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FINAL lecture notes for the course Politics, Media and Communication. Good luck with the exam!
05/09/2023 Social media as “liberation technology” or “repression technology”?
Social Media and its political consequences is an area of study that is rapidly developing,
active research is prominent and ongoing - especially since the field is rapidly developing
Some research gaps (Barbera et al.)
1. Better estimates of the effects of exposure to information and disinformation online
2. Cross- and multi-platform research
3. Disinformation spread through images and video (deepfakes, now)
4. Generalizability and comparability of US findings
5. Role of ideological asymmetries in mediating the effect of exposure to disinformation
and polarization (are people on different parts of an ideological spectrum more or
less susceptible to polarization)
6. The effects of new laws and regulations intended to limit the spread of disinformation
(EU digital services act)
7. Better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different methods of bot
detection and analysis
8. The role of political elites in spreading disinformation (partially outdated due to the
trump debacle)
Data Limitations of the field
1. Data that could be collected in the future by scholars with traditional funding but that
has not yet been collected
2. Data that is prohibitively costly for individual scholars to collect, but that could be
provided by a well-funded central research institute/data repository
a. I.e. archive of disinformation and its reach
3. Data that is not currently available for open scientific analysis due to the fact that it is
the property of social media platforms and/or due to privacy concerns
a. It’s a property
b. Field experiments conducted with these firms
From “liberation technology” to “digital unfreedom”
Social media as Liberation Technology: cfr. orange revolution in Ukraine
“Liberation technology” is a term coined by Larry Diamond (director of the center on
democracy, development and rule of law at stanford. Successor on the role from Francis
Fukuyama)
“Any form of information and communication technology (ICT) that can expand political,
social, and economic freedom”
- Social media allows people to organize, overthrow dictatorships
- It lowers transaction costs (such as spreading information regarding a protest)
“expand political, social, and economic freedom” Is a very BROAD claim
Liberation Technology is any ICT that
- Increases citizen engagement
- Makes it easier for politicians to learn citizen preferences
- Makes it easier for people in autocracies to learn about repression (ideally)
- This idea precedes the creation of large and sophisticated propaganda and
censorship regimes in autocratic regimes of today
,Liberation technology is technology that makes it easier for people to:
1. Engage in collective action
2. Increase accountability
The Collective Action Problem:
(Olson, Mancur, 1965. “The logic of collective action”)
Even if it is in the self-interest of a group to engage in an action for the betterment of the
group, it is not necessarily true that the group will engage in this action
- Rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common group
interest unless there is coercion or a separate individual incentive to do so
- Small groups are more likely to engage in collective action than large groups
However!
This contradicts real-world observations
1. People vote and protest
2. People share and protect natural resources
3. But people also definitely free ride and/or don’t act collectively when they should
Ostrom, Eilnor (Political scientist, nobel prize for economics): “A substantial number of
collective action situations are resolved successfully, at least in part” because there is a
“propensity to cooperate based on the development and growth of social norms”.
+ Modern findings: cost of abstention vs cost of participation
Collective Action Problem and Social Media
“[Since its inception] Liberation technology has been instrumental in virtually all of the
instances where people have turned out en masse for democracy or political reform”
(Diamond 2016)
But does the use of a tool make it necessary? Revolutions and protests existed before social
media
- This counterfactual (would a revolution or protest have occurred in the absence of
social media) is a much different question to answer
- Starting to deal with causualities hard to prove
Accountability
Central tenet of democracy
1. John Locke’s theory of the superiority of representational democracy is built on the
notion of accountability
2. When decision-making power is transferred from a principal (the citizens) to an agent
(i.e. government) accountability is the mechanism through which the principle can
hold the agent to account for their decision and potentially remove the agent from
power
How is this done in practice in a democracy? Elections, for example
In autocracy? Far less clear, they vary a lot among the categories.
ICT increases access to information, so it must increase accountability!
Large study on accountability (Dunning et al.2019)
“We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape
voter behavior”
, - Information did nothing to improve accountability
- Of course the study is far from a perfect design due to the choice of non-partisan
material due to ethical issues
Digital Unfreedom
Robert Diebert (University of Toronto)
“Once it was conventional wisdom to assume that these platforms would enable greater
access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society. now, they
are increasingly seen as contributing to society’s ills” (same journal as Diamond, L., a
handful of years later)
He outlines 3 painful truths:
1. The social media BUSINESS MODEL is based on deep and relentless surveillance
of consumers’ personal data in order to target advertisements
2. We permit this staggering level of surveillance willingly, if not altogether wittingly
3. Social media are far from incompatible with authoritarianism, and are proving to
be among its most effective enablers
Summary:
- Concern for topics like filler bubbles, echo chambers, trolls, bots, algorithms, etc
- Psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, selective exposure,
negative bias, and framing
- How do these psychological mechanisms interact with business models and
profit motive
- Likes button as dopamine hit (Zuckerberg): the company acknowledges the
physical effect of their business model as an addiction system
07/09/2023 Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers
Ted talk: Parison
● “Algorithmic editing”: changes what kind of information you are exposed to without
your knowledge
○ He talks about search engines and personalization of news
○ “Your own personal unique universe that you live in online” specifically in the
context of news and media
● “The Daily Me”, filtering of the news to what is pertinent to the individual: today we
see this concept as terrifying, but it originated as a positive.
● Origin of the notion of filter bubble
● “You don’t see what gets edited out”
● Human gatekeepers (editors) to algorithmic gatekeepers now
○ The goals of an editor are different to those from an algorithm
○ Subscription (trust, competitors) vs click-based business model (not as much
need to foster loyalty)
■ Divisive content is the most likely to go viral and be shared upon (The
goal is not to foster trust, but to create divisive content to maximize
clicks)
, Polarization needs to be accounted for other factors other than JUST social media. Causal
relationships here are complex to disentangle.
Talk: Cass Sunstein
“Freedom of voice can produce self-sorting”
● Freedom of choice is coming from all the different media that you can consume
Partisan messages have become more common in the past quarter century
● Not only the effect of the internet, but also the rise of cable news networks in the
1990s (CNN, FoxNews…) and other possible mechanisms and factors (i.e. traditional
news media) at play that widen this “choice”
Talk: Barack Obama on Filter Bubbles
“We start accepting only information - whether it’s true or not - that fits our opinions, instead
of basing our opinions on the evidence”
Psychological underpinnings: Asch Experiment
Two lines and a room of plants vs. 1 subject and a group of actors
Conforming to group opinion and assuming personal mistakes to not go against the group.
Conforming to the echo chamber even long before social media.
In the frame of social media: If everyone subscribes to one opinion, you are more likely to
NOT jump in with an opposing opinion. We tend to go along with the socially acceptable
answer.
Sunstein’s Colorado Experiment
Survey Split Discuss Survey
Record political Split into 1 Discuss politics for Retake survey
opinions conservative and 1 15 minutes within Average anonymous
anonymously in a liberal group their like-minded opinions within each
survey group group strengthened
considerably after
the discussions
Mechanisms:
● Humility diminishes as others agree → Fewer moderates
● Exposed to more arguments in favor → Seems more convincing
● Reputational concerns → Don’t want to betray the group, even anonymously
(Partisan cheerleading: even giving wrong answers to support the group that they
belong to, ingroup and outgroup dynamics are some of the strongest)
Concerns?
- Small N
- How were individuals selected? Random assignment? Not representative of
worldwide conditions, as it was two small cities in america
- Issue of replication crisis, but it has been replicated
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