Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.
To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,
[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .
Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."
Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120
This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!
That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:
- Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
- Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
- Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
- Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.
The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!
Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.
Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.
The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison
(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)