It's Not Misinformation. It's Amplified Propaganda.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/KT671

*snip*

In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda. That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification. It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society.

Buttar’s #PelosiMustGo was both typical and unusual. Hashtag campaigns occur all the time, but I happened to catch this one right at the start. First, it was a blip in a corner of the internet, but the hashtag soon lit up the modern propaganda system. This amplification chain is incredibly powerful; it surfaces civil-rights violations, protest movements, and breaking events, whether traditional media choose to cover those events or not. But it’s also how quack medical claims and a daily parade of conspiracy theories are made to trend—#Ivermectin, #SaveTheChildren, #StopTheSteal.

Buttar had two key prerequisites for creating a viral moment: an Extremely Online supporter base experienced in Twitter conflict, and a hashtag slogan expressing righteous indignation. At 11:57 a.m., a Twitter user who went by @Pondipper and had a modest 1,700 followers, jumped the gun: #PelosiMustGo. Tweet No. 1. Buttar himself posted promptly at noon: “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?” he asked his 113,000 followers. The tweet inspired several hundred replies and retweets, some encouraging him, others questioning him, others mocking him. But anyone who engaged with Buttar’s post—whether to applaud it or scorn it—was telling Twitter algorithms to elevate it. My coffee cooled as the hashtag moved up Twitter’s rankings and began elbowing aside trends about AR-15s, golf, Donald Trump’s pardons, and then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

In the previous few years, taking advantage of features like trending lists had become more challenging as social-media companies had gotten wise to the manipulation. By 2018, Twitter had already begun to discount postings from bot and sock-puppet accounts when determining which subjects were becoming popular. Facebook had kicked an infamous Russian troll factory off the platform, and then established integrity teams to look for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—that is, suspicious activity by networks of accounts that, in many cases, consisted of fake personas. For tech platforms, cracking down on fake accounts, bot networks, and institutional trolls was easy to justify; the general public didn’t much care about the free-speech rights of fake people. But the rewards for successfully capturing public attention were still huge enough to keep authentic actors looking for creative ways to propel their message to the top of Twitter’s popularity charts. More and more, I noticed, ordinary people had been stepping up to spread messages that, in the past, might have been amplified by bots.

*snip*

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Of course, we do this, too. We're just not as successful at it.