Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics - Hardcover

Benkler, Yochai; Faris, Robert; Roberts, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190923628 ISBN 13: 9780190923624

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives.

Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment.

The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Robert Faris is the Research Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Hal Roberts is a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Review

There are a lot of books on networks, social media, propaganda, polarization and American politics. This is the best.Cass Sunstein, Best Books of 2018, in Bloomberg

Liberals want facts; conservatives want their biases reinforced. Liberals embrace journalism; conservatives believe propaganda. In the more measured but still emphatic words of the authors, "the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment," and has been much more susceptible to "disinformation, lies and half-truths." [...] The book is not a work of media criticism but, rather, of data analysis--a study of millions of online stories, tweets, and Facebook-sharing data points. The authors' conclusion is that "something very different was happening in right-wing media than in centrist, center-left and left-wing media." [...] it was the feedback loop of right-wing quasi-journalism that had the most impact--and that hypothesis has profound implications not only for the study of the recent past but also for predictions about the not-so-distant future.Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker

Benkler, Faris and Roberts weave their findings into a dense but readable narrative that draws on a wide array of political science studies. They conclude that restoration and reunification of the cleaved system of US public communication cannot begin without "a series of electoral defeats that would force such a transformation."Michael Cornfield, associate professor of political management at the George Washington University, in The Guardian

"Network Propaganda," by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts [...] uses data to show convincingly that most of the disinformation circulating during the 2016 campaign was actually spread by the good old-fashioned right-wing American media: Breitbart and Fox News.Annalisa Quinn in The New York Times Magazine

This long, complex, yet readable study of the American media ecosystem in the run-up to the 2016 election (as well as the year afterwards) demonstrates that the epistemic-closure problem has generated what the authors call an "epistemic crisis" for Americans in general. The book also shows that our efforts to understand current political division and disruptions simplistically--either in terms of negligent and arrogant platforms like Facebook, or in terms of Bond-villain malefactors like Cambridge Analytica or Russia's Internet Research Agency--are missing the forest for the trees. It's not that the social media platforms are wholly innocent, and it's not that the would-be warpers of voter behavior did nothing wrong (or had no effect). But the seeds of the unexpected outcomes in the 2016 U.S. elections, Network Propaganda argues, were planted decades earlier, with the rise of a right-wing media ecosystem that valued loyalty and confirmation of conservative (or "conservative") values and narratives over truth.Mike Goodwin in techdirt

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0190923628
• ISBN 13: 9780190923624
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 474