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- ANDRÉ KROUWEL -
SUMMARY OF ARTICLES&LECTURES
New Media Challenges ‘22
FOCUS: Political ‘News’: Lies, conspiracies, extremism and polarisation
MAIN SUBJECTS:
● Connecting the dots: The Real Data Revolution
● What government and companies do with data
● how is data transformed into commercially and politically relevant information
● Who is monitoring and who monitors the monitors?
● Political Campaigning with old and new media:
● Has the internet changed political campaigning?
● Do new media cause populism?
● How has political news transformed by new media technologies?
● The Internet as the Domain of Extremism and Lies:
● New media, information bubbles and polarization
● Conspiracy theories, emotions and politics
● E-technology, political participation and democracy:
● Are new media technologies good or bad for democracy?
● Were old media good for democracy?
● Have we become better citizens or have we disconnected from the real world?
WEEK 3 - LECTURES 6,7,8 2
LECTURE 6: Connecting the dots: The real data revolution of turning big data into knowledge
(André Krouwel)
Can Democracy Survive the Internet Journal of Democracy - Persily, N. (2017)
Brexit Means Brexit - Risso, L. (2018) 2
LECTURE 13: New media and political campaigning (André Krouwel)
Psychological Approaches to Credibility Assessment Online. The Handbook of the Psychology of
Communication Technology - Metzger, M. J., & Flanagin, A. J. (2015).
Credibility and trust of information in online environments The use of cognitive heuristics. Journal
of Pragmatics - Metzger, M. J., & Flanagin, A. J. (2013). 12
WEEK 6 - LECTURES 14,15 20
LECTURE 15: The internet as the domain of extremism and lies: Junk news, political extremism
and polarisation (André Krouwel)
Polarization, partisanship and junk news consumption over social media in the us - Narayanan,
V., Barash, V., Kelly, J., Kollanyi, B., Neudert, L. M., & Howard, P. N. (2018).
Political extremism predicts belief in conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality
Science - Van Prooijen, J. W., Krouwel, A. P., & Pollet, T. V. (2015).
Populist Gullibility_ Conspiracy Theories, News Credibility, Bullshit Receptivity, and Paranormal
Belief 20
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WEEK 3 - LECTURES 6,7,8
LECTURE 6: Connecting the dots: The real data revolution of turning big data into knowledge
(André Krouwel)
Can Democracy Survive the Internet Journal of Democracy - Persily, N. (2017)
Brexit Means Brexit - Risso, L. (2018)
This lecture:
-The real data revolution
-Tracing, tracking, and identification technology
-Psychographic profiling
-Computational propaganda and micro-targeting
-Bots, trolls, and bot-nets
-Effect on democracy and freedom
The internet is more of an enemy of democracy than a friend.
The political world has completely turned around with the Digital Revolution and it has changed the
way people run political campaigns.
Fake news, social media bots (automated accounts across all types of platforms), and propaganda
from inside and outside the United States - alongside revolutionary uses of new media by the winning
campaign - combined to upset established paradigms of how to run for president.
The 2016 campaign of Donald Trump broke down all established distinctions of (US) political
campaigns:
- Insiders vs outsiders (outsiders can easily win, people with no-to-little experience)
- Earned media and advertising (free publicity, through social media for example)
- Media and non-Media (what information is used
- Legacy media and new media (legacy media is basically the traditional media, meaning television
and newspapers, versus new media meaning social media. People tend to get their information from
the legacy media and the interaction and reaction to that plays out on new media)
- News and entertainment
- Foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication (campaigns used to be very national,
foreigners had a hard time communicating or influencing people, but nowadays people from the
outside such as Russians can in fact influence a local campaign)
Persily (2017) suggests a power-shift: established mainstream media and political institutions already
lost most of their power. The ‘void’ was filled by unmediated populist nationalism tailor-made for the
internet age.
How the internet changed the political world
Data is being collected all day long and varies in; photos, videos, our preferences, etc. The speed at
which it is being transformed and sent around has gone up. Today, the most valuable resource is said
to be our data. It has become the most valuable economic resource. However, data without insights is
worse than useless → we can’t do anything with it without theory: it needs structure and context in
order to give it meaning.
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In order to use data, we need to link the
data to knowledge. It’s only useful when
we process and understand it.
There are several steps to be taken in
order to go from collecting data to the
actual understanding of data. After
collecting data, you need to process it:
organize, contextualize and give it
meaning. Only then are we able to come to
an understanding of data.
Data revolution is the collection of data points that you can link back to a person. Linking data to
knowledge. People are the data (als het gratis is, ben jij het product). Data collection and profiling is
not new, it has been done way before the digital revolution in order to sell more products. But we have
reached a new level of the collection of our data:
Mass proliferation of data on consumer demographics, psychographics, behavior, and attitudes -
including health and location data. They collect your every move, everything you say, everything you
do, etc. The collection happens through smartphones and the growth of internet-enabled devices,
these are tracking you at all times.
Advanced data analysis techniques enable (political) marketing to transform ‘area’ or ‘platform-based’
campaigns to campaigns that target individual users across multiple devices and locations. It
becomes more targeted towards a single person, not just a general group.
Linking data to knowledge is the real data revolution: finding a way to actually use the data. The real
data revolution is not that you can share your data and get likes for it, but the fact that someone else
on the other side sees your data, collects it, organizes it and then shares it for some purpose.
Tracing, tracking and identification technologies
Tracking: individual targeting across platforms.
Data can be used to target advertising, this data includes location, IP, browsing data, and information
collected from devices and wearables (Apple watches).
Thanks to mobility data, you can reconstruct an individual's approximate location and movement
through space and time. This is because your mobile phone connects to a mast of technical
companies wherever you go. This is seen as super high-quality data. This data makes you highly
unique as it creates your own pattern. Location data is necessary to provide services (such as google
maps in a foreign city), but it can also be used to solve crimes as it can prove you were somewhere at
a certain time.
Mobility traces are highly unique to every person. Your phone creates this. This also accounts for the
apps you may have on your phone, such as Tinder or Grindr (which might indicate that you are gay or
straight, the apps you have say something about your personality).
Facial recognition technology
The use of facial recognition technology can reveal a multitude of (psychological) factors about
someone. Every person has a very unique profile. By analyzing someone’s photos on Instagram you
can see where someone lives, what their social status is, what they own etc. It can be very
