Propaganda in the Information Age and Fraudulent Discourse
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2046147X19870844
For more than a century, if not longer, propaganda and the ability to quickly gather the masses of a sovereign state under one unified mindset have been center-stage in the theater of war and international conflict. Governments rely on the support of their people as the backbone of their diplomatic requests and demands, and without their backbone being in full support of what the government and the nation represent, a state should not expect to last very long. Civil war and chronic rebellion plague government bodies that fail to unify the people of the state. Before the internet, wartime posters among other analog forms of political advertisement were regularly used to prepare the average citizen for war, and the struggles that would inevitably entail. These items, often now regarded as relics of antiquity, are the object of great historical analysis and discourse. Today, the masses are being made to think one way or another largely through the web.
The article above cites the dependence on large amounts of resources that pre-Internet propaganda campaigns had, which has now opened doors for smaller and more niche groups to spread their own propaganda. Further, the article elaborates on how a relatively new form of propaganda, fake discourse, has been allegedly used for various campaigns, citing Brexit as well as recruitment for extremist groups. But is this new medium of propaganda any more effective, even theoretically, from a Networks intuition?
I begin to think of the rich-get-richer process that we have recently learned, and the factors affecting the spread and longevity of epidemics that we have studied. First of all, consider a common person during the World War II era who has just come across a poster in a street of their city. Are they any more or less likely to pay significant mind to such material over today’s primary mode of propaganda on the Internet? At least when considering the bot-produced fake discourse that can be found on Facebook, Twitter, etc., I believe the old-school poster propaganda to be inferior. Not only was the poster propaganda from an anonymous source, without a face with which to sympathize, but today’s fake discourse is much more relatable for the masses because that is exactly how it is created. These bots are programmed to simulate the rhetoric of the common person to earn their trust before gradually pushing the boundaries upon which the audience will be influenced. Imaging these contrasts amidst the rich-get-richer process, we can see that the fake discourse through bots drastically increases the number of nodes that link to the node of whatever ideological body that the purveyor of the fake discourse is subscribed to. Without regard to any changes in p, the probability that a new node links to the incident node, we can see that the casual social media scroller gains much more exposure to the propagated ideology.
Now, speaking of the epidemiology of the new propaganda, what does this casual scroller do, once they have been wooed by the Facebook bots that set out to brainwash them? They send it to their friends! They get emotional, they want to spread the word, show the people that the views that they have withheld from public view so long (that in reality, had not been withheld by them, but rather planted in their minds a couple minutes ago from what they had just read) are actually quite relatable and held by many. Even if the audience chooses not to share the fake discourse themselves, they begin to feel more confident in sharing more radical views and start to do so when they find new posts on similar topics. At this point, they themselves have now planted more radical views in the minds of those who are connected to them on the web, and the cycle perpetuates. Like a disease, social media users are vulnerable to the sickness of propaganda; with exposure almost limitless through the medium of the internet. Even still, the probability that a user spreads fake discourse and fake information across the web can be manipulated to be higher as well, just as the bots are made to simulate discourse that is relatable to the average user of the masses.
When I go on Facebook, which I must admit that is very rarely anymore, and I see political posts with tens of thousands of comments, I don’t click to see what’s going on. I close my phone and go outside, and save the political discourse for when I’m face-to-face.