Benjamin Duax
Walter Lippmann’s concept of the Authentic Messenger is a sociological construct used to explain why certain mediums are seen as accurate, in a way which relates more to social conditioning than material logic. Lippmann’s example is of a woman who has been conditioned to take a cracked window pane as a omen of death. Because of something in her lived experience, she assigned concrete meaning to a random physical signifier. Looking at Lippmann’s metric, I hope to examine the rise of political propaganda on social media. What I argue is that the signifiers of credibility in online political discourse are completely at odds with those signifiers in print media. Rather than legislative or academic credentials, the authenticity of the oneline messenger comes from perceived shared experience (time online) and a successful adoption of tone.
In Public Opinion Lippmann laments that the discourse includes the whole of society, not simply those he calls ‘Normal Members,’ that is, political opinions held by illiterates, the insane, the criminal caste, are included in the consense of public opinion. Lippmann (1922, p. 51) suggests that these partially isolated audiences will distort and exaggerate strands of the popular opinion, “discolouring” them with counterfacts and innuendos based on their specific mass of biases and ideologies.
Over the past decade or so, the shift of political discourse from print and television based, to social media and television based has led to increased polarization. The common refrain is that Algorithms sort users into experiential silos, where they only encounter views that are in line with their own. With no pushback they move to increasingly extreme versions of pre-existing ideology. Lippmann describes the “broad appeal” of messaging required to shift public opinion despite these distorting elements. Because a less focused message is required to reach those with less focused knowledge, the lack of detail functions as a form of censorship. BBC documentarian Adam Curtis claimed that “the Left” moved online as a means of coping with an unrecognizable political climate. In Hyper Normalization, Curtis suggests that the isolating effect of social media algorithms is what caused democrats to be unprepared for Donald Trump’s victory, Brexit, etcetera. Curtis suggests that because of the online echo chamber, leftists underestimated the scale of the right wing surge. Rather, I claim that the shift to platform based publishing, from editorial based publishing has extended the circle of expertise to include those outside Lippmann’s ‘Normal Members of society’, especially socially isolated young men. As Lippmann argues that true dialog can not begin until the facts themselves are agreed on, the primary aim of the far right today is attacking facts themselves. To render authority itself as unreliable is a central rhetorical technique of the online right. The effect of social media is not to isolate critics from one another, but to fundamentally transform the scope of normal argument or opinion.
In the Journal for Deradicalization Daniel Kohler describes interviews with eight former members of German far right groups, and how they were radicalized online. It was not simply the freedom that comes with absolute anonymity, or the silo effect of unanimous agenda, but the ability to shape a movement that was cited by Kohler’s subjects. One former Neo-Nazi describes the powerful feeling of the ability “to create own “schools” or interpretations,” to self idealize as a historical figure because of the degree of access to the center of the movement. With more or less decentralized structure, every participant is capable of imagining the historic gravity of leadership. Kohler also describes a illusory effect of far right chatrooms in that they provide not simply reinforcing perspective, but the illusion of mass perspective. The amorphous scale of online communities allowed users to not simply ignore opposing viewpoints, but to believe that the viewpoints they encountered were the majority. That the people they were talking to represented a critical mass of citizens with similar views who were kept from expressing these views in public.
The Journal for Peace Research, details the perception that an increase in migrants will necessarily result in an increase in violence against migrants. The case example is Germany where the common wisdom is that because the amount of right wing violence increased more or less in proportion to the amount of middle eastern migrants they must be correlated. The authors suggest that the increase in violence is actually more closely tied to a failure of the state to assert its power against right wing agitators: to allow itself to be influenced by public opinion in a way harmful to its own constituents.
In the same journal, Wilhelm Heitmey argues that the radicalization of right wing youth in Germany follows a pattern common to all resurgent far right nativist movements. His argument is that the increase in anti immigrant opinion is based around economic anxiety, and based around a reliable, essentially interchangeable logic sequence. Attacks on foreigners or immigrants are overwhelmingly carried out by those who are themselves of tenuous socio-economic status, even if the rhetoric justifying the attack comes from bourgeois media.
The flawed response of Twitter specifically, and of old media in general to understand the social dynamic of online space directly facilitated the transformation of online pranksters to a disciplined reactionary movement. A 2014 study by Womens Action Media, found that Twitter only took moderating action half of the time hate speech was reported. Twitter depends on documented evidence of a subjective exchange in order to take action, potentially at odds with the non archival basis of the medium. Writing in Feminist Studies Karla Mantilla describes what she calls ‘Gender Trolling’: the mass coordination of online harassment of women, particularly feminist writers. Harris Describes the phenomenon as focused primarily on women writing in tech journalism, specifically women who describe sexism of various forms within the tech industry. A specific case of Gender Trolling described by Mantilla, known as Gamergate, was a year long campaign of harassment against Video Game blogger Anita Sarkiseen, following her writing about the negative portrayal of women in electronic entertainment, she was subject to a campaign of death and rape threats. Several of the key figures in these exchanges went on to become major figures in the Alt Right, the white nationalist vanguard of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Lippmann recites an account of an experiment, where a brawl was staged in front of a group of trained observervers. A group of academics had gathered, and it was surreptitiously arranged for “a clown and a negro” to burst into the hall and quarrel over a revolver. The assembled witnesses were asked to describe what had happened, not knowing the events were pre-arranged. More than half of them described the events either mostly or completely inaccurately. Lippman (1922: 56) states that the images they saw were their stereotypes of a brawl. The men had seen many fictional fights or heard of real fights in their lives, and it was easier for them to recall this assembled gestalt of images then to actually experience what was in their face. I suggest that this form of stereotyping has been used by the Alt Right to falsify political events to manipulate the system. In september of 2016, towards the end of the American election, Hillary Clinton appeared to stagger at an event commemorating September eleventh. Aides were photographed helping her into her car in a way which made her look feeble, or at least weak. Initially citing dehydration or overheating, the Clinton Campaign later revealed that the candidate had been suffering from Pneumonia for several days. Writing in the Telegraph’s, Ruth Sherlock describes the revelation of the suppressed diagnosis as “drawing a line under” questions about her trustworthiness.
Highlighting Clinton’s apparent ill health was part of a coordinated exploitation campaign on social media. The New Yorker details a coordinated series of hashtags, arranged through far right bloggers, in its profile of Mike Cernovich. In large part the key figures of the Alt Right come from the overlapping Gamergate and PUA world’s, reactionary movements carved out in purely online social space. In november of 2016, libertarian video blogger Alex Jones alleged that Hillary clinton was at the center of a child sex trafficking ring centered out of the basement of Washington DC pizza parlour. The story had originally been posted to Reddit by an anonymous user, but achieved traction on Turkish Twitter. Writing for the BBC magazine and the Daily Dot, Efe Kerem Sozeri describes how the rumoured sex trafficking by Clinton campaign staff was used to deflect criticism of the Turkish president after a real sex trafficking scandal. Not only was a rumor manufactured in Lippmann’s “isolated social space” (in this case the overlap between pick up artist Twitter and far right Twitter) but it had jumped from one isolated space to another and back. That Turkish right wing media successfully amplified chatter from American right wing social media, which then became a tenable issue in the campaign, something that mainstream media reported on, even breathlessly, is a disturbing sequence of degrading copies: the imitation of the imitation of a whisper.
A passage from Lippmann’s Public Opinion describes “Lunatics, simpletons, the half-crazy and the crazy turned their darkened brains toward him as toward reason itself” describing “fan mail” to General Joffe, the commander of the French infantry following the first World War. Not only the mass of French society turned to him in adoration, but the dregs of society as well. The “discoloured isolated element” of public opinion, where half truths fester, has been given a central role in American political discourse because of the isolating effect of trumps ascendancy. The Republican party has spent the past decade purging serious intellectuals. There is no William Buckley of the party today, only Mike Cenroviches and Milo Yiannopoulos.
The organizational strength of the far right, supported by dark money has led to a situation in which large corporations cater to online activists in a manner disproportionate to their actual influence. The ability to “game” clicks, to manipulate traffic has resulted in major corporations reacting to the right wing fringe as if they exerted pluralistic influence. The Newsletter of the American Trotskyist organization, World Socialist Website, outlines a shift in search engine optimization, over the past year they claim that their web traffic dramatically declined as a result of Google deliberately suppressing left wing sources, in order to appear more neutral and therefore within the center of public opinion. In a similar fashion to Twitter, capitulating to the organizational acumen of the far right because internet discourse is something fundamentally alien to the middle aged executives who run these companies. According to former New York Times writer Chris Hedges, the number of visitors to the World Socialist Website declined 95% in October of 2017 relative to the weekly average over the past year—just one example of the kowtowing of Media companies to the far right. Another recent example was the coordinated campaign of white supremacists to have MSNBC contributor Sam Ceder fired over a resurfaced tweet where he appeared to make light of Roman Polanski’s rape case. The Tweet in question was clearly a sarcastic defense of Polanski, intended to attack Hollywood’s sheltering of powerful predators, but over a week period, GamerGate and Nazi activists engaged in a bad faith reading, and submitted complaints to MSNBC as if taking it on face value. The organizers of the campaign were prominent members of the far right, including Mike Cernovich, also one of the masterminds of the Sick Hillary campaign, and a former publisher of “pick up” manuals. Again, ‘Old Media’ failed to realize the shift in goalposts, considering malicious actors as real arbiters of public opinion.
I believe that this is the end goal of a market based publishing system, in which platforms are divorced from publishing reality. In order to preserve the commons function as a sounding ground for ideological development, they can not be left to the market. Because of the dissolution of notions of authenticity or expertise in favour of content, the notion of credibility itself has been discarded. A solution I propose is that the government should nationalize social media, because they have essentially taken the function of national levels of social discourse or papers of record.
Bibliography
Curtis, Adam, HyperNormalization, BBC, 2016.
Damon , Andrew, Google escalates blacklisting of left-wing web sites and journalists, international Committee of the Fourth International, October 2017 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/20/goog-o20.html
Kerem Sozeri, Esme, How the alt-right’s PizzaGate conspiracy hid real scandal in Turkey, the Daily Dot, November 2016. https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/pizzagate-alt-right-turkey-trolls-child-abuse/
Koehler, Daniel The Radical Online: Individual Radicalization Processes and the Role of the Internet, 2014 http://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/8/8
Gert Krell, Hans Nicklas & Änne Ostermann, Immigration, Asylum, and Anti-Foreigner Violence in Germany Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May, 1996) http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/425434.pdf
Lippman, Walter Public Opinion, 1922.
Mantilla, Karla Gendertrolling: Misogyny Adapts to New Media, Feminist Studies, 2013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719068
Sherlock, Ruth, The illness and the cover up that almost cost Hillary Clinton the presidency—and still might, The Telegraph, 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/12/the-illness-and-the-cover-up-that-almost-cost-hillary-clinton-th/
Women, Action, and the Media, Reporting, Reviewing and Responding to Harassment on Twitter , May 2015. https://womenactionmedia.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/05/wam-twitter-abuse-report.pdf