Reflections on Propaganda and Social Media
Abstract:
Fake news, state-controlled manipulation and commercialized manipulations all those concepts have been increasing over decades meanwhile they were always there, however, when the era we have been in even calling “post-truth” how we keep relying on the news. The terms of propaganda and rhetoric have been discussing since the first-time communication had emerged, for example, the first public relations examples and debates on rhetoric can be found, even, amidst ancient civilizations, notably Ancient Greek. Nevertheless, the importance of the term has been increasing with each invention had done in communication technologies. On the other hand, social movements and wars, especially WW, have nonignorable impacts on the field. Propaganda exercises throughout WW1 have been implemented by Germany and Britain showed immense practicum of propaganda in real life. Then with the end of the WW propaganda has begun to evolve and adapt through the capitalist system, where commercialization embraces techniques and adjust it. Elimination of time with ascending of digitalization in communication also have caused to gradually increase of propagandist, manipulative contents.
Dissemination of those types of contents, between peer to peer and peer to mass, also led some question marks for the future of the communication industry. Due to nature of the Internet, the feature of UGC (User Generated Content) being mainstream and opinion leader had switched hand to new social media influencers which seems the things have become democratized at first glance, it hasn’t. Indeed, powerholders and elites had changed their tactics and wielded much more on propagandist discourse. For example, a Russian institution as known as Internet Research Agency (IRA), which has been dubbed a “troll factory”, performed global activities by using existing media environment. After 4 years still, the USA officials are investigating between 2016 presidential elections and the IRA’s relation. As well as same thing valid for the UK and Brexit campaign. What did too much effective propaganda techniques? Media moguls, the Internet, journalists or us?
Some of the think tanks of the industry, however, they prefer to be called as technology companies, have been wielding soft regulations and others choose to be more pro-active. For example, Facebook still depends on its advertisement revenue from politics, on the contrary, after the 2016 elections Twitter promises not to advertise politics, no more. Another problem comes with the way of using the Internet, due to the nature of the Internet. The feature of UGC (User Generated Content) being mainstream and opinion leader had switched hand to new social media influencers which seems the things have become democratized at first glance, which is not true. Even organizations which are established to prevent dissemination of propagandist contents forced to be partial in this grimy race.
Rest of the paper will be divided into three pieces first how, when emerged the propaganda concept, second what actors had played a role on the expansion of the propaganda, at last, but not least scrutinizing propaganda in terms of the current media environment, that is, how it’s been revealing across platforms, how it’s changed and how new debunking organizations serve the reveal of the propaganda.
Keywords: Propaganda, Rhetoric, Persuasion, Internet Research Agency (IRA), Tech giants,
The essence: “Will to Power”
Every relative subject we see around have some sort of power relation, it means, each relationship is naturally rigged with power interest. Each existing subject demand power over others thus the foremost dynamic could be described with the domination of thing(s). This is likewise how we found our place in a conversation or in an emotional relationship. If we extended the Nietzsche’s concept of “Will to Power”, meanwhile the concept has no certain definition and thus open to debate as his other works, and separate the meaning from the inner world of the human being we can see what human desires and expects in mutual communication. That refers we all desire to dominate the conversations, we participate actively, this may call as a critical work of human brain either unconscious work which brings us to the reptilian brain. We know propaganda possess to be organized or unorganized, therefore, could be conscious or unconscious.
Power has precedence over emotions and knowledge as well as it is the combination of those things but rationally. To control the environment human has equipped some persuasion and manipulation techniques. Besides the microenvironment of human, present medium facilities made it possible to get manipulative contents through masses. We have been confronting with manipulative works over centuries, the main issue or main subject here is the rise of the Internet. The Internet made it possible to reach every piece of the world and turned the world into, notably as how McLuhan calls, a global village.
Previous thoughts on Propaganda
Propaganda and persuasion and rhetoric have traditionally been studied for decades in the context of how could one be manipulated, however, over three decades it has transformed ones to crowds. Thanks to augmentation of mass media technologies but before that the terms propaganda and persuasion have been discussing even in Ancient Greek. The usage of Rhetoric led a divergence between well-known philosophers, Plato and Aristotle took differing positions on rhetoric’s role on self-expression. Plato was suspicious as to whether using rhetoric, which origins in oratory, may sweep up into persuasion rather than the truths (Soules, 2015).
Socrates: . . . [T]he rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know?
Gorgias: Yes, Socrates, and is not this a great comfort? Not to have learned the other arts, but the art of rhetoric only, and yet to be in no way inferior to the professors of them? (Plato Gorgias 380 BCE)
It’s by now a common understanding but rhetoric has, involuntarily, perceived as the mix of propaganda and persuasion from Plato. Nevertheless, pondering its origin and the reasons, none of the philosopher and scholar has tried to define how it should be done, within strict borders, nor its way of dissemination elaborately. This could be because of the constant changing in the area of communication and social interests. Mass media and propaganda techniques evolved together at the beginnings of the 20th century (Soules, 2015).
During the World War I propaganda has been using for convincing masses and stipulating the moral reasons of the War which will determine the future of a nation, in doing so, War has been justified from the eyes of the public. However, each circumstance/event will demand to be approached differently in case propaganda needed. Ellul (1965) identifies four categories of propaganda, where each has its own strategies and purpose. 1)Political versus sociological propaganda: Political propaganda includes concerns of political parties, government and interest groups, it is distinguishable from advertorial works. On the other hand, entertainment industry possesses immense effect whilst defining fashions, trends, values, ethics. “Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously moulds individuals and makes them conform to society” (Ellul, [1965] 1973). 2)Agitation versus integration propaganda: Agitation propaganda is been using, in case the circumstances which demand rapid social changes such as revolution. It happens and ends in a narrow time of span since the density of output make it hard to sustain for long times. Meanwhile, integration demands a longer time of span, which is also hard to see at first glance by masses. The adjusted education system would be a good example of that. 3)Vertical versus horizontal propaganda: Source of the vertical propaganda is elite organizations and groups which relies on centralized orchestration of mass media used for propaganda of agitation and integration. However, the source of the horizontal propaganda is small citizen groups, that is to say, it might be produced from/for the public itself. Therefore, it relies on well-organized groups with a common ideology, not depending on mass media, by considering these features usage of horizontal propaganda tends to be understood under the integration (Farkas & Neumayer, 2018). 4)Irrational versus rational propaganda: Propaganda could be both builds up upon the facts or myths, beliefs, etc. For instance, an organization may choose to reinforce the idea “our world… our future” without claiming any data whilst taking attention for climate change, on the other hand, may use scientific data to convince the target audience, or maybe both together.
Besides the structure of the propaganda, there is a vast amount of supplier ingredients that is embraced by propaganda like; technological improvements on communication, visceral behaviours of human and present political/economic system. The most comprehensive and crystal-clear work was written by Noam Chomsky, media provide for whom needs to produce public consent, propaganda should yield on public consent, in a nutshell, media is perceived as a tool of manufacturing consent. Also, he defined the (five) filters of the media, whilst producing public consent, those filters maintain also being propagandist dynamics of the media (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). However, except the last of them, which is anti-communism, others still keep their significance even today. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that it was wrong, though could have been identified with a generalized term like “current evil” (!) to make people feel that we embark on together. As a result, Chomsky thought that content needs to be legitimized in the eyes of the public, due to that media supposed to manipulate the public with several techniques by calling their primitive mind. In this case, the media as an implementation can be both subject and object of dissemination. For the sake of clarity, whilst manufacturing consent it may be gauged as a subject since media had turned into propaganda itself. On the other hand, Ellul assumed “propaganda cannot exist without using the mass media” here it seems like the object due to being just responsible for dissemination (Ellul, [1965] 1973).
Rise of the Internet
Expansion of the Internet amidst public led to change in every area of our lives and brought some advantageous as well as disadvantageous. Have you ever thought the assumption of the Internet brought democratization could be a lie? First and foremost, the most common fallacy it’d brought is that, it’s neither enhancing the democracy, nor social equality. Till the Internet had introduced it’s been calling “Information superhighway”, whereas it’s been notably serving the elites and corporates. Thus, we can assume old-fashioned media’s features, like media ownership, advertisement, have transferred into a new area where all of them are disguised. Nevertheless, it can’t be neglected that individuals play more role in this system, within drawn borders, therefore broadcasting had evolved to some kind of narrowcasting (which means rather than a single mass audience, we have multiple audiences, interests, and channels) meantime (Rampton, 2007). Shrink of the “one-to-many” communication made people think it is flatter and for everyone, however, forgot one thing is that the audacity of the media moguls for the adaptation. Still, it doesn’t mean that it’s evil or bad though, nonetheless, we shouldn’t ignore four challenges that came with the Internet. 1) The abundance of information, 2) beefing up the authoritative environment, 3) conflict of speed and accuracy, 4) human preferences (we all tend to see information which supports our pre-existing ideas/beliefs) (Hornik, 2016). All these bring us to what is the main ideas of the article. First, what are the purposes of debunking ventures and second is what approaches think tanks of the industry possess against propagandist contents?
Stop Fake News
The current media environment has changed the newsroom practices as well, for example, the importance of witness journalism had enormously soared, thus, without any differences, every platform became a newsroom. It includes two major problems, first fake news and second is ethical problems regard to published content, such as not blurring faces of underages in a video. Masses can be included this production and dissemination process wittingly or unwittingly since some people tend to rely upon a content that has seen for several times and several websites, especially, from a website designed to look trustworthy. For instance, there was a website to maintain Sir Martin Luther King’s memos and thoughts which have had an URL as martinlutherking.com (currently it’s down). According to a conducted survey by Daniels in 2008 interviewee asked for would you trust the site (martinlutherking.com) almost every one of participators told that it’s trustable and would be a beneficial source for the school paper (Daniels, 2008). As we can see people with a poor inquiry and research ability is to believe what they’ve been seeing on the Internet, however, this narration and production of partially biased content is the nature of reporting. As Schudson (2003) told, reporting activities to give a meaning and draw a portrait of the facts by constructing a narrative which includes their own way of coding the truth, hereby, partially biased. Here comes the question on are we able to know the truth? As it is discussed in Maria Haigh’s “Stopping Fake News” article, it says, “traditional positivist philosophers of science assumed that objective truth existed and could be discovered by following a scientific method, which we might compare to the rhetoric of professional journalists. As a reaction to this, the radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend insisted that there was no scientific method for the production of truth, that objectivity was an illusion, and that therefore all forms of knowledge were equivalent” (Haigh, Haigh, & Kozak, 2018).
With the rise of the Internet pressure on changing and manipulating the truth has also doubled. Organizations like IRA (Internet Research Agency), a troll farm company established in Saint Petersburg and has a rooted connection with the Russian government, reinforce the international propaganda campaigns. IRA works for the dissemination of false information across social media platforms, explicitly, they’ve been investigating for 2016 presidential election in the USA as well as Brexit campaigns. Afterall all these manipulation efforts, fact-checking sites gained popularity to prevent propaganda campaigns. Either intentional misstatements or simple mistakes in the news have begun to be evaluated, however, for some people those are just a counter-propaganda mechanism as well. One reason for that while debunking news they serve for ethics of the journalism mostly and take an elitist attitude indeed they should do it for the benefit of everyone. Additionally, most of the fact-checking sites neglect to evaluate whom benefits most from that/fake news. Whilst debunking fake news, researchers should likewise make an inquiry about the origin of news for evaluating whether it is on purpose or not.
Think tanks of the media industry, however, should have used strict regulations prefers not to take precautions due to maintaining their own, advertorial, interests. This conflict of interest is strengthening the position of fact-checking websites, on the other hand, descending the trustworthiness ratio and lead questioning the presence of social media platforms in the eyes of users. However, do social platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, care it? I don’t think so, thanks to, the immense impact of the “network effect” they already know users all depend on themselves, whereas, they try to not to be embraced as a media company rather than a technology company.
As a consequence of everything above, we can assume that educating ourselves despite standing for some fact-checking organization is crucial, also we have to approach critically everything we see on the Internet. Up until here, we have seen the essence of the propaganda, previous thoughts and at last the Internet and its creation of novel patterns, like IRA, fact-checking sites.
Works Cited
Soules, M. (2015). Media, Persuasion and Propaganda. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Ellul, J. (1973). Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes. New York: Vintage Books.
Farkas, J., & Neumayer, C. (2018). Disguised Propaganda from Digital to Social Media. Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature, 2–15.
Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political cconomy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Daniels, J. (2008). Searching for Dr. King: Teens, race, and cloaked websites. Electronic techtonics: Thinking at the interface. Lulu Press, Durham NC
Hornik, R. (2016). A strategy to counter propaganda in the digital era. Yearbook of the Institute of East-Central Europe, 14(2), 61–74.
Haigh, M., Haigh, T., & Kozak, N. (2018). Stopping Fake News. Journalism Studies, 19(14), 2062–2087.
Schudson, M. (2003). The Sociology of News. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Scott, Mark. 2014. Mail.ru Takes Full Ownership of VKontakte, Russia’s Largest Social Network. New York Times. September 16. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/mail-ru-takes-full-ownership-of-vkontakte- russias-largest-social-network/?_r=1.
