This is a crib of a talk (30 min read) that Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas on September 13, 2018. Well worth the read for anyone interested in a great analysis of our current media situation.
Media manipulators have developed a strategy with three parts that rely on how the current media ecosystem is structure:
1. Create spectacle, using social media to get news media coverage.
2. Frame the spectacle through phrases that drive new audiences to find your frames through search engines.
3. Become a “digital martyr” to help radicalize others.
These steps rely on the relationship between social media, news media, and search engines.
In early September 2018, Facebook and Twitter were accused during a Congressional hearing of having anti-conservative bias. This should sound familiar to many of you in this room as you too have been accused for political purposes of being the “liberal media.” The core of this narrative is a stunt, architected by media manipulators, designed to trigger outrage among conservatives and pressure news and social media to react.
It works. Over the last two years, both social media and news media organizations have desperately tried to prove that they aren’t biased. What’s at stake is not whether these organizations are restricting discussions concerning free-market economics or failing to allow conservative perspectives to be heard. What’s at stake is how fringe groups can pervert the logics of media to spread conspiratorial and hateful messages under their false flag of conservatism.
Accusations of anti-conservative bias are not evaluated through evidence because reality doesn’t matter to them. This is what makes this stunt so effective. News organizations and tech companies have no way to “prove” their innocence. What makes conspiratorial messages work is how they pervert evidence. The simplest technique is to conflate correlation and causation. Conspiracy makers point to the data that suggests that both journalists and Silicon Valley engineers are more likely to vote for candidates from the Democratic party. Or that they have higher levels of education than the average American and are more likely to live in Blue states.
As my colleague Francesca Tripodi points out, accusing tech of anti-conservative bias also leverages and reinforces a misunderstanding of how search engines and social media work. As she notes, “People believe Google is weighing facts instead of rank-ordering results that match the entered keywords.” When the goal is to drive a wedge among the public, it’s not hard to encourage people to see bias.
To read the entire article click here
For a video (and rolling transcript) of the talk, click here.
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