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Is Digital Age Propaganda Fundamentally Different From That Of Past Eras?

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It seems accepted wisdom in the halls of government and among the pundits and scholars that advise those that wander its corridors, that propaganda in the digital era is somehow fundamentally different from that which has gone before. The fact that citizens no longer passively absorb propaganda, but rather actively participate in its spread and mutation means falsehoods and foreign influence represent a fundamentally new form of informational behavior in the social media era, so the argument goes. Yet, a closer look at propaganda in the past century reminds us that this argument is based on several false premises and a failure to understand how information was produced and consumed in the pre-digital era. In reality, digital propaganda is seen to be merely just another technological adaptation to age-old principles, just one that is easier for our data-obsessed world to see.

Perhaps the single most defining failure of modern misinformation, disinformation, “fake news” and foreign influence research has been the assumption that the web has somehow fundamentally altered the conduct and impact of propaganda.

Researchers today have become fixated on the technological aspects of information spread, rather than the underlying affordances of those technologies and whether they differ in meaningful ways from previous communicative conduits.

Look a bit closer and every single challenge we describe today as being unique to social media was in fact an issue half a century ago with the rise of television. Technologies change, the challenges they bring to a changing society do not.

I attended a conference several years ago where a panel of preeminent scholars from the nation’s most prestigious institutions sat on a stage and spoke about how prior to social media there were no social movements, no social organizations, no ways for the public to mobilize. That social media represented the first time in the history of human existence that ordinary like-minded citizens had been able to band together to exchange ideas or effect social change.

Of course, being of Estonian descent, the idea that prior to Facebook and Twitter it was impossible for societies to band together and bring about social change was rather comical to hear.

Yet, most enlightening was when an audience member rose to address the panel during the Q&A session and offered a miniature history lesson on the role of civic groups, churches, phone trees, newsletters, and all manner of civic organizing during the era of Martin Luther King Jr., all of which occurred without the benefit of these apparently necessary social media platforms.

The problem was that the panelists, like most scholars of propaganda today, hail increasingly from technological disciplines that lack backgrounds in the study of information. Yet, even those from information science and communications backgrounds have become increasingly distanced from the history of propaganda research and social activism in the pre-digital era.

Instead, it is technology that has become the centerpiece of modern research, which has blinded today’s scholars to the fact that so many of the assumptions they have made about the differences between communication today and communication of yesteryear are simply wrong.

The idea that digitally mediated propaganda is fundamentally different from historical propaganda distribution rests largely on the idea that today’s citizens actively assist in the spread and mutation of propaganda, while those of the past merely passively absorbed it via broadcast channels like radio and television.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Spend a bit of time perusing the propaganda literature of last century and a central concept that will emerge is that of the centrality of community to social life. While today’s citizenry might be digital zombies so glued to their phones that they are utterly unaware even of their immediate surroundings, citizens of last century were far more connected to their local communities. Civic groups, churches, schools, neighborhood organizations, fraternities, social clubs, professional societies and any number of other social and professional organizations brought people together and formed complex networks that emphasized both the local community and the national sense of belonging.

These networks fulfilled precisely the role that social media does today in facilitating the spread of information.

Propaganda spread in that era much as it does today: through seeding. Tailored messages were targeted to communities all across a nation, using myriad customized messages designed to appeal to their distinct grievances or allegiances. Communities had influencers, gatekeepers, references and informational sources and sinks much as they do today.

Ideas would spread over the dinner table at home, around the water cooler at work, in classrooms at school and at social and professional gatherings. Ideas from one location would spread to another through letters, phone calls and gatherings.

Ordinary people would be exposed to narratives and beliefs, internalize and shape them through the lens of their own experiences and then redistribute those slightly modified narratives to others.

The only difference between then and now is that all of this occurred through in-person contact, phone calls, discarded letters and mailings – ephemeral communications that have long since been lost, compared with our ability today to monitor and permanently archive narratives as they spread through the written medium of social media.

We can measure community today so we feel we understand it, whereas we lack the same kind of detailed records of past community conversation, so we assume it didn’t matter.

Putting this all together, perhaps the greatest lesson of all is that today we study falsehoods and foreign influence through the datapoints we can most easily measure, rather than stepping back to ask the far harder question of just how such information enters and spreads through our societies. The majority of that spread is not readily measurable simply by mining public tweets. It occurs in myriad forums across myriad mediums and is largely ephemeral and unmeasured.

If we truly hope to understand misinformation, disinformation, “fake news” and foreign influence, we must let go of the idea that they are somehow products of our modern world and look beyond the data that we have most easily at hand.

In the end, we must accept that not everything can be measured by tweet or Facebook post.