Post-truth politics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes.

As of 2018 political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Brazil, among others. As with other areas of debate, this is being driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media. In 2016, post-truth was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year, due to its prevalence in the context of that year's Brexit referendum and media coverage of the U.S. presidential election.

History

According to Oxford Dictionaries, the term post-truth was first used in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate, more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War demonstrate that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world." In 2004, Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title. The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11. In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the phrase "post-democracy" to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments," but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams." Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics. More recently scholars have followed Crouch in demonstrating the role of professional political communication's contribution to distrust and wrong beliefs, where strategic use of emotion is becomes key to gaining truth for truth statements.

The term "post-truth politics" was coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010, where it was defined as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)". Post truth was used by philosopher Joseph Heath to describe the 2014 Ontario election. The term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the 2016 "Brexit" referendum on membership in the European Union in the United Kingdom. Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 is "post-truth", citing a 2,000% increase in usage compared to 2015.

Jennifer Hochschild, H.L. Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, has described the rise of post-truth as a return to 18th and 19th century political and media practices in the United States, following a period in the 20th century where the media was relatively balanced and rhetoric was toned down. (Not so in Britain and elsewhere necessarily; for example, in 1957 scientist Kathleen Lonsdale remarked that "for many people truthfulness in politics has now become a mockery.... Anyone who listens to the radio in a mixed company of thinking people knows how deep-seated is this cynicism.") 

The pamphlet wars that arose with the growth of printing and literacy beginning in the 1600s have been described as an early form of post-truth politics. Slanderous and vitriolic pamphlets were cheaply printed and widely disseminated, and the dissent that they fomented contributed to starting wars and revolutions such as the English Civil War and the American War of Independence.

Description

A Vote Leave poster with a contested claim about the EU membership fee, cited as an example of post-truth politics.

 

A defining trait of post-truth politics is that campaigners continue to repeat their talking points, even when media outlets, experts in the field in question, and others provide proof that contradicts these talking points. For example, during campaigning for the British EU referendum campaign, Vote Leave made repeated use of the claim that EU membership cost £350 million a week, although later began to use the figure as a net amount of money sent directly to the EU. This figure, which ignored the UK rebate and other factors, was described as "potentially misleading" by the UK Statistics Authority, as "not sensible" by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and was rejected in fact checks by BBC News, Channel 4 News and Full Fact. Vote Leave nevertheless continued to use the figure as a centrepiece of their campaign until the day of the referendum, after which point they downplayed the pledge as having been an "example", pointing out that it was only ever suggested as a possible alternative use of the net funds sent to the EU. Tory MP and Leave campaigner Sarah Wollaston, who left the group in protest during its campaign, criticized its "post-truth politics". The Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a notorious anti-intellectual, controversially claimed in an interview that the British people "Had had enough of experts".

Michael Deacon, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Daily Telegraph, summarised the core message of post-truth politics as "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic." He added that post-truth politics can also include a claimed rejection of partisanship and negative campaigning. In this context, campaigners can push a utopian "positive campaign" to which rebuttals can be dismissed as smears and scaremongering and opposition as partisan.

In its most extreme mode, post-truth politics can make use of conspiracism. In this form of post-truth politics, false rumors (such as the "birther" or "Muslim" conspiracy theories about Barack Obama) become major news topics. In the case of the "pizzagate" conspiracy, this resulted in a man entering the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and firing an AR-15 rifle.

In contrast to simply telling untruths, writers such as Jack Holmes of Esquire describe the process as something different, with Holmes putting it as: "So, if you don't know what's true, you can say whatever you want and it's not a lie".

Drivers

In 2015 media and Politics scholar Jayson Harsin coined the term "regime of post-truth" which encompasses many aspects of post-truth politics. He argues that a convergent set of developments have created the conditions of post-truth society: the political communication informed by cognitive science, which aims at managing perception and belief of segmented populations through techniques like microtargeting which includes the strategic use of rumors and falsehoods; the fragmentation of modern, more centralized mass news media gatekeepers, which have largely repeated each others scoops and their reports; the attention economy marked by information overload and acceleration, user-generated content and fewer society-wide common trusted authorities to distinguish between truth and lies, accurate and inaccurate; the algorithms which govern what appears in social media and search engine rankings, based on what users want (per algorithm) and not on what is factual; and news media which have been marred by scandals of plagiarism, hoaxes, propaganda, and changing news values. These developments have occurred on the background of economic crises, downsizing and favoring trends toward more traditional tabloid stories and styles of reporting, known as tabloidization and infotainment. 

While some of these phenomena (such as a more tabloidesque press) may suggest a return to the past, the effect of the convergences is a socio-political phenomenon which exceeds earlier forms of journalism in deliberate distortion and struggle. Fact-checking and rumor-busting sites abound, but they are unable to reunite a fragmented set of audiences (attention-wise) and their respective trustful-/distrustfulness. Harsin has called it a "regime of post-truth" instead of merely post-truth politics, professional pan-partisan political communication manipulates the communication competitively.

Major news outlets

Several trends in the media landscape have been blamed for the perceived rise of post-truth politics. One contributing factor has been the proliferation of state-funded news agencies like CCTV News and RT, and Voice of America in the USA which allow states to influence Western audiences. According to Peter Pomerantsev, a British-Russian journalist who worked for TNT in Moscow, one of their prime objectives has been to de-legitimize Western institutions, including the structures of government, democracy, and human rights. As of 2016, trust in the mainstream media in the US had reached historical lows. It has been suggested that under these conditions, fact checking by news outlets struggles to gain traction among the wider public and that politicians resort to increasingly drastic messaging.

Many news outlets desire to appear to be, or have a policy of being, impartial. Many writers have noted that in some cases, this leads to false balance, the practice of giving equal emphasis to unsupported or discredited claims without challenging their factual basis. The 24-hour news cycle also means that news channels repeatedly draw on the same public figures, which benefits PR-savvy politicians and means that presentation and personality can have a larger impact on the audience than facts, while the process of claim and counter-claim can provide grist for days of news coverage at the expense of deeper analysis of the case.

Social media and the Internet

Social media adds an additional dimension, as user networks can become echo chambers possibly emphasised by the filter bubble where one political viewpoint dominates and scrutiny of claims fails, allowing a parallel media ecosystem of websites, publishers and news channels to develop, which can repeat post-truth claims without rebuttal. In this environment, post-truth campaigns can ignore fact checks or dismiss them as being motivated by bias. The Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner laid some of the blame on the rise of clickbait, articles of dubious factual content with a misleading headline and which are designed to be widely shared, saying that "chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity" undermines the value of journalism and truth. In 2016, David Mikkelson, co-founder of the fact checking and debunking site Snopes.com, described the introduction of social media and fake news sites as a turning point, saying "I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump."

The digital culture allows anybody with a computer and access to the internet to post their opinions online and mark them as fact which may become legitimized through echo-chambers and other users validating one another. Content may be judged based on how many views a post gets, creating an atmosphere that appeals to emotion, audience biases, or headline appeal instead of researched fact. Content which gets more views is continually filtered around different internet circles, regardless of its legitimacy. Some also argue that the abundance of fact available at any time on the internet leads to an attitude focused on knowing basic claims to information instead of an underlying truth or formulating carefully thought-out opinions. The internet allows people to choose where they get their information, allowing them to reinforce their own opinions.

Polarized political culture

The rise of post-truth politics coincides with polarized political beliefs. A Pew Research Center study of American adults found that "those with the most consistent ideological views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct from those of individuals with more mixed political views—and very distinct from each other". Data is becoming increasingly accessible as new technologies are introduced to the everyday lives of citizens. An obsession for data and statistics also filters into the political scene, and political debates and speeches become filled with snippets of information that may be misconstrued, false, or not contain the whole picture. Sensationalized television news emphasizes grand statements and further publicizes politicians. This shaping from the media influences how the public views political issues and candidates.

Dissenting views

In an editorial, New Scientist suggested "a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually any more dishonest than they used to be", and hypothesized that "fibs once whispered into select ears are now overheard by everyone". Similarly, Viner suggested that while social media has helped some untruths to spread, it has also restrained others; as an example, she said The Sun's false "The Truth" story following the Hillsborough disaster, and the associated police cover-up, would be hard to imagine in the social media age. The journalist George Gillett has suggested that the term "post-truth" mistakenly conflates empirical and ethical judgements, writing that the supposedly "post-truth" movement is in fact a rebellion against "expert economic opinion becoming a surrogate for values-based political judgements".

Toby Young, writing for The Spectator, called the term a "cliché" used selectively primarily by left-wing commentators to attack what are actually universal ideological biases, contending that "[w]e are all post-truthers and probably always have been". The Economist has called this argument "complacent", however, identifying a qualitative difference between political scandals of previous generations, such as those surrounding the Suez Crisis and the Iran–Contra affair (which involved attempting to cover-up the truth) and contemporary ones in which public facts are simply ignored. Similarly, Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute said that political lies were not new and identified several political campaigns in history which would now be described as "post-truth". For Mantzarlis, the "post-truth" label was—to some extent—a "coping mechanism for commentators reacting to attacks on not just any facts, but on those central to their belief system", but also noted that 2016 had been "an acrimonious year for politics on both sides of the Atlantic". Mantzarlis also noted that interest in fact checking had never been higher, suggesting that at least part of the electorate rejects "post-truth" politics.

David Helfand argues, following Edward M. Harris, that "public prevarication is nothing new" and that it is the "knowledge of the audience" and the "limits of plausibility" within a technology-saturated environment that have changed. We are, rather, in an age of misinformation where such limits of plausibility have vanished and where everyone feels equally qualified to make claims that are easily shared and propagated.

Examples

Post-truth politics has been applied as a political buzzword to a wide range of political cultures; one article in The Economist identified post-truth politics in Austria, Germany, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Germany

In December 2016 "postfaktisch" (post-factual) was named word of the year by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (German language society), also in connection with a rise of right-wing populism from 2015 on. Since the 1990s, "post-democracy" was used in sociology more and more.

India

Amulya Gopalakrishnan, columnist for The Times of India, identified similarities between the Trump and Brexit campaigns on the one hand, and hot-button issues in India such as the Ishrat Jahan case and the ongoing case against Teesta Setalvad on the other, where accusations of forged evidence and historical revisionism have resulted in an "ideological impasse".

South Africa

Health care and education in South Africa was substantially compromised during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki due to his HIV/AIDS denialism.

United Kingdom

An early use of the phrase in British politics was in March 2012 by Scottish Labour MSP Iain Gray in criticizing the difference between Scottish National Party's claims and official statistics. Scottish Labor leader Jim Murphy also described an undercurrent of post-truth politics in which people "cheerfully shot the messenger" when presented with facts that didn't support their viewpoint, seeing it among pro-independence campaigners in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Jeremy Corbyn supporters in the 2015 Labor leadership election, and Leave campaigners in the then-upcoming EU membership referendum.

Post-truth politics has been retroactively identified in the lead-up to the Iraq War, particularly after the Chilcot Report, published in July 2016, concluded that Tony Blair misrepresented military intelligence to support his view that Iraq's chemical weapons program was advanced.

The phrase became widely used during the 2016 UK EU membership referendum to describe the Leave campaign. Faisal Islam, political editor for Sky News, said that Michael Gove used "post-fact politics" that were imported from the Trump campaign; in particular, Gove's comment in an interview that "I think people in this country have had enough of experts..." was singled out as illustrative of a post-truth trend, although this is only part of a longer statement. Similarly, Arron Banks, the founder of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, said that "facts don't work ... You've got to connect with people emotionally. It's the Trump success." Andrea Leadsom—a prominent campaigner for Leave in the EU referendum and one of the two final candidates in the Conservative leadership election—has been singled out as a post-truth politician, especially after she denied having disparaged rival Theresa May's childlessness in an interview with The Times in spite of transcript evidence.

United States

In its original formulation, the phrase "post-truth politics" was used to describe the paradoxical situation in the United States where the Republican Party, which enforced stricter party discipline than the Democratic Party, was nevertheless able to present itself as more bipartisan, since individual Democrats were more likely to support Republican policies than vice versa. The term was used by Paul Krugman in The New York Times to describe Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign in which certain claims—such as that Barack Obama had cut defense spending and that he had embarked on an "apology tour"—continued to be repeated long after they had been debunked. Other forms of scientific denialism in modern American politics include the anti-vaxxer movement, and the belief that existing genetically modified foods are harmful despite a strong scientific consensus that no currently marketed GMO foods have any negative health effects. The health freedom movement in the U.S. resulted in the passage of the bipartisan Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which allows the sale of dietary supplements without any evidence that they are safe or effective for the purposes consumers expect, though the FDA has begun regulation of homeopathic products. 

In a review for the Harvard Gazette, Christopher Robichaud—a lecturer in ethics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School—described conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of elections and politicians, such as the "birther" idea that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, as one side-effect of post-truth politics. Robichaud also contrasted the behavior of the candidates with that following the contested result of the 2000 election, in which Al Gore conceded and encouraged his supporters to accept the result of Bush v. Gore. Similarly, Rob Boston, writing for The Humanist saw a rise in conspiracy theories across American public life, including Birtherism, climate change denialism, and rejecting evolution, which he identified as a result of post-truth politics, noting that the existence of extensive and widely available evidence against these conspiracy theories had not slowed their growth.

In 2016, the "post-truth" label was especially widely used to describe the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, including by Professor Daniel W. Drezner in The Washington Post, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, Chris Cillizza in The Independent, Jeet Heer in The New Republic, and James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, and by several professors of government and history at Harvard. In 2017, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others, have pointed out lies or falsehoods in Trump's statements after the election. Former president Barack Obama stated that the new media ecosystem "means everything is true and nothing is true".

Environmental politics

Although the consensus among scientists is that human activities contribute to global warming, several political parties around the world have made climate change denial a basis of their policies. These parties have been accused of using post-truth techniques to attack environmental measures meant to combat climate changes to benefit industry donors. During the course of the most recent 2016 election, the United States has seen numerous climate change deniers rise to power, such as new Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt replacing Barack Obama's appointee Gina McCarthy. In Australia, the repeal of carbon pricing by the government of Tony Abbott was described as "the nadir of post-truth politics" by The Age.

Solutions

Both technology companies and governments have started to make efforts to tackle the challenge of "post-truth politics". In an article for the journal Global Policy, professor Nayef Al-Rodhan suggested four particular responses:

1. Improve the technological tools for fact checking. For example, Germany has already asked Facebook to introduce a fake news filtering tool.
2. Greater involvement and visibility for scientists and the scientific community. The UK, for instance, has a series of Parliamentary committees at which scientists are called to testify, and present their research to inform policy-making. Similarly in Canada, the role of Chief Science Advisor was re-established and each department with even a small scientific capability was required to develop a policy for scientific integrity.
3. Stronger government action. In countries such as the Czech Republic, new units have been set up to tackle fake news. The most important challenge here is to ensure that such state-led efforts are not used as a tool for censorship.
4. Securitizing fake news. It is important to treat post-truth politics as a matter of security and devise global efforts to counter this phenomenon. In March 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE, and the Organization for American States issued a Joint Declaration on "Freedom of Expression and Fake News, Disinformation and Propaganda" to warn against the effects of fake news but, at the same time, condemn any attempts at state-mandated censorship.

Criticism

Roger Scruton has extensively criticized the idea of post-truth politics, saying that 'only deluded academics and Donald Trump can't tell the difference between fact and fabrication.' He holds that politicians and journalists have always lied in politics, and that the only reason many believe in a world where fact and fiction have become indistinguishable is because they 'cannot stomach the Brexit vote.' He has declared it a disturbing progression in postmodernism that many feel the truth doesn't exist- or, if it does, that it doesn't matter- and feels that it is down to academics such as Nietzsche, Marx and Foucault, whose books he describe as 'turgid', that such a term exists. He feels that the description is unnecessary, and is a leftist defence strategy to a changing world- one that he wholeheartedly supports.

Moral panic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Preparing to burn a witch in 1544. Witch-hunts are an example of mass behavior fueled by moral panic.

A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. A Dictionary of Sociology defines a moral panic as "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".

The media are key players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory paedophiles, belief in ritual abuse of women and children by satanic cults, the War on Drugs, and other public health issues.

Use as a social science term

Marshall McLuhan gave the term academic treatment in his book Understanding Media, written in 1964. According to Stanley Cohen, author of a sociological study about youth culture and media called Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a moral panic occurs when "...[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as 'moral entrepreneurs', while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as 'folk devils'.

British vs. American

Many sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic as described by American versus British sociologists. In addition to pointing out other sociologists who note the distinction, Kenneth Thompson has characterized the difference as American sociologists tending to emphasize psychological factors while the British portray "moral panics" as crises of capitalism.

British criminologist Jock Young used the term in his participant observation study of drug taking in Porthmadog between 1967 and 1969. In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the public reaction to the phenomenon of mugging and the perception that it had recently been imported from American culture into the UK. Employing Cohen's definition of 'moral panic', Hall et al. theorized that the "...rising crime rate equation..." performs an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes; moral panics could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to "...police the crisis".

Cohen's stages of moral panic

According to Stanley Cohen, who seems to have borrowed the term from Marshall McLuhan (see above), there are five key stages in the construction of a moral panic:

1. Someone, something or a group are defined as a threat to social norms or community interests
2. The threat is then depicted in a simple and recognizable symbol/form by the media
3. The portrayal of this symbol rouses public concern
4. There is a response from authorities and policy makers
5. The moral panic over the issue results in social changes within the community

In 1971 Stanley Cohen investigated a series of "moral panics". Cohen used the term "moral panic" to characterize the reactions of the media, the public, and agents of social control to youth disturbances. This work, involving the Mods and Rockers, demonstrated how agents of social control amplified deviance. According to Cohen, these groups were labeled as being outside the central core values of consensual society and as posing a threat to both the values of society and society itself, hence the term "folk devils".

In a more recent edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen outlines some of the criticisms that have arisen in response to moral panic theory. One of these is of the term "panic" itself, as it has connotations of irrationality and a lack of control. Cohen maintains that "panic" is a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.

Mass media

According to Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the concept of "moral panic" was linked to certain assumptions about the mass media. Stanley Cohen showed that the mass media are the primary source of the public's knowledge about deviance and social problems. He further argued that moral panic gives rise to the folk devil by labeling actions and people.

According to Cohen, the media appear in any or all three roles in moral panic dramas:

• Setting the agenda – selecting deviant or socially problematic events deemed as newsworthy, then using finer filters to select which events are candidates for moral panic.
• Transmitting the images – transmitting the claims by using the rhetoric of moral panics.
• Breaking the silence and making the claim.

Characteristics

Moral panics have several distinct features. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, moral panic consists of the following characteristics:

• Concern – There must be the belief that the behaviour of the group or activity deemed deviant is likely to have a negative effect on society.
• Hostility – Hostility toward the group in question increases, and they become "folk devils". A clear division forms between "them" and "us".
• Consensus – Though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society. It is important at this stage that the "moral entrepreneurs" are vocal and the "folk devils" appear weak and disorganized.
• Disproportionality – The action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group.
• Volatility – Moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared because public interest wanes or news reports change to another narrative.

Examples

20th–21st century: public health

The fear of disease (or fear of threats to public health) and spread of panic dates back many centuries and continues into the 21st century with diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Zika, and SARS. Cohen's idea of the "folk devil" and epidemics can be compared because of their role in spreading mass panic and fear. The intense concentration on hygiene emerged, before the 20th century, with a medical belief referred to as miasma theory, which states that disease was the direct result of the polluting emanations of filth: sewer gas, garbage fumes, and stenches that polluted air and water, which results in an epidemic. The Great Stink of 1858 was blamed on miasma, along with reoccurring cholera epidemics during the Victorian era. Although the water was safe to drink in most parts of London, such a panic had arisen that very few people would dare drink the water.

1950s: switchblades

In the United States, a 1950 article titled "The Toy That Kills" in the Women's Home Companion, about automatic knives, or "switchblades", sparked a storm of controversy, further fed by highly popular films of the late 1950s including Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets, 12 Angry Men, The Delinquents, High School Confidential, and the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. Fixation on the switchblade as the symbol of youth violence, sex, and delinquency resulted in demands from the public and Congress to control the sale and possession of such knives. State laws restricting or criminalizing switchblade possession and use were adopted by an increasing number of state legislatures, and many of the restrictive laws around them worldwide date back to this period.

1970s–present: increase in crime

Research shows that fear of increasing crime is often the cause of moral panics. Recent studies have shown that despite declining crime rates, this phenomenon, which often taps into a population's "herd mentality", continues to occur in various cultures. Japanese jurist Koichi Hamai explains how the changes in crime recording in Japan since the 1990s caused people to believe that the crime rate was rising and that crimes were getting increasingly severe.

1970s–present: video games and violence

There have been calls to regulate violence in video games for nearly as long as the video game industry has existed, with Death Race a notable early example. In the 1990s, however, improvements in video game technology allowed for more lifelike depictions of violence in games like Mortal Kombat and Doom. The industry attracted controversy over violent content and concerns about effects they might have on players, generating frequent media stories drawing connections between video games and violent behavior as well as a number of academic studies reporting conflicting findings about the strength of correlations. According to Christopher Ferguson, sensationalist media reports and the scientific community unintentionally worked together in "promoting an unreasonable fear of violent video games". Concerns from parts of the public about violent games led to cautionary, often exaggerated news stories, warnings from politicians and other public figures, and calls for research to prove the connection, which in turn led to studies "speaking beyond the available data and allowing the promulgation of extreme claims without the usual scientific caution and skepticism."

Since the 1990s, there have been attempts to regulate violent video games in the United States through congressional bills as well as within the industry. Public concern and media coverage of violent video games reached a high point following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, after which videos were found of the perpetrators talking about violent games like Doom and making comparisons between the acts they intended to carry out and aspects of games.

Ferguson and others have explained the video game moral panic as part of a cycle that all new media go through. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that legally restricting sales of video games to minors would be unconstitutional and called the research presented in favor of regulation "unpersuasive".

1970s–present: war on drugs

Some critics have pointed to moral panic as an explanation for the War on Drugs. For example, a Royal Society of Arts commission concluded that "the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 ... is driven more by 'moral panic' than by a practical desire to reduce harm."

Some have written that one of the many rungs supporting the moral panic behind the war on drugs was a separate but related moral panic, which peaked in the late 1990s, involving media's gross exaggeration of the frequency of the surreptitious use of date rape drugs. News media have been criticized for advocating "grossly excessive protective measures for women, particularly in coverage between 1996 and 1998," for overstating the threat and for excessively dwelling on the topic. For example, a 2009 Australian study found that drug panel tests were unable to detect any drug in any of the 97 instances of patients admitted to the hospital believing their drinks might have been spiked.

1980s–1990s: Dungeons and Dragons

At various times, Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games have been accused of promoting such practices as Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, pornography and murder. In the 1980s and later, some groups, especially fundamentalist Christian groups, accused the games of encouraging interest in sorcery and the veneration of demons. While many of these criticisms have been aimed specifically at Dungeons and Dragons, they touch on the genre of fantasy roleplaying games as a whole.

1980s–1990s: Satanic ritual abuse

Also known as the "satanic panic", this was a series of moral panics regarding Satanic ritual abuse that originated in the United States and spread to other English-speaking countries in the 1980s and 1990s, and led to a string of wrongful convictions.

1980s–present: HIV/AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) may lead to or exacerbate other health conditions such as pneumonia, fungal infections, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, and cytomegalovirus. A meeting of the British Sociological Association's South West and Wales Study entitled "AIDS: The Latest Moral Panic" was prompted by the growing interest of medical sociologists in AIDS, as well as that of UK health care professionals working in the field of health education. It took place at a time when both groups were beginning to voice an increased concern with the growing media attention and fear-mongering that AIDS was attracting. In the 1980s, a moral panic was created within the media over HIV/AIDS. In Britain the notable iceberg advert by the government clearly hinted that the public was uninformed about HIV/AIDS due to a lack of publicly assessable and accurate information.

The media outlets nicknamed HIV/AIDS the "gay plague", causing further stigmatization and misunderstandings about the disease. However, scientists gained a far better understanding of HIV/AIDS as it grew in the 1980s and moved into the 1990s and beyond. The illness was still negatively viewed by many as either caused by, or passed on through, the gay community. Once it became clear that this wasn't the case, the moral panic created by the media changed to blaming the overall negligence of ethical standards of the younger generation (both male and female), resulting in another moral panic. It is prevalent in the media and the way HIV/AIDS is depicted taken from this extract, "British TV and press coverage is locked into an agenda which blocks out any approach to the subject which does not conform in advance to the values and language of a profoundly homophobic culture-a culture that is which does not regard gay men as fully or properly human. No distinction obtains for the agenda between 'quality' and 'tabloid' newspapers, or between 'popular' and 'serious' television."

In the 1990s, blame shifted to "uncivilized Africans" as the new "folk devils", with a popular theory alleging that HIV originated from humans having sex with simians. This theory was debunked by numerous experts.

1980s–1990s: Blue star LSD tattoos

The blue star tattoo legend states that a temporary lick-and-stick tattoo soaked in LSD and made in the form of a blue star, or of popular children's cartoon characters, is being distributed to children in the area in order to get them 'addicted to LSD'. The legend states that a temporary lick-and-stick tattoo soaked in LSD and made in the form of a blue star (the logo of the Dallas Cowboys is often mentioned), or of popular children's cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Bart Simpson, is being distributed to children in the area in order to get them 'addicted to LSD'; even though LSD is rarely addictive. Generally some attribution is given, (typically to a well-regarded hospital or a vaguely specified "advisor to the president"), and instructions are given that parents should contact police if they come across the blue star tattoos.

1990s–present: sex offenders

The media narrative of a sex offender highlighting egregious offenses as typical behavior of any sex offender, and media distorting the facts of some cases, has led legislators to attack judicial discretion, making sex offender registration mandatory based on certain listed offenses rather than individual risk or the actual severity of the crime, thus practically catching less serious offenders under the domain of harsh sex offender laws.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there have been instances of moral panics in the UK and the US related to colloquial uses of the term pedophilia to refer to such unusual crimes as high-profile cases of child abduction.

2000–present: human trafficking

Many critics of contemporary anti-prostitution activism argue that much of the current concern about human trafficking and its more general conflation with prostitution and other forms of sex work have all the hallmarks of a moral panic. They further argue that this moral panic shares much in common with the 'white slavery' panic of a century earlier as prompted passage of the 1910 Mann Act.

2000–present: Jenkem

In the mid-1990s, jenkem was reported to be a popular street drug among Zambian street children manufactured from fermented human waste. In November 2007, there was a moral panic in the United States after widespread reports of jenkem becoming a popular recreational drug in middle and high schools across the country, though the true extent of the practice has since been called into question. Several sources reported that the increase in American media coverage was based on a hoax and on faulty Internet research.

Criticism

Paul Joosse (2017) has argued that while classic moral panic theory styled itself as being part of the 'sceptical revolution' that sought to critique structural functionalism, it is actually very similar to Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance (in Cohen's case, for example, 'right-thinkers' use folk devils to strengthen societal orthodoxies). In his analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory, Joosse re-imagines moral panic in Weberian terms, showing how charismatic moral entrepreneurs can at once deride folk devils in the traditional sense while avoiding the conservative moral recapitulation that classic moral panic theory predicts.

Another criticism is that of disproportionality. The problem with this argument is that there is no way to measure what a proportionate reaction should be to a specific action. Jarrett Thibodeaux (2014) further argues that the criteria of disproportionality erroneously assumes that a social problem should correspond with some objective criteria of harm. The idea that a social problem should correspond with some objective criteria of harm, but is a moral panic when it does not, is a 'constructionism of the gaps' line of explanation.

Writing in 1995 about the moral panic that arose in the UK after a series of murders by juveniles, chiefly that of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys but also including that of 70-year-old Edna Phillips by two 17-year-old girls, the sociologist Colin Hay pointed out that the folk devil was ambiguous in such cases; the child perpetrators would normally be thought of as innocent.

In "Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds", Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton argue "that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as the social relations which support it, should be revised." Their argument is that mass media has changed since the concept of moral panic emerged so "that 'folk devils' are less marginalized than they once were", and that 'folk devils' are not only castigated by mass media but supported and defended by it as well. They also suggest that the "points of social control" that moral panics used to rest on "have undergone some degree of shift, if not transformation."

The British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes has also raised issue with the term 'morality', how it is accepted unproblematically in the concept of 'moral panic' and how most research into moral panics fails to approach the term critically but instead accepts it at face value. Jewkes goes on to argue that the thesis and the way it has been used fails to distinguish between crimes that quite rightly offend human morality, and thus elicit a justifiable reaction, and those that demonise minorities. The public are not sufficiently gullible to keep accepting the latter and allowing themselves to be manipulated by the media and the government.

Another British criminologist, Steve Hall, goes a step further to suggest that the term 'moral panic' is a fundamental category error. Hall argues that although some crimes are sensationalized by the media, in the general structure of the crime/control narrative the ability of the existing state and criminal justice system to protect the public is also overstated. Public concern is whipped up only for the purpose of being soothed, which produces not panic but the opposite, comfort and complacency.

Echoing another point Hall makes, the sociologists Thompson and Williams argue that the concept of 'moral panic' is not a rational response to the phenomenon of social reaction, but itself a product of the irrational middle-class fear of the imagined working-class 'mob'. Using as an example a peaceful and lawful protest staged by local mothers against the re-housing of sex-offenders on their estate, Thompson and Williams show how the sensationalist demonization of the protesters by moral panic theorists and the liberal press was just as irrational as the demonization of the sex offenders by the protesters and the tabloid press.

Many sociologists and criminologists (Ungar, Hier, Rohloff) have revised Cohen's original framework. The revisions are compatible with the way in which Cohen theorizes panics in the third Introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

Other uses

The term was used in 1830, in a way that completely differs from its modern social science application, by a religious magazine regarding a sermon. The phrase was used again in 1831, with an intent that is possibly closer to its modern use.

Internet manipulation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Internet manipulation refers to media manipulation on the Internet.

Such manipulation may be conducted for purposes of propaganda, discreditation, harming corporate or political competitors, improving personal or brand reputation or plain trolling among other things. To accomplish these objectives, online influencers, hired professionals and/or software − typically Internet bots such as social bots, votebots and clickbots − may be used.

Cognitive hacking refers to a cyberattack that aims to change users' perceptions and corresponding behaviors.

Internet manipulation is sometimes also used to describe selective Internet censorship or violations of net neutrality.

Issues

• High-arousal emotion virality: It has been found that content that evokes high-arousal emotions (e.g. awe, anger or anxiety) is more viral and that this also hold when surprisingness, interestingness, or usefulness is taken into consideration.
• Simplicity over complexity: Providing and perpetuating simple explanations for complex circumstances may be used for online manipulation. Often such are easier to believe, come in advance of any adequate investigations and have a higher virality than any complex, nuanced explanations and information.
• Peer-influence: Prior collective ratings of an web content influences ones own perception of it. In 2015 it was shown that the perceived beauty of a piece of artwork in an online context varies with external influence as confederate ratings were manipulated by opinion and credibility for participants of an experiment who were asked to evaluate a piece of artwork. Furthermore, on Reddit it has been found that content that initially gets a few down- or upvotes often continues going negative, or vice versa. This is referred to as "bandwagon/snowball voting" by reddit users and administrators.
• Filter bubbles: Echo chambers and filter bubbles might be created by Website administrators or moderators locking out people with altering viewpoints or by establishing certain rules or by the typical member viewpoints of online sub/communities or Internet "tribes"
• Confirmation bias & manipulated prevalence: Fake news does not need to be read but has an effect in quantity and emotional effect by its headlines and sound bites alone. Specific points, views, issues and people's apparent prevalence can be amplified, stimulated or simulated.
• Information timeliness and uncorrectability: Clarifications, conspiracy busting and fake news exposure often come late when the damage is already done and/or do not reach the bulk of the audience of the associated misinformation
• Psychological targeting: Social media activities and other data can be used to analyze the personality of people and predict their behavior and preferences. Dr Michal Kosinski developed such a procedure. Such can be used for media or information tailored to a person's psyche e.g. via Facebook. According to reports such may have played an integral part in Donald Trump's win.

Algorithms, echo chambers and polarization

The proliferation of online sources represents a vector leading to an increase in media pluralism but algorithms used by social networking platforms and search engines to provide users with a personalized experience based on their individual preferences represent a challenge to pluralism, restricting exposure to differing viewpoints and news feed. This is commonly referred to as "echo-chambers" and "filter-bubbles".

With the help of algorithms, filter bubbles influence users' choices and perception of reality by giving the impression that a particular point of view or representation is widely shared. Following the 2016 referendum of membership of the European Union in the United Kingdom and the United States presidential elections, this gained attention as many individuals confessed their surprise at results that seemed very distant from their expectations. The range of pluralism is influenced by the personalized individualization of the services and the way it diminishes choice.

Research on echo chambers from Flaxman, Goel, and Rao, Pariser, and Grömping suggest that use of social media and search engines tends to increase ideological distance among individuals.

Comparisons between online and off-line segregation have indicated how segregation tends to be higher in face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members, and reviews of existing research have indicated how available empirical evidence does not support the most pessimistic views about polarization. A study conducted by researchers from Facebook and the University of Michigan, for example, has suggested that individuals’ own choices drive algorithmic filtering, limiting exposure to a range of content. While algorithms may not be causing polarization, they could amplify it, representing a significant component of the new information landscape.

Research and use by intelligence and military agencies

Some of the leaked JTRIG operation methods/techniques

 

The Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group unit of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British intelligence agency was revealed as part of the global surveillance disclosures in documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and its mission scope includes using "dirty tricks" to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" enemies. Core-tactics include injecting false material onto the Internet in order to destroy the reputation of targets and manipulating online discourse and activism for which methods such as posting material to the Internet and falsely attributing it to someone else, pretending to be a victim of the target individual whose reputation is intended to be destroyed and posting "negative information" on various forums may be used.

Known as "Effects" operations, the work of JTRIG had become a "major part" of GCHQ's operations by 2010. The unit's online propaganda efforts (named "Online Covert Action") utilize "mass messaging" and the "pushing [of] stories" via the medium of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. Online "false flag" operations are also used by JTRIG against targets. JTRIG have also changed photographs on social media sites, as well as emailing and texting colleagues and neighbors with "unsavory information" about the targeted individual. In June 2015, NSA files published by Glenn Greenwald revealed new details about JTRIG's work at covertly manipulating online communities. The disclosures also revealed the technique of "credential harvesting", in which journalists could be used to disseminate information and identify non-British journalists who, once manipulated, could give information to the intended target of a secret campaign, perhaps providing access during an interview. It is unknown whether the journalists would be aware that they were being manipulated.

Furthermore, Russia is frequently accused of financing "trolls" to post pro-Russian opinions across the Internet. The Internet Research Agency has become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post propaganda online under fake identities in order to create the illusion of massive support. In 2016 Russia was accused of sophisticated propaganda campaigns to spread fake news with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton and helping Republican Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election as well as undermining faith in American democracy.

In a 2017 report Facebook publicly stated that its site has been exploited by governments for the manipulation of public opinion in other countries – including during the presidential elections in the US and France. It identified three main components involved in an information operations campaign: targeted data collection, content creation and false amplification and includes stealing and exposing information that's not public; spreading stories, false or real, to third parties through fake accounts; and fake accounts being coordinated to manipulate political discussion, such as amplifying some voices while repressing others.

In politics

In 2016 Andrés Sepúlveda disclosed that he manipulated public opinion to rig elections in Latin America. According to him with a budget of $600,000 he led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices to help Enrique Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, win the election.

In the run up to India's 2014 elections, both the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and the Congress party were accused of hiring "political trolls" to talk favourably about them on blogs and social media.

The Chinese government is also believed to run a so-called "50-cent army" (a reference to how much they are said to paid) and the "Internet Water Army" to reinforce favourable opinion towards it and the Communist Party of China (CCP) as well as to suppress dissent.

In December 2014 the Ukrainian information ministry was launched to counter Russian propaganda with one of its first tasks being the creation of social media accounts (also known as the i-Army) and amassing friends posing as residents of eastern Ukraine.

Twitter suspended a number of bot accounts that appeared to be spreading pro-Saudi Arabian tweets about the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Trolling and other applications

In April 2009, Internet trolls of 4chan voted Christopher Poole, founder of the site, as the world's most influential person of 2008 with 16,794,368 votes by an open Internet poll conducted by Time magazine. The results were questioned even before the poll completed, as automated voting programs and manual ballot stuffing were used to influence the vote. 4chan's interference with the vote seemed increasingly likely, when it was found that reading the first letter of the first 21 candidates in the poll spelled out a phrase containing two 4chan memes: "mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME".

Jokesters and politically oriented hacktivists may share sophisticated knowledge of how to manipulate the Web and social media.

Countermeasures

In Wired it was noted that nation-state rules such as compulsory registration and threats of punishment are not adequate measures to combat the problem of online bots.

To guard against the issue of prior ratings influencing perception several websites such as Reddit have taken steps such as hiding the vote-count for a specified time.

Some other potential measures under discussion are flagging posts for being likely satire or false. For instance in December 2016 Facebook announced that disputed articles will be marked with the help of users and outside fact checkers. The company seeks ways to identify 'information operations' and fake accounts and suspended 30,000 accounts before the presidential election in France in a strike against information operations.

Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee considers putting few companies in charge of deciding what is or isn't true a risky proposition and states that openness can make the web more truthful. As an example he points to Wikipedia which, while not being perfect, allows anyone to edit with the key to its success being not just the technology but the governance of the site − its coordination of countless volunteers and ways of determining what is or isn't true.

Furthermore, various kinds of software may be used to combat this problem such as fake checking software or voluntary browser extensions that store every website one reads or use the browsing history to deliver fake revelations to those who read a fake story after some kind of consensus was found on the falsehood of a story.

Furthermore, Daniel Suarez asks society to value critical analytic thinking and suggests education reforms such as the introduction of 'formal logic' as a discipline in schools and training in media literacy and objective evaluation.

Research

German chancellor Angela Merkel has issued the Bundestag to deal with the possibilities of political manipulation by social bots or fake news.