I got my first inkling of the potential political power of social media back in 2007 on receiving a Facebook friend request from Barack Obama. I was momentarily surprised since I'd never met the man and at that time barely knew who he was. I quickly realised though that it wasn't from Barack himself but rather a bunch of young IT smart-asses at his campaign headquarters who'd learned how to scrape the content of FB posts to compile a list of people who might be sympathetic to his cause (but clearly didn't tell them whether said people had a vote in the USA). It seemed to me then entirely predictable that it would be Democrats, young and "progressive", who first learned how to play the social media, rather than those old, rigid, luddite, perhaps religious Republicans. Oh boy, how things change...
I expended quite a few typing-finger joules during the autumn of 2016 on Facebook, pointing out to certain American friends that the news stories (almost all involving Hillary Clinton) they were commenting on were bogus - affiliated to a number of Far-Right websites that they could have easily checked on Google - and that commenting merely promoted this bogosity to the top of their friends' news feeds. I'd already noticed, over the previous year or so, that while loitering among the Guardian's Comment is Free forums (another bad habit) that whenever the subject of Putin's Russia was mentioned, a small army of trolls with slightly odd English syntax would appear within minutes, as if from a hollow tree trunk. It began to feel as though something organised was going on.
Turns out my gut feeling was right. Since Donald Trump's surprise election win (not that surprising to me in fact) the UK newspapers have been frothing about the Post-Truth era, Macedonian teenage lie-mongers and the rise of Fake News sites, but embedded among all this froth was an alarming nugget of real information. On December 4th 2016 an Observer story by Carole Cadwalladr alerted me to a research project by Jonathan Albright, assistant professor of communications at Elon University in North Carolina, into the interconnectivity of Far-Right websites which he calls the "The #Election2016 Micro-Propaganda Machine" (https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gp86cg9ns).
Albright described this phenomenon as an "influence network that can tailor people’s opinions, emotional reactions, and create “viral” sharing (LOL/haha/RAGE) episodes around what should be serious or contemplative issues". Or more succinctly "data-driven 'psyops'" He crawled and indexed 117 sites known to be associated with the propagation of fake news, and produced a mind-boggling diagram of the outgoing links from them which create a vast alternative web that feeds back into the mainstream web via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and others (diagram at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook#img-4 if the whole article is TLDNR for you). The builders of this network appear to have a masterly grasp of SEO and tweaking site linkages, which to judge from my own experience is now way in excess of anything Democrats or Independents are able to muster.
The size and effectiveness of this network raises some important questions for the future of our industry (and indeed whole society). Back in Idealog 267 I commented on the fact that the big five IT companies, through their sheer size and reluctance to pay taxes, may soon find themselves at odds with the federal government of the USA. That possibility is now magnified many times with the Republicans in command of both houses and well aware of the Democratic leanings of most Silicon Valley moguls. How much are you prepared to bet on whether the big five will resist all attempts to curb their independence, or will *reluctantly* bend the knee? And what happens if this new government with deep connections to the Alt Right gets a hold of that mighty untruth network?
Politicians have of course been telling lies ever since the Trojan War, but persistent and systematic lying is a relatively recent phenomenon which you might date from Karl Rove's famous quote about the Iraq War: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality". In my own Naturalistic philosophy (read all about it at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CORF62O) the world is made of atoms but we can't see them directly, just information about them sampled by our various sense organs. This information isn't always "correct": we can mistake things, imagine things, hallucinate, dream, play computer games. The internet is a perfect conduit for such information, for pictures of pizzas rather than pizzas you can actually eat. My definition of a Truth is information that actually corresponds to the action of some clumps of atoms in the real world at a certain time and place, and Albright's Micro-Propaganda Machine, once in malign hands, poses a real threat to the dissemination of such Truths.
[Dick Pountain is finding it very hard to imagine the lunchtime conversation between Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg]
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