A feature in today's NY Times Magazine about Facebook as a
spawning ground for a certain kind of politics, is fascinating. It describes
the way Facebook propaganda takes off and becomes viral, first on social media,
and then beyond, viral, and to boot, enriching.
It does strike me on a first read that most of the groups described are right-wing, if not Alt-right then versions thereof. (I think the author of this feature, in the interests of appearing to be being journalistically objective, pulled some obvious punches.)
Question is: does the far right always exploit new media
better than the left? Seems so, pending the detailed study waiting to be made
of the subject. I suggest it is the case, given the left's inbred assumption
that reason might short-circuit spectacle and have a say.
Such a thought never passed for a second through the mind of
Goebbels or Hitler, media monsters, both of them.
Permit me to get pedantic and try to quote correctly Walter
Benjamin's dictum that the right aestheticizes politics whereas the left tries
to politicize aesthetics.
If that's so, the right always has a head-start, whether it
be Leni Riefenstahl and her hideous, and, to my mind stultifying, exaltation of
power in Triumph of the Will, or Fox News.
NY Times Magazine 8/28/16
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks-totally-insane-unintentionally-gigantic-hyperpartisan-political-media-machine.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
Inside Facebook's (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic,
Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take
over our news feeds.
By John Herrman
Open your Facebook feed. What do you see? A photo of a close
friend's child. An automatically generated slide show commemorating six years
of friendship between two acquaintances. An eerily on-target ad for something
you've been meaning to buy. A funny video. A sad video. A recently live video.
Lots of video; more video than you remember from before. A somewhat
less-on-target ad. Someone you saw yesterday feeling blessed. Someone you
haven't seen in 10 years feeling worried.
And then: A family member who loves politics asking,
"Is this really who we want to be president?" A co-worker, whom
you've never heard talk about politics, asking the same about a different
candidate. A story about Donald Trump that "just can't be true" in a
figurative sense. A story about Donald Trump that "just can't be
true" in a literal sense. A video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid
with text, shared from a source you've never seen before, viewed 15 million
times. An article questioning Hillary Clinton's honesty; a headline questioning
Donald Trump's sanity. A few shares that go a bit too far: headlines you would
never pass along yourself but that you might tap, read and probably not forget.
Maybe you've noticed your feed becoming bluer; maybe you've
felt it becoming redder. Either way, in the last year, it has almost certainly
become more intense. You've seen a lot of media sources you don't recognize and
a lot of posts bearing no memorable brand at all. You've seen politicians and
celebrities and corporations weigh in directly; you've probably seen posts from
the candidates themselves. You've seen people you're close to and people you're
not, with increasing levels of urgency, declare it is now time to speak up, to
take a stand, to set aside allegiances or hangups or political correctness or
hate.
Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn't
just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized
online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its
site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month,
out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44
percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate
exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on
these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political
conversation in America.
The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet
subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video
produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local
and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there's also a new and
distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and
advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly
engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed.
These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you've
probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry
Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing
Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages
have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.
Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for
Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared,
liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election
topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists
and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who
together make up 2016's most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.
Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but
cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On
Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the
political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or
openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional
media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure
readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new
publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their
pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a
major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the
purest expression of Facebook's design and of the incentives coded into its
algorithm -- a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited,
for better or for worse, a great deal of America's political discourse.
In 2006, when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college to run
his rapidly expanding start-up, Mark Provost was a student at Rogers State
University in Claremore, Okla., and going through a rough patch. He had
transferred restlessly between schools, and he was taking his time to graduate;
a stock-picking hobby that grew into a promising source of income had fallen
apart. His outlook was further darkened by the financial crisis and by the
years of personal unemployment that followed. When the Occupy movement began,
he quickly got on board. It was only then, when Facebook was closing in on its
billionth user, that he joined the network.
Now 36, Provost helps run US Uncut, a left-leaning Facebook
page and website with more than 1.5 million followers, about as many as MSNBC
has, from his apartment in Philadelphia. (Sample headlines: "Bernie
Delegates Want You to See This DNC Scheme to Silence Them" and "This
Sanders Delegate Unleashing on Hillary Clinton Is Going Absolutely
Viral.") He frequently contributes to another popular page, The Other 98%,
which has more than 2.7 million followers.
Occupy got him on Facebook, but it was the 2012 election
that showed him its potential. As he saw it, that election was defined by
social media. He mentioned a set of political memes that now feel
generationally distant: Clint Eastwood's empty chair at the 2012 Republican
National Convention and Mitt Romney's debate gaffe about "binders full of
women." He thought it was a bit silly, but he saw in these viral moments a
language in which activists like him could spread their message.
Provost's page now communicates frequently in memes, images
with overlaid text. "May I suggest," began one, posted in May 2015,
when opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was gaining traction,
"the first 535 jobs we ship overseas?" Behind the text was a photo of
Congress. Many are more earnest. In an image posted shortly thereafter, a photo
of Bernie Sanders was overlaid with a quote: "If Germany, Denmark, Sweden
and many more provide tuition-free college," read the setup, before
declaring in larger text, "we should be doing the same." It has been
shared more than 84,000 times and liked 75,000 more. Not infrequently, this
level of zeal can cross into wishful thinking. A post headlined "Did
Hillary Clinton Just Admit on LIVE TV That Her Iraq War Vote Was a Bribe?"
was shared widely enough to merit a response from Snopes, which called it
"quite a stretch."
This year, political content has become more popular all
across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with
a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general.
But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new
approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most
effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a
potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots
seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or
doesn't ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more
stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share
the post that's right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.
While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to
take advantage of Facebook's audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of
any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of
any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom
that more traditional publishers don't: to engage with Facebook purely on its
terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media
companies, in other words, not the other way around.
From a user's point of view, every share, like or comment is
both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people
want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as
some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want
to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as
important, what they don't. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact
headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme,
that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.
Rafael Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost's who, with his
twin brother, Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three
million followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero,
and by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to
interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular:
"Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate," Rivero says. The rise of
Occupy Democrats essentially mirrored the rise of Sanders's primary run. On his
page, Rivero started quoting text from Sanders's frequent email blasts, turning
them into Facebook-ready memes with a consistent aesthetic: colors that pop,
yellow on black. Rivero says that it's clear what his audience wants.
"I've probably made 10,000 graphics, and it's like running 10,000 focus
groups," he said. (Clinton was and is, of course, widely discussed by
Facebook users: According to the company, in the last month 40.8 million people
"generated interactions" around the candidate. But Rivero says that
in the especially engaged, largely oppositional left-wing-page ecosystem,
Clinton's message and cautious brand didn't carry.)
Because the Sanders campaign has come to an end, these sites
have been left in a peculiar position, having lost their unifying figure as
well as their largest source of engagement. Audiences grow quickly on Facebook
but can disappear even more quickly; in the case of left-leaning pages, many
had accumulated followings not just by speaking to Sanders supporters but also
by being intensely critical, and often utterly dismissive, of Clinton. Continue
reading the main story
Photo
Credit Screenshots from Facebook
Now that the nomination contest is over, Rivero has turned
to making anti-Trump content. A post from earlier this month got straight to
the point: "Donald Trump is unqualified, unstable and unfit to lead. Share
if you agree!" More than 40,000 people did.
"It's like a meme war," Rivero says, "and
politics is being won and lost on social media."
In retrospect, Facebook's takeover of online media looks
rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw
an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home
page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook
had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through
desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could
produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers
could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were
widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals
from the social network were sending visitors to publishers' websites at rates
sometimes comparable to Google, the web's previous de facto distribution hub.
Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.
This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of
visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people
and to make money. But as Facebook's growth continued, its influence was
intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of
smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users' daily
routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn't just a source of
readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.
Facebook, from a publisher's perspective, had seized the
web's means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a
social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their
audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is
fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more
challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning
multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and
sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and
celebrities.
From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook
as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing
businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced
it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video
production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most
notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric
production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the
same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a
user is less a partner than a context -- a self-contained marketplace to which
you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and
incentives that you cannot control.
The news feed is designed, in Facebook's public messaging,
to "show people the stories most relevant to them" and ranks stories
"so that what's most important to each person shows up highest in their
news feeds." It is a framework built around personal connections and
sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of
engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media
businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now
the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.
Any sufficiently complex system will generate a wide variety
of results, some expected, some not; some desired, others less so. On July 31,
a Facebook page called Make America Great posted its final story of the day.
"No Media Is Telling You About the Muslim Who Attacked Donald Trump, So We
Will ...," read the headline, next to a small avatar of a pointing and
yelling Trump. The story was accompanied by a photo of Khizr Khan, the father
of a slain American soldier. Khan spoke a few days earlier at the Democratic
National Convention, delivering a searing speech admonishing Trump for his
comments about Muslims. Khan, pocket Constitution in hand, was juxtaposed with
the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. "It is a sad day in
America," the caption read, "where we the people must expose the
TRUTH because the media is in the tank for 1 Presidential Candidate!"
Readers who clicked through to the story were led to an
external website, called Make America Great Today, where they were presented
with a brief write-up blended almost seamlessly into a solid wall of fleshy
ads. Khan, the story said -- between ads for "(1) Odd Trick to `Kill'
Herpes Virus for Good" and "22 Tank Tops That Aren't Covering
Anything" -- is an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood and a "promoter of
Islamic Shariah law." His late son, the story suggests, could have been a
"Muslim martyr" working as a double agent. A credit link beneath the
story led to a similar-looking site called Conservative Post, from which the
story's text was pulled verbatim. Conservative Post had apparently sourced its
story from a longer post on a right-wing site called Shoebat.com.
Within 24 hours, the post was shared more than 3,500 times,
collecting a further 3,000 reactions -- thumbs-up likes, frowning emoji, angry
emoji -- as well as 850 comments, many lengthy and virtually all impassioned. A
modest success. Each day, according to Facebook's analytics, posts from the
Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people. In July,
articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers, were shared,
commented on or liked more than four million times, edging out, for example,
the Facebook page of USA Today.
Make America Great, which inhabits the fuzzy margins of the
political Facebook page ecosystem, is owned and operated by a 35-year-old
online marketer named Adam Nicoloff. He started the page in August 2015 and
runs it from his home outside St. Louis. Previously, Nicoloff provided web
services and marketing help for local businesses; before that, he worked in
restaurants. Today he has shifted his focus to Facebook pages and websites that
he administers himself. Make America Great was his first foray into political
pages, and it quickly became the most successful in a portfolio that includes
men's lifestyle and parenting.
Nicoloff's business model is not dissimilar from the way
most publishers use Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on
an outside website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your
favor. For many, it doesn't: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and
website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers. But as with most of these
Facebook-native pages, Nicoloff's content costs comparatively little, and the
sheer level of interest in Trump and in the type of inflammatory populist
rhetoric he embraces has helped tip Nicoloff's system of advertising arbitrage
into serious profitability. In July, visitors arriving to Nicoloff's website
produced a little more than $30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total
around $8,000, partly split between website hosting fees and advertising buys
on Facebook itself.
Then, of course, there's the content, which, at a few dozen
posts a day, Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. "I have two
people in the Philippines who post for me," Nicoloff said, "a
husband-and-wife combo." From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the
contractors scour the internet for viral political stories, many explicitly
pro-Trump. If something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to
their site and promoted with an urgent headline. (The Khan story was posted at
the end of the shift, near midnight Eastern time, or just before noon in
Manila.) The resulting product is raw and frequently jarring, even by the
standards of this campaign. "There's No Way I'll Send My Kids to Public
School to Be Brainwashed by the LGBT Lobby," read one headline, linking to
an essay ripped from Glenn Beck's The Blaze; "Alert: UN Backs Secret Obama
Takeover of Police; Here's What We Know ...," read another, copied from a
site called The Federalist Papers Project. In the end, Nicoloff takes home what
he jokingly described as a "doctor's salary" -- in a good month, more
than $20,000.
Terry Littlepage, an internet marketer based in Las Cruces,
N.M., has taken this model even further. He runs a collection of about 50
politically themed Facebook pages with names like The American Patriot and My
Favorite Gun, which push visitors to a half-dozen external websites, stocked
with content aggregated by a team of freelancers. He estimates that he spends
about a thousand dollars a day advertising his pages on Facebook; as a result,
they have more than 10 million followers. In a good month, Littlepage's
properties bring in $60,000.
Nicoloff and Littlepage say that Trump has been good for
business, but each admits to some discomfort. Nicoloff, a conservative, says
that there were other candidates he preferred during the Republican primaries
but that he had come around to the nominee. Littlepage is also a recent
convert. During the primaries, he was a Cruz supporter, and he even tried
making some left-wing pages on Facebook but discovered that they just didn't
make him as much money.
In their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America
Great's followers express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I
spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to
things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy. No doubt
because of the page's name, some Trump supporters even mistake Nicoloff's page
for an official organ of the campaign. Nicoloff says that he receives dozens of
messages a day from Trump supporters, expecting or hoping to reach the man
himself. Many, he says, are simply asking for money.
Many of these political news pages will likely find their
cachet begin to evaporate after Nov. 8. But one company, the Liberty Alliance,
may have found a way to create something sustainable and even potentially
transformational, almost entirely within the ecosystem of Facebook. The
Georgia-based firm was founded by Brandon Vallorani, formerly of Answers in
Genesis, the organization that opened a museum in Kentucky promoting a literal
biblical creation narrative. Today the Liberty Alliance has around 100 sites in
its network, and about 150 Facebook pages, according to Onan Coca, the
company's 36-year-old editor in chief. He estimates their cumulative follower
count to be at least 50 million. Among the company's partners are the former
congressman Allen West, the 2008 election personality Joe the Plumber, the
conservative actor Kirk Cameron and the former "Saturday Night Live"
cast member Victoria Jackson. Then there are Liberty's countless news-oriented
pages, which together have become an almost ubiquitous presence on
right-leaning political Facebook in the last few years. Their names are
instructive and evocative: Eagle Rising; Fighting for Trump; Patriot Tribune;
Revive America; US Herald; The Last Resistance.
A dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts
from the company's small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire
network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You bring the
name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab site, furnish it
with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut of the revenue. Coca
told me the company brought in $12 million in revenue last year. (The company
declined to share documentation further corroborating his claims about
followers and revenue.)
Because the pages are run independently, the editorial
product is varied. But it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles
that seem to work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to
conservative Facebook media's big narratives, which, in turn, track with the
Trump campaign's messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally
unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement; Donald
Trump alone can save us; the system -- all of it -- is rigged. Whether the
Liberty Alliance succeeds or fails will depend, at least in part, on Facebook's
algorithm. Systemic changes to the ecosystem arrive through algorithmic
adjustments, and the company recently adjusted the news feed to "further
reduce clickbait headlines."
For now, the network hums along, mostly beneath the surface.
A post from a Liberty Alliance page
might find its way in front of a left-leaning user who might disagree with it
or find it offensive, and who might choose to engage with the friend who posted
it directly. But otherwise, such news exists primarily within the feeds of the
already converted, its authorship obscured, its provenance unclear, its
veracity questionable. It's an environment that's at best indifferent and at
worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page
operator, it's mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly
sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging,
mostly formed, into the national discourse.
Consider the trajectory of a post from August, from a
Facebook page called Patriotic Folks, the headline of which read, "Spread
This: Media Rigging the Polls, Hiding New Evidence Proving Trump Is
Winning." The article cited a litany of social-media statistics
highlighting Trump's superior engagement numbers, among them Trump's Facebook
following, which is nearly twice as large as Clinton's. "Don't listen to
the lying media -- the only legitimate attack they have left is Trump's poll
numbers," it said. "Social media proves the GOP nominee has strong
foundation and a firm backing." The story spread across this right-wing
Facebook ecosystem, eventually finding its way to Breitbart and finally to Sean
Hannity's "Morning Minute," where he read through the statistics to
his audience. [BUTTON]
Before Hannity signed off, he posed a question: "So,
does that mean anything?" It's a version of the question that everyone
wants to answer about Facebook and politics, which is whether the site's
churning political warfare is actually changing minds -- or, for that matter,
beginning to change the political discourse as a whole. How much of what
happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held
beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created,
or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our
politics?
Appropriately, the answer to this question can be chosen and
shared on Facebook in whichever way you prefer. You might share this story from
The New York Times Magazine, wondering aloud to your friends whether our
democracy has been fundamentally altered by this publishing-and-advertising
platform of unprecedented scale. Or you might just relax and find some memes to
share from one of countless pages that will let you air your political id. But
for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand.
Facebook's primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook's
relationship to political discourse is absurd -- they're one and the same. As
Rafael Rivero put it to me, "Facebook is where it's all happening."
John Herrman is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times.
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