Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
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Read between January 6 - January 8, 2019
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“The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared . . . What’s more, the fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to [weaponize] the web at scale.”
Lena Denman liked this
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The best way to describe the feeling that results is a term from the field of philosophy: “presentism.” In presentism, the past and future are pinched away, replaced by an incomprehensibly vast now. If you’ve ever found yourself paralyzed as you gaze at a continually updating Twitter feed or Facebook timeline, you know exactly what presentism feels like.
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Serious reflection on the past is hijacked by the urgency of the current moment; serious planning for the future is derailed by never-ending distraction. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has described this as “present shock.” Buffeted by a constant stream of information, many internet users can feel caught in a struggle just to avoid being swept away by the current.
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Unlike in other states where the focus is on banning discourse on human rights or calls for democratization, Chinese censorship seeks to suppress any messages that receive too much grassroots support, even if they’re apolitical—or even complimentary to the authorities. For example, what seemed like positive news of an environmental activist who built a mass movement to ban plastic bags was harshly censored, even though the activist started out with support from local government officials. In a truly “harmonious society,” only the central government in Beijing should have the power to inspire ...more
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Yet, far from being postmodern, sockpuppets actually followed the example of classic Cold War “active measures” by targeting the extremes of both sides of American politics during the 2016 election. The fake accounts posed as everything from right-leaning Tea Party activists to “Blacktivist,” who urged those on the left to “choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.” A purported African American organizer, Blacktivist, was actually one of those Russian hipsters sitting in St. Petersburg, whose Facebook posts would be shared an astounding 103.8 million times before ...more
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In an exhaustive series of experiments, Yale University researchers found that people were significantly more likely to believe a headline (“Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”) if they had seen a similar headline before. It didn’t matter if the story was untrue; it didn’t even matter if the story was preceded by a warning that it might be fake. What counted most was familiarity. The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically. And the longer you linger in a particular community, the more its claims will be repeated until they become ...more
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In the past several years, episodes like #Pizzagate have become all too common, as have fabulists like Posobiec. These conspiracy-mongers’ influence has been further reinforced by the age-old effects of homophily and confirmation basis. Essentially, belief in one conspiracy theory (“Global warming is a hoax”) increases someone’s susceptibility to further falsehoods (“Ted Cruz’s dad murdered JFK”). They’re like the HIV of online misinformation: a virus that makes its victims more vulnera-ble to subsequent infections.
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Simply sharing crazy, salacious stories became a form of political activism. As with the dopamine-fueled cycle of “shares” and “likes,” it also had a druglike effect on internet partisans. Each new “hit” of real (or fake) news broadcast on social media might be just enough to help their chosen candidate win. There was also a sort of raw entertainment to it—a no-holds-barred battle in which actual positions on policy no longer mattered. This, too, was infectious. Now taking their lead from what was trending online, traditional media outlets followed suit. Across the board, just one-tenth of ...more
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Human minds are wired to seek and create narrative. Every moment of the day, our brains are analyzing new events—a kind word from our boss, a horrible tweet from a faraway war—and binding them into thousands of different narratives already stowed in our memories. This process is subconscious and unavoidable.
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Even for members of Congress, there is a powerful correlation between their level of online celebrity and a narrative of ideological extremism. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the more unyieldingly hyperpartisan a member of Congress is—best fitting our concept of the characters in a partisan play—the more Twitter followers he or she draws.
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It’s innately human to want to feel as if you’re at the center of a sweeping plotline in which you are simultaneously the aggrieved victim (such as of the vast global cabal that oversees the “deep state”) and the unlikely hero, who will bring the whole thing crashing down by bravely speaking the truth. The more an article claims that it contains information that governments or doctors “don’t want us to know,” the more likely we are to click on it.
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across 200,000 users, they discovered that anger was the emotion that traveled fastest and farthest through the social network—and the competition wasn’t even close. “Anger is more influential than other emotions like joy,” the researchers bluntly concluded.
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The door is being slowly opened to a bizarre but not impossible future where the world’s great powers might fall to bloodshed due—in part—to matters getting out of hand online. In this dynamic, one is reminded of how the First World War began. As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1914, the advisors to both the German kaiser and the Russian tsar came to the same curious conclusion. Confiding in their diaries at the time, they wrote that they feared more the anger of their populace if they didn’t go to war than the consequences if they did. They had used the new communications technology of the ...more
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Silicon Valley was beginning to awaken to another, more fundamental challenge. This was a growing realization that all the doomsaying about homophily, filter bubbles, and echo chambers had been accurate. In crucial ways, virality did shape reality.