Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity

by Samuel Woolley

An in-depth exploration of social media and emergent technology that details the inner workings of modern propaganda
 
Until recently, propaganda was a top-down, elite-only system of communication control used largely by state actors. Samuel Woolley argues that social media has democratized today’s propaganda, allowing nearly anyone to launch a fairly sophisticated, computationally enhanced influence campaign. Woolley shows how social media, with its anonymity and capacity for automation, allows a wide variety of groups to build the illusion of popularity through computational tools (such as bots) and human-driven efforts (such as sockpuppets—real people assuming false identities online—and partisan influencers). They use these technologies and strategies to create a bandwagon effect by bringing the content into parallel discussions with other legitimate users, or to mold discontent for political purposes.
 
Drawing on eight years of original international ethnographic research among the people who build, combat, and experience these propaganda campaigns, Woolley presents an extensive view of the evolution of computational propaganda, offers a glimpse into the future, and suggests pragmatic responses for policy makers, academics, technologists, and others.

Genres: Technology, Sociology, Politics, Psychology

232 pages, Hardcover

Published January 31, 2023

About the author

Dr. Samuel Woolley is a writer, researcher and speaker who specializes in the study of disinformation, emergent technology and life online. He and his colleagues were among the first people to uncover the manipulative political use of social media during political events worldwide. They coined the terms “computational propaganda” and “political bot.”

Woolley’s next book, “The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth“, is set to be released in January 2020 by PublicAffairs/Hachette. His previous book, “Computational Propaganda,” (2018) is a series of country case studies on how digital tools were used during elections, national disasters and security crises in attempts manipulate public opinion. It is co-authored with Dr. Philip N. Howard and published by Oxford University Press. Woolley regularly writes publicly on politics and social media for venues including Wired, the Guardian, Motherboard, TechCrunch, Slate and the Atlantic. For his research, he has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and on NBC’s Today show, PBS’ Frontline and BBC’s News at Ten.

He has worked with numerous academic institutions (Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley), private companies (Alphabet, Deloitte, Allianz), governmental entities (US Senate, UK Parliament, NATO), and civil society groups (German Marshall Fund, Anti-Defamation League, National Endowment for Democracy) to translate the complex empirical impacts of computational propaganda to effects on everyday life. He has given talks and hosted workshops on digital manipulation—as it relates to subjects ranging from policy to vaccination to commerce—at venues including Princeton University, Data and Society, SXSW, BBC Monitoring, and Mishcon de Reya LLP.

Dr. Woolley is a current faculty member in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication. He has current and past academic affiliations with the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, and at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is the former Director of Research and Co-Founder of the National Science Foundation and European Research Council supported Computational Propaganda Project at the University of Oxford. He is the Founding Director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, a 50-year-old think tank located in the heart of Silicon Valley. He has held research fellowships at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Anti-Defamation league, Google Jigsaw, the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington, and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. His research has been supported by large grants from the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the New Venture Fund for Communications and the Ford Foundation. His research has informed policy in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries around the world. His PhD is from the University of Washington.

He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Samantha, and their dog, Basket. He tweets from @samuelwoolley.

Reviews

[Ellie Connors · Rating 3 out of 5]

there was a lot of good in this. the problem with books like these is the content is so dense and there is so much you can talk about and at times i felt like he was trying to tackle too much without fully delving into anything in particular. the conclusion of the book was extremely strong though and i'm feeling super seen by what he writes about a new information ethnography. i think at the heart of a lot of the issues with bots and automation there is a question about what it actually means to be human and the ways that we are already "posthuman" ourselves. there is one line in the book where he says "now, we are all reply guys" and that was the scariest part

[Catherine Wicker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book so much. This book had valuable information about bots and how social media is impacted by it. The information was valuable for me as an organizer to think about how the information leaders are getting and what information is created to get people to agree or disagree. The interviews in the book are interesting but the rest of the book is very dry.

[Joshua Sprinkle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because an AI told me I'd like it.

It's an astonishing thing that a man can do such careful and broad research (the author) and still write something too short and not fully explain what "manufacturing consensus" is.

[Mohamed Osman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book extends our understand of propaganda to the new era of social media; a phenomenon the author calls computational propaganda. The general gist is that technology has changed propaganda in a number of ways, mostly notably it has decentralised it. Whereas it used to be top-down from the political elite via main stream News channels (BBC, CNN, Fox) and newspapers, now anyone can engage in it through the use of social media by creating bots (automated social media profiles), sockpuppet accounts (fake accounts if real people), partisan nanoinfluencers (paid propaganda with people with around 10,000 followers). These can be used to spread whatever to thousands of people at a time, gaming the algorithm which makes it trend on peoples account. This is then picked up by traditional media thinking that its actually a trending topic of discussion when it isn't giving it a false sense of importance. The book argues that this is now used quite heavily not only by governments and political movements across the world, but individuals with enough fervour to spread their ideology. Some people are now so proficient at it that they turn it into a business.

While the book introduces some novel ideas, it lacks any depth really. It would have been great to see detailed case studies on how theses bots and sockpuppets about were used, its reception, and its impact. I think Channel 4 in the UK did a wonderful job looking at Cambridge Analytica's computational propaganda during the Trump 2016 presidential campaign. This book teases you with examples from Equador, Mexico, Russia, India, and Turkey, but hardly get into any detail all. It just says the ruling party in Turkey uses bots to undermine its opposition, Russia used bot o help Trump win, India's fascist BJP party uses fake stories to spread on Facebook groups and WhatsApp becuase they can't be detected easily. No detail whatsoever, just statements. For this reason, this book could have been 10% its length and we would have lost no substance at all.

[Zak Rogoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The descriptions of his interviews with computational propagandists are invaluable. But other than that, this book didn't add much to my understanding as a digital rights researcher. It seems to straddle a weird line between being high academic - with long lists of questions, mentioning previous theorists without much elaboration, and academic terminology - while also trying to provide a basic-level education on what a bot is - ie repeatedly reminding you that it is not the same thing as its creator. It felt like it was trying to be both for an academic crowd and for a legislative staffer who was caught up in an extremely shallow politicized understanding.

[Liu Xinyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Political bots are something that very interesting to start with when thinking about today propaganda. I particularly like author’s efforts to re-conceptualize propaganda from a top-down to a “democratized” perspective. However, the scale of propaganda is not considered, and media-politics interdependence is not fully discussed. I also like the part where people are talking about how they use bots to launch their own campaigns. The democratization of computational propaganda techniques, bots and algorithms, are indeed scaling up the visibility of propaganda messages. We need more research on this.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had a lot of promise but ended up being a superficial treatment of the subject. I expected much more depth from an ethnographer, but the interviews were superficially described and somehow we’re left to rely on the author’s assurance of what he has seen, heard, and read, rather than presenting an account of the relevant research he has conducted. Some sources, particularly of ethnographers doing work on the same topic, were also oddly left out, notwithstanding numerous author statements that he has done this research for a decade.

[Katrina Kauffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

woolley’s research is fascinating but I was left unsatisfied with the solutions he offered. still, I feel like I learned a lot from this book, so it’s a solid 3.5.