The collection of data for this project ended some time ago. The potential use of the data is expansive, my time is quite limited until my current project is completed. I have a few notes about things that we might want to consider:
Sockpuppets. There has been a great deal of traffic in claims of sockpuppet deployment recently. Yes, there are bots. What we need to think about is how bots figure into our existing models. Comment sections largely went extinct when editors of sites realized that their own comment sections undermined their arguments. It will be important to understand the centrality of bots to the network to see if they really have any impact.
Do bots matter in a transmit or event centered eco-system? During media events social networks tend to focus on recirculating information and most nodes tend to go dormant. This is an interesting phenomena that I have documented extensively in this project. In any social media event network, most nodes have eigenvector centralities of zero.
Do swarms of unimportant bots have an ambient agenda setting effect? Meraz found that the legacy media tended to maintain agenda setting influence via the blogosphere. Without getting too much into the literature it is clear that the current consensus position is that agenda setting functions of elites simply transitioned onto the internet. Given the utility of this argument in many other forums, it would only make sense that it is true here too. Much like new media is old, or old is new, this is a fairly safe argument to be making. After all, break, rupture, and discontinuity are are delta to continuity. Media theorists love to endlessly chew through this debate in the context of the “digital.” My concern with these debates comes on the level of practice. Debunking claims to novelty can be an important move, I am not sure what else that debate gets for scholars. Ontological critique will never be really complete particularly when there is an aporia involved. As a dialectical engine these debates can power interesting reflection that might inform semantics, pragmatics, and alterity but should not be allowed to supplant them.
Propaganda is bad. I am not sure if it is bad because it is false or even because it is, but because the public culture into which propaganda is diffused is not able to cleave truth from falsity or I believe more accurately, is entirely willing to support falsity as a weapon.
What could I possibly mean by that? People are not stupid. In a class on code and small screen design we were discussing a study of Instagram which connected IG with depression. The mechanism? The confusion that sets in when people see the highly curated feeds. Apparently they can’t distinguish this from reality. This is an old canard in media studies and cultural critique in general. Just as novels would make it impossible for an eighteenth century mother to respond to her child (due to confusion) the media now does the same thing. Of course every student already knew the difference between social network profile life and regular physical reality. Watch Doug Rushkoff’s Digital Nation. Advertising agencies have nothing on these kids. The buzzword in social media research a decade ago was context collapse, the potential victims: children. Now the average college frosh is incredibly sophisticated at parsing contexts. Older people, the adults who once would have protected them from such misunderstanding, now the victims. This meme builds out the argument:
Your parents in 1996: Don’t trust ANYONE on the Internet. Your parents in 2016: Freedom Eagle dot Facebook says Hillary invented AIDS.
Where the rubber meets the road is the understanding of ideology. Ideology in this formulation is a form of enlightened self-consciousness. This formulation has been well developed by Sloterdjik, Zizek, and many others. Regardless of what you might think of this research trajectory, it is a really helpful argument.
It seems possible then that the bulk of users might have been communicating in conjunction with the bots. Instead of deceiving users into believing something false, the agenda setting power of bots might be unified with a public interested in distributing propaganda. A web of publics interested in circulating and recirculating false content for strategic purposes is much more powerful than a robot. Too many activists believe that they are strategic and the publics they attempt to persuade are not. They are all strategic. Robots may just not be that important.