Abstract
The rise of populist leaders in the West, as well as the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, has left many people in crisis and confusion via a ‘how could this happen’ attitude, in which social media has often been the target of blame. A number of news articles and opinion pieces from news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and others have pointed to online echo chambers, filter bubbles, and platforms like Facebook in general as implicated in creating an information ecosystem that has fundamentally shaped the contours of public discourse. To this end, Benkler et al. – all affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University – provocatively ask in their book (2018) whether social media and networked technologies are destroying democracy because of their influence on building opinion, shaping reality, and influencing discourse.
Benkler et al. (2018) argue that social media are not the main culprit of the current mis/disinformation marketplace but, rather, the seeds of disinformation and propaganda in media planted long before. Using network analysis and case studies of news coverage of Clinton scandals like PizzaGate, the Trump-Russia investigation, and politically divisive issues like immigration, they find that the right-wing media ecosystem (from more extremist news organizations like Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit to mainstream institutions like Fox News) operates in a structurally different way from the rest of the media environment. Looking at these case studies through a larger lens of propaganda and the ways that cultural and political patterns interact with technological change, Benkler et al. provide robust analyses and inquiry into the current news landscape in the age of social media.
During this critical time where technology plays a key role in the shaping and evolution of the public sphere, Benkler et al. (2018: 8) state that their ‘goal is to understand which actors were responsible for this transformation of the American public sphere, and how this new public sphere operated through those actors so as to make it so vulnerable to disinformation, propaganda, and just sheer bullshit’ . They contend in the book that, through this inquiry, they offer other researchers a method, one grounded in network analysis, to empirically observe what is presently occurring in political media ecosystems. The book focuses on the United States, but the authors state that they feel that this approach can be applied in different countries. Although the book is primarily focused on analyzing the media ecosystem immediately leading up to and after the election of Donald Trump, the authors propose that their analysis can be adopted to other contexts (i.e. other factions of the media ecosystem).
As the authors of the book discuss, ‘outrage media’, as it is so often called, is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon enacted by likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and others. This has laid the groundwork through radio and television for the rise of the current right-wing online media ecosystem. Thus, this media ecosystem not only functions in a differently than the rest of the media ecosystem or the left-leaning or centrally located media ecosystem but is also more susceptible to propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Propaganda, simply defined, is ‘the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols’, (Lasswell, 1927: 627). In the text, Benkler et al. demonstrate the historical and political ways that outrage media, disinformation, and propaganda are all similar mechanisms of sowing discord and swaying public opinion using the affordances of mass media technologies. By combining this historical and theoretical lens with massive data sets of news media networks online, on television, and other channels, they illustrate that the current media ecosystem is one borne of already existing networks. In situating their framework through the lens of political economy, they suggest that the view of technology as something that ‘polarizes’ is a relatively naive one that promotes how technology functions and dismisses the role of the degree to which institutions, culture, and politics shape adoption and diffusion patterns.
To empirically demonstrate how the right-wing media ecosystem functions in a fundamentally different way from the rest of the media ecosystem, Benkler et al. collected millions of news stories and shared content through the Berkman Klein Center’s service, Media Cloud, which collected millions of posts from Twitter and Facebook from over 40,000 online news sources. These data served as the basis from which they built their network maps to illustrate how these stories spread from network to network, which includes news organizations, individual people, and social media sites. Divided into four parts, the book begins in chapter 1 with a historical overview and cultural contextualization for the work. The book introduces the case studies in part 1 by analyzing the right-wing media ecosystem’s architecture. They argue that what deserves special attention is the analysis of the ‘propaganda feedback loop’. They illustrate this argument in chapter 3, where they open with the findings of chapter 2, that the ring-wing media ecosystem, anchored by Fox News and Breitbart, is structurally different and that there is no equivalent network for left-wing news. However, they note that just because there is no parallel system on the left, it does not mean that the left-leaning media landscape is immune to propaganda and disinformation.
However, they state ‘dynamics on the right tend to reinforce partisan statements, irrespective of their truth, and to punish actors – be they media outlets or politicians and pundits – who insist on speaking truths that are inconsistent with partisan frames and narratives dominant within the ecosystem’ (Benkler et al., 2018: 75).
This ‘reality check dynamic’ that is core to journalistic norms functions differently between the right-wing and left-wing media ecosystems. Moving from these broader inquiries, in part 2, they narrow issues like immigration and islamophobia and the role of Breitbart in spreading disinformation on these issues and the role of Fox News in the circulation of propaganda and disinformation. In part 3 of the text, they pay special attention to algorithms, their manipulation, Russian bots and ‘troll farms’, and the role of ‘clickbait’ in spreading propaganda on Facebook. Part 4 analyzes the resulting polarization in American politics, and the origins of the asymmetric patterns are presented in part one.
The book is particularly useful for its empirical approach to studying propaganda and disinformation in the American political media ecosystem and for demonstrating through network analyses and case studies how, within the larger ecosystem, different ecosystems emerge that operate on their own logic. By situating their analyses in a larger historical and theoretical framework for the study of propaganda (going back to Lippmann and Bernays), they provide a robust approach to examining these systems, and a framework from which to understand their growth and spread. Using a cultural, historical, and critical approach in conjunction with an empirical method like network analysis, the authors demonstrate the utility of services like Media Cloud in collecting data for these kinds of analyses, critically examine the networks and their figurations, and attempt to understand the implications of these fundamentally different ecosystems. By looking at things like social media networks, news organization sharing behaviors, and even targeted political advertising, the authors approach their analysis through multiple points of entry. For each case study, the network visually maps and demonstrates how different modes of influence and kinds of movement influence the ways news stories spread.
Although Benkler et al. state in the beginning of the text that they hope the book reaches wider audiences outside of academe, the analysis, theories, and language used in the text are difficult to grasp without a deeper knowledge of the methods used. Further, a lack of inquiry into how race and other aspects of identity functions as a talking point within these ecosystems prevented them from perhaps a deeper critical analysis. Although they include immigration and islamophobia as case studies, deeper historical analysis into Trump’s role in the extremely racist ‘birther conspiracy’ about former President Barack Obama and the way that race hysteria functioned within these ecosystems in regard to Black Lives Matter, No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL), and other protest movements by minority groups was lacking and could have provided more insight into how race, gender, and class drive these processes. Nonetheless, the authors did include in their analysis the role of Gamergate in providing strategies for other Internet-based organizations to spread their messages of hate, harassment campaigns, and the way that these digital movements prior to the Trump presidency influenced the current right-wing media ecosystem today.
Overall, the book is a necessary inquiry into the state of propaganda and disinformation networks today. Looking beyond Twitter as a main point of inquiry and expanding to television, Facebook, YouTube, and beyond, the authors’ historical grounding, theoretical framework, and analysis provide both a broad and more focused view of the media ecosystem today and how it functions. The authors conclude that their study is ‘both optimistic and pessimistic about the possibilities for democracy in an age of ubiquitously networked communications’ (Benkler et al., 2018). They reiterate that the online media ecosystem is broken because it was borne out of an already broken television and radio public sphere and note that each country’s unique politics and institutional histories will dictate how online media functions in the future. Its release coincides with a crucial point in time for both academic scholarship and democracy in the United States. Ultimately the book asks difficult questions about the role of technology in shaping politics, culture, and its susceptibility to manipulation.
The book would be appropriate for scholars at any stage of their career – be they graduate students or tenured faculty, journalists, and other practitioners interested in the practices of ring-wing media, and policy makers attempting to come up with solutions to the issues brought forth in the book; but with the caveat that the book is indeed dense and deploys computational methods that may make understanding its contributions difficult for those not familiar with them. The answer to solving these issues, however, is not so cut and dry, and rather ‘developing such a framework without falling into high modernist nostalgia is the real answer to the threat of a post-truth era’, (Benkler et al., 2018: 387). For scholars within this realm, the book provides an in-depth historical and cultural analysis and demonstrates how this network approach can be used through a variety of case studies, but there is pushback on the claims of social media fundamentally shaping reality and politics. The book is indeed targeted to a more general audience rather than a purely academic one, however, given the limits of its scope, fails to answer the questions the authors pose: whether social media are destroying democracy. The answer to this is fraught, and this book is only one piece of a larger body of scholarship that attempts to explore the role of social media and its function in society. Research has shown people are becoming increasingly more politically polarized and, although media ecosystems have a hand in shaping public opinion, that the underlying roots of such shaping has ultimately increased polarization is not thoroughly explored within the book but is, rather, only touched upon. Thus, because in the end social media does not exist without the people who create these systems and participate within them, it can be argued that the current media ecosystem is a symptom of a larger societal and cultural shift rather than the cause.