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Heard this interview on NPR today, while on my way to the weekend reset ritual, of finding that next hiking-photography adventure.
Thought it might be worth sharing. Made me wonder why only the #SoreLosers and #GOPLiars seem to be main manipulators/influencers of social media, to motivate folks to get #MadAsHell and #SiezeTheDay … ?
Here are some of the highlights of that interview:
NPR Weekend Edition Sunday — December 13, 2020 — 8:00 AM ET
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This past week, President Trump tweeted a single hashtag - #OVERTURN. It's part of a pattern of amplifying hashtags already out there or creating new ones. For the uninitiated, it may seem meaningless or random, but our next guest argues it is part of a calculated campaign of disinformation and propaganda.
Emily Dreyfuss works with the Harvard Shorenstein Center's Media Manipulation Casebook, and she joins us now from San Francisco to talk about how it works. Welcome to the program.
[...]
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just after the election, you wrote an op-ed for The New York Times with the title "Trump's Tweeting Isn't Crazy: It's Strategic, Typos And All." So let's first talk about how something like the #OVERTURN hashtag sort of metastasizes on social media when someone with such an enormous following like Trump uses it.
DREYFUSS: So hashtags like #OVERTURN or #StopTheSteal or, in the case of my New York Times op-ed, #BidenCrimeFamily, they work as a viral slogan is what we call them. And it is a way to distill a very complicated agenda down into one soundbite. And then it allows people who are interested in furthering that agenda to amplify it much further.
[...]
Dreyfuss goes on to explain how Trump’s Hashtag typos are really just a “clever way” to beat Twitter’s “de-indexing” algorithm. A low tech way to by-pass the filters and still get his disingenuous “soundbites” out there — into the social media ‘bloodstream’ so to speak.
Despite what the ‘Twitter experts’ may say — “disputing the claims” …
Speaking of experts, here are some more specifics on how “viral sloganeering” works — whether the intent of the “amplifiers” be for good, or for chaos …
Harvard Shorenstein Center's Media Manipulation Casebook
The Life Cycle Method for Understanding Media Manipulation and Disinformation
The media manipulation life cycle (MMLC) forms the basis of the Casebook, giving a common framework for journalists, researchers, technologists, and members of civil society to understand the origins and impacts of disinformation and its relation to the wider information ecosystem.1 [...]
Stage 1: Manipulation campaign planning and origins
The first stage documents the origins or planning stage of a campaign and is generally limited to conversations by a small group of operators or campaign participants, who develop narratives, images, videos, or other material to be spread online as “evidence.” In effect, it details the intended strategies, tactics, and goals of the campaign.
Stage 2: Seeding the campaign across social platforms and web
Stage 2 documents the tactics and relevant materials used to execute the campaign. In other words, this stage details the dissemination and propagation of content relevant to the operation.
Stage 3: Responses by industry, activists, politicians, and journalists
After content has been seeded, the campaign moves on to Stage 3, which documents how actors and organizations outside the campaign (ex. civil society organizations, politicians, political parties, mainstream media outlets) react. The third stage of the operation is usually a turning point indicating whether the campaign was effective in gaining attention via amplification or if it led to another observable outcome.
Stage 4: Mitigation
The fourth stage of a manipulation campaign documents actions by tech companies, government, journalists, or civil society to mitigate the spread of a campaign’s content, messaging, and effects.
Stage 5: Adjustments by manipulators to new environment
The fifth stage of a manipulation campaign involves how the operators and campaign participants adapt according to mitigation efforts described in Stage 4 and the resulting changes in the information ecosystem.
They have this handy graphic to illustrate the “infectious” feedback loop:
It would seem that viral slogans amplifying good things could be used to “inoculate,” the harm caused by the reckless spreading of the disinformation-type slogans …
Could it not?
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Well here’s one such effort: #BuildBackBetter
It’s a start.
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Here’s few more snapshots from today’s adventure … Enjoy.
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