A tactical shift in social media propaganda?

Zuckerberg -- Liar or truth teller?

Misleading propaganda from politics-related sites are among some of the most popular sources of online interaction with people. Misleading propaganda is up a notch in sophistication compared to simple lying. Instead of merely asserting blatant lies, misleading content is more subtle. One can call this lies of omission because the intent is to deceive as is the case with simple lying. Misleading content is harder to fact check and harder to expose as intentional propaganda because of differences in how different people perceive information and think about it. 

One interesting trend is that people are less engaged with sites that sites that repeatedly post outright lies and blatantly false information. That data indicates that some of the public has become aware of the amount of lying that drives a lot of politics-related news content and consciously wants to avoid it. The Washington Post writes:

More than 1 in 5 interactions — such as shares, likes or comments — with U.S. sites from April to June happened on “outlets that gather and present information irresponsibly,” according to a report by the German Marshall Fund.

This includes outlets such as the Daily Wire, TMZ, the Epoch Times and Breitbart[1] that researchers say “distort or misrepresent information to make an argument or report on a subject,” a metric determined by NewsGuard, a website cited in the study that rates the credibility of news sources. Researchers say these sources, which they argue spread subtler but still harmful forms of misinformation, are decidedly different from sites that publish overtly false news.

“These are the kinds of sites that will cherry pick anecdotes and are giving rise to vaccine hesitancy and other kinds of conspiracy theories,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, a public policy think tank.

Researchers highlighted articles that they say “disproportionately amplify vaccine-hesitant voices over experts” and “fail to mention risks of not being vaccinated against covid-19,” such as a June story on football, titled, “NFL Wide Receiver Refuses Vaccine, Wants To ‘Represent’ Other Silent Players.”

While platforms have cracked down on black-and-white cases of fiction masquerading as fact, they are still grappling with how to handle murky yet wide-reaching cases that stop short of falsehood. [lies are usually a lot easier to fact check and debunk than flawed motivated reasoning (crackpottery)]

“What we really see is that the information environment has changed dramatically,” said Kornbluh, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development under the Obama administration.

The ratio of misleading content marks a five-year high for Facebook, where “false content producers” have received a higher share of engagement in the past, according to the findings. At the same time, engagement with U.S. sites that repeatedly share outright false information — going a step beyond merely misrepresenting information — has plummeted across Facebook and Twitter. 

On Twitter, 9 percent of shares by verified accounts to U.S. sites went to misleading sites, while 3 percent went to sites that publish false content, marking a three-year low for both categories.

WaPo goes on to comment that cracking down on false content producers is low hanging fruit. It will be harder for social media to figure out how to deal with an information ecosystem increasingly shades of gray as the sophistication of propaganda increases. Obviously, sites like Daily Wire and Breitbart that rely on divisive, deceptive propaganda will continue to refine their dark art, so those sources of social poison are not going to go away unless people finally realize they are being manipulated and betrayed. It may be the case that outright lies will have to play a smaller role in deceiving and polarizing people into irrational states of mind. 

The open question is whether the more subtle propaganda will be as effective as the blunt stuff that pushed us to the poisoned society we have today. Some evidence hints that subtle deceit may be somewhat less effective than a blunderbuss packed with lies. WaPo commented that engagement decreased among U.S. sites in the second quarter, dropped significantly faster for misleading sites compared to reliable sites with a high trustworthiness rating. That is quite encouraging. Maybe society’s defenses against the dark arts are slowly increasing.

If only social media companies could be trusted. WaPo reports that some evidence indicates that Facebook is lying about some of this the data to limit damage to its reputation. Content with lies has been a money-maker for social media companies, so there is an economic incentive for them to keep the lies coming. This reporting therefore has to be taken with some caution. 

Footnote: 

1. From what I can tell, most hard core radical right politics sites block commenters like myself who post content that contradicts false fact assertions or clearly flawed reasoning. It is often fairly easy to find and cite evidence that rebuts false fact assertions. It usually takes significantly more time and effort to rebut flawed reasoning, i.e., intentionally misleading motivated reasoning. In retaliation for posting truth and sound reasoning, I’ve been blocked and cannot comment at multiple big fascist right sites including Daily Wire and Breitbart. Before I was blocked, my comments that contradicted lies tended to generate the most responses and the most emotional responses by people who disliked hearing that they were being lied to. 

Early on (before ~March 2016), fascist right sites allowed links to be in comments. I used links to cite to evidence that rebutted lies and crackpot reasoning. But over time, sites used links to hold inconvenient comments in moderation, allegedly to look for spam, but most often for no reason. Inconvenient comments with links in them were destined to never be seen. That made it a little harder to rebut lies, but significantly harder to rebut crackpot reasoning. 

But even that level of free speech censoring wasn’t enough. In time, radical right sites decided they needed to flat out block people like me from making any comments. No reason was ever given. Based on what WaPo is reporting here, it may be the case that, despite what appeared to be no impact from people posting truth and sound reasoning, maybe there was some impact. Maybe some people who trusted those sites gained some awareness that they were possibly being lied to or crackpotted on (misled). That would be consistent with sites like Daily Wire and Breitbart shifting somewhat from heavy reliance on flat out lies to more reliance on misleading motivated reasoning as WaPo is reporting now.

Maybe, just maybe, people like me who commented in opposition to wanton dark free speech at least for a while were not acting completely in vain. Of course, maybe we didn't have anything to do with this mindset shift, assuming it is real.