Network propaganda
When you think back to the US Presidential election in 2016 do you remember the story that Donald Trump was accused of having raped a 13-year old girl? Me either. Do you remember the story that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizzeria in Washington DC? If you are like me, you probably do.
Both stories were baseless conspiracy theories that were launched in the extreme corners of the internet in spring 2016, yet, the Trump Jane Doe story quickly disappeared while the Clinton paedophilia story made it into the conservative mainstream media and got picked up by Sean Hannity and other anchors on Fox News. Our chart shows how often these two stories were shared by the ten biggest media organisations across the political spectrum, from the left to the right. As you can see, the Clinton paedophilia story was much more prominent on the right than the Trump Jane Doe story on the left. You might even remember that one person took these accusations against Hillary Clinton so seriously that he went to the pizzeria in Washington DC armed with a gun in order to bust the criminal organisation.
How is it possible that Trump and his supporters can lie about obvious things or come up with crazy conspiracy theories seemingly without suffering any consequences? Why are fact-checkers who call out these lies completely ineffective in reducing the support of Trump’s fan base for the President? How was it possible that someone who peddles conspiracy theories made it into the White House in the first place?
If you want to get an answer to these questions, I highly recommend the new book “Network Propaganda” by Harvard researchers Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Using network analysis tools and showing their results in beautiful and informative graphics, the researchers analyse the connections between different media outlets and information sources on the internet, on Facebook and on Twitter. They are able to demonstrate how the conservative media ecosystem has largely decoupled itself from the centrist and left-wing media. As a result, conservative media outlets have fewer checks on the accuracy of the stories they run and are more prone to promote baseless stories. In fact, the conservative media outlets start to value consistency with pre-existing beliefs more than factual accuracy.
This in turn means that consumers of conservative media outlets have to choose whether to believe the right-wing media or the centrist media outlets that value factual accuracy. Conservative media consumers then face cognitive dissonance and typically resolve this dissonance by discounting the fact-based reporting that does not confirm with their pre-existing beliefs. This is a normal human tendency and the question that the authors also ask is, why is there no equivalent media bubble on the left of the political spectrum? I leave it up to the authors to give you an answer:
“The outlets that formed the partisan ecosystem have a first-mover advantage over outlets that try to copy them on the opposite site, because as they decrease the value of the mainstream media to their own audiences, they increase it for the putative audiences of their opponents. The further the first mover-moving partisan media ecosystem goes down the path of its own propaganda feedback loop, the greater its tendency to produce untrue statements, and the greater the opportunities for reality-check centrist media organisations to deliver news that is both truthful and pleasing to partisans from the other side. Creating a partisan ecosystem then becomes more difficult.”
Coverage of conspiracy theories on the most-linked websites across the political spectrum
Source: Benkler et al. (2018), Fidante Capital.