COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA: IF YOU MAKE IT TREND, YOU MAKE IT TRUE

1 2 Y C O M P U T A T I O N A L P R O P A G A N D A I F Y O U M A K E I T T R E N D , Y O U M A K E I T T R U E R E N E E D I R E S T A There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. – Edward Bernays, Propaganda The pioneering public relations consultant Edward Bernays’s words are nearly a century old, but today, in an era of rampant misinformation and insidious disinformation campaigns online, they seem startlingly apt. The rulers Bernays was talking about were public relations specialists, and at the time propaganda was not a pejorative. But when we consider this statement in the context of the current information ecosystem, replete with manipulative narratives spread by bots and human operators alike, it’s somewhat jarring. Now the ‘‘invisible rulers’’ are the people who control the algorithms that populate the feeds of two billion users, and the strategists who are most adept at gaming them. In Bernays’s time, propaganda was used somewhat interchangeably with public relations. The concept has evolved since then; modern and postwar propaganda can perhaps be defined in the simplest terms as information with an agenda. The information is not objective, but it also isn’t necessarily false – in fact, to be most 1 3 R e√ective, propaganda is often anchored in a partial truth. Regardless of whether it’s true or false, propaganda has a consistent aim: to influence the target to feel a certain way or form a certain opinion about a concept or entity. Propaganda is most often associated with governments, but activist groups, companies, and the media also produce it. Propaganda has been a tool of rulers since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans; the term itself comes from an administrative body of the Catholic Church that was dedicated to ‘‘propagating ’’ the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries. Kings used it, religious leaders used it, and even the American Founding Fathers used it to shape opinions and influence societies. In fact, Bernays believed that propaganda was essential to the functioning of a democracy: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. This manipulation took the form of informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. ‘‘Of course,’’ Bernays noted, ‘‘the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.’’ The methods changed rather dramatically decades after Bernays ’s death; the internet was born, and it transformed and upended the stranglehold that rulers and elites traditionally had on the flows of information. And as the internet itself changed, with the emergence of a handful of social platforms that serve two billion people, a series of unintended consequences stemming from design choices and business models democratized propaganda and helped it evolve into what Phil Howard and Sam Woolley of the University of Oxford called computational propaganda: ‘‘the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to pur- 1 4 D I R E S T A Y posefully distribute misleading information over social media networks .’’ Most people have heard of, and experienced, misinformation: it’s false information, and on the early internet it often took the form of email chains, perhaps from your gullible uncle, telling you that if you forwarded a message to ten people, Bill Gates would send you money. This kind of misinformation is the raison d’être of the hoax-buster Snopes, the site that explains what’s going on when things are wrong on the...