Since the widespread adoption of social media by Americans, news outlets have sought to incorporate it into the new media landscape. Whether this takes the form of Tweets of those involved in a specific news story having their comments read on air; the views of established commentators being read; live events on Facebook; Ask Me Anything on Reddit, etc. – social media is seen as providing the means for reporting that is more democratic – not just for allowing more voices to potentially be incorporated into reporting but also as a story’s newsworthiness is increasingly being chosen for packaging by news companies based upon the things that are trending online.
The rationale for this is understandable, in an age wherein people now spend more of the time on their computer, this allows for a means of engaging audiences in a novel fashion and being able to discern what is important to the audience in advance allows news teams to produce content based upon what is cared about. But as an indicator of actual interest in a topic, virality itself is tricky as it can so easily be falsified.
Dianne Feinstein and the Climate Kids
In an article by Mark Heertsgard in The Nation entitled, On March 15, the Climate Kids are Coming you can see an example of how this plays out. Here is an extended quote describing the birth of the Green New Deal:
“Last November, Sunrise activists welcomed the incoming Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives with protest signs demanding that Democrats “Step Up or Step Aside.” Next, they occupied the office of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand her support for a Green New Deal. The sit-in went viral after Ocasio-Cortez, likewise rejecting the wait-your-turn etiquette expected of freshmen members, joined the protesters. The mainstream media picked up the story, and voilà: The Green New Deal was on its way. “
Whatever one’s position on the Green New Deal, knowledge of the connection between it and Venezuela’s Gramscian Project in America as well as the image at the top of this section clearly shows virality not only to be an empty indicator of actual interest in political policy, but also as a means for getting content re-shared on older and more established media platforms with a wider audience. In other words, virality is manufactured by people with access to coordinated inauthentic behavior networks and thus the democratic promise of social media via genuine engagements dies.
The kids in the Sunrise Movement, Bay Area Earth Guardians and Youth vs. Apocalypse may not get this – but those that then booked them on Democracy Now and others do.
Regardless of the perceived imperative of their causes, online networks of digital activists, intellectuals and artists that falsify how many people actually care about something and to what extent they care about it do their own cause a disservice by opening them to criticisms of propagandists and via the normalization of such behavior. With many actors engaged in such same spam-like activities, social media platforms like Facebook become a staging ground for propaganda campaigns – something which is a far cry from the services most users signed up for.
Another example of this is the news story of how the ‘Iconic’ image of Palestinian Protestor goes viral. The image was turned into memes connecting it with Lady Liberty Leading the People and the number of comments left on news sites with such features was high. Rather than a bunch of posts of pictures of comments by bots, I decided to quote someone often cited by critics of America, Noam Chomsky, who claimed that “Propaganda is to a democracy what a bludgeon is to the totalitarian state.”
Interestingly, this article on Teen Vogue begins with a variation on the virality theme addressed above. By alluding to perceived popularity, this article begins with the sentence: “You may have come across communist memes on social media. The man, the meme, the legend behind this trend is Karl Marx, who developed the theory of communism, which advocates for workers’ control over their labor (instead of their bosses).”
Considering that many if not most of these meme groups were developed with the assistance of Venezuelan Intelligence Officers and that Teen Vogue itself is deeply connected with them – this is yet another example of a false authenticity and virality being the cause to justify it publication.
The last case that I’ll cover here is that of George Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel Professor who went ‘viral’ for a white Genocide Tweet. While not reported until several months after the events, it was later revealed that this and a number of other of GCM’s Tweets were in fact boosted by sock-puppet accounts connected to Russia – who is Venezuela’s media partner! Considering George Ciccariello-Maher’s long-standing connections to Venezuelan Intelligence what this means for his credibility as an academic, or political commentator is unknown – but given the extensive media coverage he received over it, it’s worth adding this fact to the historical record.
Newsworthiness and Propaganda
These three viral but not necessarily newsworthy narratives all draw on a similar and well-established framing for propaganda – the powerless standing up to the powerful. In the above cases we see a group of non-voting age students and their parents try to pigeonhole a Senator to get her to agree to the Green New Deal; a group of poorly armed activists entering the military zone of a neighboring power to dismantle its borders; a lone professor takes on White Supremacism with a single tweet.
And yet despite addressing vastly different subjects – the environment, Palestine and White Supremacy – all of them are not only connected the same coordinated inauthentic behavior networks but also demonstrate the same anti-systemic political sensibilities. I’m not saying that these narratives should be silenced, but when seeking to understand the current political moment it’s important to recognize that foreign powers see value in creating such political polarization and that this is destructive to the democratic process.