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"Woolley, Samuel"
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Manufacturing Consensus
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.
eBook
Digital Propaganda: The Power of Influencers
Attempts to manipulate public opinion using social media and emerging information communication technologies (ICTs) continue to proliferate internationally. Governments, corporations, extremist groups, and a wide variety of other entities around the globe now commonly use both automated bots and anonymous human \"sockpuppet\" accounts in efforts to amplify and suppress particular streams of information during elections, security crises, and other pivotal events. They use these same tools to sow disinformation and engage in organized political trolling campaigns. However, the technologies and tactics used in these internet-based \"influence operations\" are changing. This essay leverages insights from over 70 interviews with people who both produce and track online manipulation campaigns. It compares emerging trends in digital disinformation and computational propaganda across the globe using qualitative data from 12 countries—Burma, Brazil, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. In essence, internet-borne manipulation efforts are evolving from relatively unsophisticated \"inorganic\" campaigns pushed by social media bots and towards more complex \"semi-organic\" efforts combining both coordinated human users and artificial intelligence software. Additional, related, trends include the increased coercive political use of social media influencers and encrypted and private messaging applications.
Journal Article
Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction
Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers’ success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencers get involved in politics, when they harness their digital clout to promote political causes and social issues, and thereby become political influencers. This introduction to the special issue on political influencers provides a definition of what makes someone a political influencer. It theoretically locates political influencers within the larger field of media and communication scholarship, and delineates the term from other, related concepts such as that of opinion leader. Building on eight contributions focused across more than six countries and nine platforms, the article showcases important strands of current and future research. It provides the foundation for a more systemic understanding of political influencers on social media, situating them within a media ecology complicated by a diverse array of traditional and nontraditional actors, tactics, and dynamics. The article concludes with recommendations for future research.
Journal Article
Probabilistic social learning improves the public’s judgments of news veracity
The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs that require social media users to classify news in binary terms as either true or false. However, research on peer influence suggests that framing decisions in binary terms can amplify judgment errors and limit social learning, whereas framing decisions in probabilistic terms can reliably improve judgments. In this preregistered experiment, we compare online peer networks that collaboratively evaluated the veracity of news by communicating either binary or probabilistic judgments. Exchanging probabilistic estimates of news veracity substantially improved individual and group judgments, with the effect of eliminating polarization in news evaluation. By contrast, exchanging binary classifications reduced social learning and maintained polarization. The benefits of probabilistic social learning are robust to participants’ education, gender, race, income, religion, and partisanship.
Journal Article
How Disinformation on WhatsApp Went From Campaign Weapon to Governmental Propaganda in Brazil
The popular encrypted messaging and chat app WhatsApp played a key role in the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The present study builds on this knowledge and showcases how the app continued to be used in a governmental operation spreading false and misleading information popularly known in Brazil as the Office of Hatred (OOH). By harnessing in-depth expert interviews with documentarians of the office’s daily operations—researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers (N = 10)—this study draws up a chronology of the OOH. Via this methodological approach, we trace and chronologize events, actions, and actors associated with the OOH. Specifically, findings (a) document the rise of antipetismo and disinformation campaigns associated with attacks on the Brazilian Worker’s party from 2012 until the election of Bolsonaro in 2018, (b) describe the emergence of the OOH at the heels of the election and subsequent radicalization in WhatsApp groups, (c) provide an overview of the types of disinformation that are spread on the app by the OOH, and (d) illustrate how the OOH operates by mapping key actors and places, communicative strategies, and audiences. These findings are discussed in light of ramifications that government-sponsored forms of disinformation might have in other antidemocratic polities marked by strongman populist leadership.
Journal Article
Embodied Political Influencers: How U.S. Anti-Abortion Actors Co-Opt Narratives of Marginalization
U.S. anti-abortion activists use social media to advocate for their cause. While influencer scholarship has proliferated within media studies, the advent of political influencers remains understudied, despite their ability to influence public opinion. Through 16 interviews with anti-abortion political influencers combined with digital observation, we examine the emergent tactics of “progressive” anti-abortion influencers. We find that these influencers co-opt marginalized communities’ ideological frameworks and experiences of discrimination in an effort to influence public opinion on abortion. We build upon the concept of identity propaganda from Reddi, Kuo, and Kreiss, but crucially reveal the ways in which these influencers mobilize their own experiences of oppression as members of marginalized communities themselves. Thus, we put forth the theoretical concept of embodied political influencers to articulate these influencers’ aim to change political opinion through identifying as members of marginalized groups, calling on their own historical—and at times contemporary—experiences of subjugation to propagate embodied propaganda.
Journal Article
How pro- and anti-abortion activists use encrypted messaging apps in post-Roe America
In a post-Roe America, abortion-rights activists are scrambling to protect reproductive rights. Communication on open social media platforms like Facebook can now be used to prosecute those seeking an illegal abortion in a frightening entanglement of technology corporations and the state. Building on surveillance studies and feminist scholarship, we analyze 22 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists and pro-encryption activists to answer: How will encrypted messaging apps be relevant for pro- and anti-abortion activists post-Roe? We find that while encrypted messaging apps are used by activists on either side of the abortion debate, their motivations for use range from mere convenience to supplanting state and corporate surveillance. We thus argue that encryption can act as a feminist tool to usurp patriarchal surveillance but must be used in combination with a holistic privacy framework. This framework may include care-motivated, community-centered, relational surveillance.
Journal Article
Chat Apps and Cascade Logic: A Multi-Platform Perspective on India, Mexico, and the United States
Chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are increasingly popular platforms for communication. Their sometimes-closed nature and encryption affordances present researchers, governments, and law enforcement with unique problems of access, traceability, and, ultimately, understanding. It also makes them useful vectors for sowing disinformation. This research assumes a multi-platform perspective, describing the particularities of how chat apps can be used toward disseminating mis- and disinformation by way of cascade logic—the means by which information in chat app ecologies is trafficked upstream (making its way from private conversations into the mainstream) as well as downstream (allowing information to withdraw from the public eye), providing space for distortion along the way. Cascade logic also describes how chat apps allow the gradual withdrawal and self-segregation of individuals into, or emergence out of, layered spaces of privacy and obfuscation. We present an interview-based study exploring chat apps in three countries, synthesizing unifying dimensions across cultures and contexts: India, the United States, and Mexico. We analyze data from in-depth conversations with 33 individuals who work to either produce or track political content on chat apps. These interviewees work for a wide array of organizations: political parties, governments, extremist groups, digital political consultancies, news entities, and civil society organizations. We reveal key insights into the tactics of producers of political content on chat apps and show how these platforms are particularly suitable for harnessing human connections, or leveraging communities of trust, to sow disinformation.
Journal Article