Joseph Bernstein writes in Harper's that the average middle-class news consumer in the '50s and '60s was blissfully unaware of what some of his fellow Americans were hearing and reading:
Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. In magazines and books he didn’t read, elites fretted at great length about the dislocating effects of television. And for people who didn’t look like him, the media had hardly anything to say at all.
....Today, we are lapsed. We understand the media through a metaphor—“the information ecosystem”—which suggests to the American subject that she occupies a hopelessly denatured habitat. Every time she logs on to Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, she encounters the toxic byproducts of modernity as fast as her fingers can scroll. Here is hate speech, foreign interference, and trolling; there are lies about the sizes of inauguration crowds, the origins of pandemics, and the outcomes of elections.
Extremist nutballs have been with us for a very long time. At first they communicated via mimeographed newsletters and low-power AM radio stations. Later they turned to database-driven direct mail and email chains. Today they use Facebook.
As Bernstein suggests, the big difference here is not that we have more nutballs today than in the past—though we might. The difference is that they mostly flew under the radar until a few years ago. Then they made the move to social media where everyone could see them. In particular, everyone in the mainstream media could see them. And they were shocked. Since they had barely ever encountered this stuff before, they had always figured it was just a tiny fringe. But now it was everywhere. Surely that meant social media had caused a huge increase in extremist nutballism.
But probably not. More likely, it simply exposed us all to reality. These folks had always been around, accusing Ike of being a communist and Bill Clinton of running drugs out of Mena airport. That stuff had an audience of millions but rarely surfaced beyond short blurbs or occasional feature pieces in national dailies. Today it's on the surface to begin with and the mainstream media is entranced with it. They are literally unable to ignore social media storms in a teacup, so today everyone knows all about these folks.
It's possible that social media has made this problem worse. As Bernstein says later in his piece, there's just not a lot of good research here. However, the research we have tentatively suggests that crackpots on social media mostly talk to each other, rather than pulling in new recruits.
Interestingly, Bernstein makes another argument that I haven't seen before. He suggests that one reason we think social media is so powerful is because social media companies encourage us to think so. Facebook spends a huge amount of time and money trying to convince people that it has a secret sauce that makes its advertising far more effective than anywhere else. That argument is a lot easier to make if the entire country is yelping about how powerful Facebook is. So while it might seem like Facebook is trying to appease Congress by cracking down on the nutballs, in reality they love the attention they're getting for supposedly being so powerful that they have to be reined in.
The issue of social media's power and influence is still an open question. There's some evidence to suggest its power has been overblown, but it's pretty tentative. It will probably be several years before we really have a good idea of how influential it is.
A hundred years ago it was the glossy magazines vs the pulps.
Sophisticated readers claimed to have no idea who would read such things.
I find it implausible that 1/6 would have occurred had not social media networks allowed the amplification and coordination of 1/6. That is not to suggest that the MSM doesn't have its own responsibility in the matter of amplification of the fringe, but the "information ecosystem" exists, and this echo chamber has Fox News residing in it comfortably with Facebook Groups.
The addition of Fox and others to amplify the crazy is the real difference. From there it bleeds into the MSM after a bit of cleanup. "Some say space aliens created the Pyramids."
Giorgi Tsoukalos did nothing wrong!
A minor influence of social media is recruiting.
A major influence is confirmation bias.
I second the point about confirmation bias. I cannot second it enough.
Since there is a study on everything, I wonder aloud whether there is a study on the following.
1. Until the dawn of the printing press, in depth knowledge of any subject was extremely limited. To the extent the average person had in-depth knowledge of anything, it was through their own years of personal experience. The key point being that it was "experience" not (with the exception of organized religion, which I grant you is a huge exception) access to published material.
2. From the printing press to the dawn of the internet, in depth knowledge became much much easier to come by. However, you still needed to seek out that knowledge - that is what Kevin is referring to when he talked about nutty published conspiracies of the past. Actual propaganda, such as what we saw in WWI and WWII, and say, the "red scare" of the 1950s, required the mainstream media of the time to buy in. If something did not make it to the mainstream press or the three television networks, it remained difficult to access, and the average person did not access it.
3. Now, its a whole new ballgame. And not because of social media. To learn about anything in depth, from how to fix a door hinge to the price of moving to Malta to get an EU passport to the details of Brexit to the tech people are working on to rid the oceans of plastic to how the Dutch reclaimed land from the sea to how the California "Salton Sea" was created to why SoCal retired its public transport trolly system only to have to build another to whether Canadians are still in conflict over Quebec -- I mean, the list is now endless and that's just off the top of my head.
Because actual in depth knowledge is so readily available, its a dream situation for propaganda to flourish. An absolute dream. Propaganda, when its well done, is not based on falsehood, its taking a small grain of truth and spinning the intepretation of that truth.
Example. Yes, if you just have mail in ballots, in theory, it would be easier to falsify a particular ballot than requiring a live person to vote in person. That's not false. So now you spin that into "rampant fraud."
Its not social media, its that figuring out which sources are actually AUTHORITATIVE and which are merely spinning is harder than any time in human history. Compare the stages above.
Example, instead of having to apprentice as a carpenter (Stage 1), or going to a library and hoping they have some good books on carpentry (Stage 2) you can find some guy on youtube in seconds who will say "this is how you fix X." (Stage 3 now)
Fortunately, there are not a bunch of people out there who are interested in putting up fake carpentry videos, but there are such people in other areas.
Sigh.
Well said!
"Fake carpentry videos"
Now you've done it. They'll be everywhere.
This. In spades.
I agree that confirmation bias is critical, but I wonder if recruitment is not more important than "minor."
Drum says: "The difference is that they mostly flew under the radar until a few years ago."
The or a difference is that today far more people can be reached far more quickly.
I have two points to make:
1) Anti-Bill-Clinton conspiracies were thoroughly mainstream in the 90s. It wasn't some weirdos with access to a kinkos keeping that going. The mainstream media, congress, and of course the Starr investigation was all in on this insanity.
2) I have almost never been influenced by a Facebook ad, and when I have been it's generally something random and fringy like maybe a small company somewhere that makes masks or something.
"...it's generally something random and fringy like maybe a small company somewhere that makes masks or something."
Which is exactly one of the kinds of things in which fraud is likely to be rampant. Fortunately, I've never been influenced by anything on Facebook (except that Zuckerberg is a monumental creep), because I've never been on Facebook.
It's always struck me that the appeal of Facebook is not that it allows people to stay in touch -- that's been easy my entire, none-too-short, life. It's that it allows people to be lazy and stay in contact or get information, which, because people are lazy, is often nonsense, but they never make the effort to check it, because, yeah, they're lazy and...see confirmation bias.
Facebook could, I suppose, be a wonderful tool, but in the hands of "typical" Americans it's probably significantly negative, even dangerous.
Also, there was cocaine being run out of Mena, but it was Reagan's CIA doing it.
Always projection with the GQP.
"...crackpots on social media mostly talk to each other, rather than pulling in new recruits....we have no idea how influential it is..."
This misses the point. The point is scale and connectivity, which social networking offers in abundance in ways not previously imaginable or available. A Xerox machine or a mailing list only reach so many people. Even email has limitations.
But social networking can connect wing-nuts to millions of like-minded people across the borders effectively "friction-free," without cost, effort, or lag-time.
I hate social media and am not on them, but I see my daughter sometimes come with strange conceptions. And she's Extinction Rebellion, pro-LGBT, BLM and so on. You'd expect her to be in a leftwing echo chamber. Which she mostly is. Yet one day she said QAnon was bad but at least they fought against pedophilia. Just an example.
That's what's changed. Conspiracy theories and nut cases have always been here, but they permeate much more than they used to. We sensible people who don't spend our lives on our smartphones don't often see how far it goes.
Seems obvious to me that it mainstreams a lot of crazy that people otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. Of course, this stuff was always out there, but harder to encounter if you weren't looking. Even just hard-right non-crazy stuff has become more mainstreamed, you don't have to sign up for the John Birch Society anymore (and know how to do it), or get long chain emails, it's all much easier now to encounter, often accidentally just perusing your timeline or whatever.
And this mainstreaming phenomenon does underscore that nativist and even crazy rhetoric can be subtly (or not) persuasive, we haven't really focused our education on critical thinking and rhetoric, and there are lots of triggers propagandists can hit both emotional and rational (fallacial and faulty premises). So it's an interesting moment in our history, one that a guy like Donald Trump can win the presidency, hoodwink conservatives and evangelicals, and gaslight the country.
' Surely that meant social media had caused a huge increase in extremist nutballism.'
Do you seriously believe, Kevin, that social media is not a "force multiplier" for disinformation? The fact that I even KNOW about the dumbest conspiracy "theories" (there's a misnomer) speaks to its reach and impact.
Do you honestly think, the social media has had nothing to do with the radicalization of not only ordinary Americans, but of the GOP itself?
The FBI literally tracks social media to learn who is radicalizing whom, and who is plotting violence.
It allows the crazies to network and create effects larger than the sum of their parts. If you think improving organization is not a danger then you are more blinded than I think you are.
And they definitely are recruiting among young people.
They aren't nutballs either. But paid shills. Dialectics for control. It's part why "Qnan" failed. It never criticised the Republican party. Just a flat mistake. Yet Republicans were committing. Crime after crime Qnan whined usually by Democratic officials and party members.being committed by Republicans ignored. Thus the hoax is exposed.
The John Birch Society had the same problem which doomed them eventually. It was clear to the "leftist side" of the group what was going on by the 60's, they weren't anti-Leninist as much as anti-worker, trying to destroy the New Deal. This exposed its ties to Wall Street the Rockefellers and thus the Oliverian split happened. It took longer because it was easier to hide face back then.
Wingnut congressman challenges random guy on the internet to a fight, guy accepts,
https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/p6mnew/tifu_by_angering_a_sitting_us_congressman_on/
Actually, Facebook's ads are very effective.
FB gathers so much data on its own and ingests/aggregates so much from other sources, that it enables highly targeted ads that are not very expensive