what makes a VEO’s narrative attractive in the first place. Randy Kluver remarks that alternative platforms “re-create the geographical and political divisions that most assumed were ending with the rise of a globalized world. Political, social, and cultural discussions that could happen on globally accessible platforms are moving into different platforms, where there is less ability for US citizens to interact, and thus the technological platforms re-embody the geographical differences.”

Brugh elaborates: “Are we yet spending as much (hopefully far more) on youth opportunity and other vectors we know that decrease the likelihood of finding ISIL et al as undesirable? All the tools I know about from online harassment, escalated (aka “weaponized social”) which monitor or nudge people’s online communications are far more often used to quash meaningful dissent than to actually help anyone.”

In conclusion, while we may have taken some limited steps toward answering one question, we know that the question itself is really the core of the matter, and are therefore grateful for this and any future opportunities to engage.

Contributing Authors

Agarwal, N. (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), Brugh, W. (Center For Civic Media, MIT Media Lab), Goolsby, R. (Office of Naval Research), Huffman, T. (IST Research) Kluver, R. (Texas A&M University), Morstatter, F. (Arizona State University), Paterson, R. (IST Research)

 

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