Manufacturing Outrage: political astro-turfing on social media

Manufacturing rage with micro-targeting and social media astroturf-roots

This discussion is split from the Russia Ukraine war thread where a discussion came up as to what was the harm of RT. The person with that POV didn't think there was any harm in RT as said forumite thought everyone knew it was a Russian propaganda mouthpiece.

I pointed out so is Fox News a propaganda mouthpiece of the alt-right here in the US. And it does plenty of harm. I had been sitting on this article with an open tab for quite a while and now it seems the topic itself is worth discussing.

Quote:

This paper analyzes the social media ads from the viewpoint of ‘political astroturfing,’ a practice of masking the sponsors of a political message or events to make it appear as though it originates from or is supported by grassroots participants. A sheer number of news media articles, a vast amount of government released public data, reports, and only a handful of academic studies are available to make sense of the trolling and disinformation activities by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA). While these sources are useful to inform the public about the IRA’s online activities, there is a need for a conceptual framework that can be effectively used to specifically point towards the correlation between the deceptive purpose of the IRA’s exploitation of Western digital media platforms with its concealed and ground-based activities that enabled them to take advantage of two prominent social media’s Pages, Events, and Messenger features to reach out to specific segments of the population by race, sex, religion, location, and political orientation. Indeed, previous reports on IRA’s activities discussed general trends on Twitter and other social media outlets (see, for example, Badawy, et al., 2019). Our study solely focuses on the analysis of all the publicly available Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the IRA in order to identify the patterns and major issues that the organization was financially invested in. Second, the study uses a unique mixed method that involves topic modelling and interpretative measures. Further, it expands on the theory of astroturfing by elaborating and applying the concept of political astroturfing to the IRA’s activities.

Political propaganda moved into social media micro-targeting to amplify manufactured outrage beginning in earnest in the 2016 US election. It's one of the ways Russia promoted candidate Dump. Cambridge Analytica surveyed and developed the micro-targeting audiences. IMO it really exacerbated the alt-right divide in this country and in a lot of other countries as well.

Outraged people are more likely to vote. Fortunately for us in 2020 that outrage was equalled by voters who were beginning to see Dump for what he was: a pathological lying narcissist.

It looks like the Dump cult might be shrinking more given a lot of voters are tired of the 'Stop the Steal' nonsense. Fox News is of course still promoting the outrage though they have more recently begun showing cracks in that business model. Supporting Putin over Ukraine pushed them off their manufacturing outrage messaging when it became clear Fox's position was intolerable to most of the country.

But that still leaves us with the problem that micro-targeting on social media is smoldering in the background. Yes RT and Fox News do tremendous damage despite their messaging not being all that popular at the moment. Social media still has lots of room for sophisticated target-marketing of voters in the US and elsewhere. And that smoldering propaganda is something we should not take lighty.

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2BpUldn