The Digital Media Manipulators
How Big Tech and other digital media firms help conservatives spread propaganda
America is in a crisis of division. Poll after poll shows American partisan divides deepening. The causes are multiple: traditional media, social media, a sclerotic and dysfunctional government, structural governmental hurdles, the loss of community and third spaces, social and economic inequalities, and individualism. One cause in particular stands out: digital media.
The siloing of partisans and the hollowing out of our discourse into echo chambers can be felt across the political spectrum. Fewer people listen to the “other side,” and even fewer interact with “the enemy.” Big Tech and social media platforms are, to a significant extent, responsible. In the pursuit of profits via capitalist competition, search engines and social media satisfy our desires and feed our biases in an attempt to hold our attention long enough to sell it to advertisers, developing addictive technologies in the process. Conservative media takes advantage of this business model to peddle propaganda.
The motive: profit. The means: engagement. The method: addiction.
Attention … is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of…several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
- William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890
When information is abundant, attention becomes scarce. Search engines and social media platforms are advertising companies and, contrary to popular belief, don’t sell individual personal data per se but rather access to users in the form of engagement. While data brokering can be profitable, selling access to your attention is far more lucrative. Indeed, in the decade spanning the 2010s, “personal data” was uttered only twice in Big Tech earnings calls. In the battle for advertisers, the company that can glue the most eyeballs to a screen wins. Attention-seeking technologies of enchantment that control the flow of attention for billions of people are paramount because the regulation of attention is central to the production of value in the age of digital capitalism.
In many ways, this is no different than traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television. Commodifying your audience for advertisers is nothing new, and within the context of traditional media, you are both the consumer and the commodity. While you read, listen, or watch, you consume a product produced by your preferred media enterprise. Your attention is then sold to advertisers who attempt to peddle their products between bouts of consumption. Advertisers are the customers, and your attention is the commodity. In this way, capitalists can extract value from you while you passively consume media.
In the latest iteration of capitalism, digital capitalists have outsourced media production to the consumer. While engaging in social media, users create content, upload photos and videos, browse profiles, create communities, engage in discussion, and even disseminate content in the form of liking, sharing, and reposting. All these activities are tracked and cataloged. This data is then repackaged into usable metrics like engagement and detailed profiles of users’ interests and behavior, objectifying human subjectivities and enticing advertisers to buy access to these objects on the platform. In the digital sphere of capitalism, we are not only the consumer and commodity but also the producer, what Alvin Toffler termed prosumers.
Additionally, digital capitalists have optimized the advertising process. Unlike traditional media, digital media can present numerous advertisements to different user groups simultaneously, and these advertisements are more effective because users’ data are leveraged granularly to appeal to the interests of prosumers. If traditional media treats advertisements like a firehose, spraying every consumer in sight, then digital media advertising is akin to drinking a personalized oat milk latte straight from a home faucet. In the age of hyper-individualism and -personalization, advertising is no different.
Beneath the gleam of Silicon Valley campuses, this is ingenious. In the quest to reduce labor costs and maximize efficiency, capitalists have found a panacea: value creation by unpaid labor and targeted, personal advertising. Not only are they extracting value from your consumption, like traditional media, but also labor and the best part is you do it for fun, for leisure. Capitalists have transformed your leisure time into productive, value-producing labor-time, thereby increasing absolute surplus value production. However, beneath the shadow of Marxian thought, you’re being infinitely exploited because you do not receive a wage. Still, perhaps this is a little too hasty, for you receive some (nonmonetary) benefits for engaging with digital platforms.
Every human being needs social interaction, and the loss of community is pervasively felt in contemporary American life. Indeed, most Americans use social media to stay in touch with friends and family, to reconnect with old friends, and to find like-minded people. Social media is sold to us as a democratizing force, a new participatory culture wherein you can cultivate what Bourdieu calls symbolic, cultural, and social capital: recognition, reputation, validation, education, and social ties. It’s unsurprising that people engage in social media production when cast in this light.
Once on their platforms, digital media companies are incentivized by the iron law of capitalist competition to hold your attention, and they do so through addiction. These enterprises are incentivized not to provide a superior product but a more addictive product to better hook their next victim. Through innovations like infinite scrolling, auto-play, and video shorts, all designed to reach and activate neurons lower in your brainstem, they attempt to bypass the conscious processing centers of your brain to create a dopamine feedback loop. Much like slot machines at a casino, this is no happy accident: it’s by design.
Spurred on by profit motive, capitalists have taken advantage of genuine human needs and desires to build addictive platforms to commodify human subjectivities. These are then sold to advertisers who attempt to convince the prosumers of digital media to consume other products and services. This addictive infrastructure, designed to extract monetary value from leisure, provides fertile ground for media manipulators to push propaganda.
In her book, The Propagandists’ Playbook, Francesca Bolla Tripodi explains, among other things, how conservative media takes advantage of the system and infrastructure created by Big Tech and other digital media firms to promote propaganda. The first hurdle for these mass media manipulators is motivational: how do you convince a populace whose guiding ideals are autonomy and individualism to come to similar conclusions?
[C]onservatives bound by libertarian ideals are wary of groupthink. To work around this dimension of conservatism, this network [of conservative media] encourages constituents to “do the research” for themselves, allowing people who value individualism to form a set of collective ideas and actions seemingly of their own accord. (179)
Where does one turn to find information about the world? Google, where 90% of all online searches start. Similarly to social media, search engines commodify your attention for advertisers and operate under the same incentive structure as social media: engagement. While web pages may provide the content of search engines, user inputs provide the fuel, for search results are ranked according to relevance, which relies on linguistic cues (term frequency and web metadata), Page Rank cues (popularity of the web page), and user cues (queries, clicks, and reading time). These metrics are easily gamed and manipulated.
If one were so inclined, one could create a website and, with a sufficient following, place that website at the top of Google’s search results with little effort, and in 2003, journalist Dan Savage did precisely that. In response to then-US senator Rick Santorum’s views on homosexuality and comments on same-sex marriage, he created the webpages spreadingsantorum.com and santorum.com, wherein he defined “santorum” as a lewd and sexually explicit act. Savage then herded enough people to the webpage, manipulating the search engine’s user cues to place the site at the top of every Santorum-related query, eclipsing Santorum’s then-campaign site. These results can also be obtained the old-fashioned way: money. Google offers up its coveted top result spots for anyone so financially inclined.
Notwithstanding how easily Google’s search results can be manipulated by those with sufficient social or financial capital, its results are generally regarded as trustworthy, and the higher the website is ranked, the more trustworthy it’s perceived to be. Moreover, because search engines sell your engagement to advertisers, they are incentivized to show you what you want.
Since most of Google’s revenue comes from selling information about its users to third-party businesses, it, like other search engine companies, has a financial interest in matching users with content it thinks they want to see. While this process of tailoring returns to users’ needs and desires is a good business model, the algorithmic process that drives it can end up altering the ways that different groups understand current and historical events. (125)
How is it that individuals on either side of the ideological divide come to radically different conclusions when querying identical topics? Confirmation bias plays a pivotal role in the bifurcation of Americans into partisan echo chambers. People tend to search for and favor information that confirms rather than contests their beliefs and values, but search engines and social media algorithms take this common informational bias and supercharge it because their goal is not to provide accurate and truthful information but to keep you engaged. These platforms are confirmation bias machines that feed people precisely what they want because it's profitable, and to do otherwise would be corporate suicide.
According to Tripodi, propagandists take advantage of this fertile information ecosystem with a two-step process that facilitates the rooting of their preferred ideology. First, they seed the internet with articles and stories using particular keywords and dialects. Then, they strategically signal these words while encouraging their audience to do their own research, and when their audience turns to Google or social media, market forces usher them toward ideological segregation.
If you’ve been paying attention, and even if you haven’t, you have more than likely heard about Critical Race Theory—a method of analyzing societal systems and structures through the lens of race and racism that posits these as systemic instead of individual failures. The idea that the war on drugs and its concomitant laws and legal rulings are institutionally racist because they disproportionately harm black people is a product of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Chances are, however, that most people have heard the term in the context of the debate over what should be taught in public schools, with conservatives claiming CRT is divisive, un-American, and racist. Why American conservatives become squeamish about using race to analyze institutions and laws needs no elaboration, and what we’re concerned with is how they have appropriated the term for their use.
By associating CRT with unrelated ideas and actions generally considered to be negative, conservatives have blunted the rhetorical edge of a theory that scrutinizes power and the status quo in the name of racial justice. The architect of CRT hysteria, Christopher Rufo, agrees: “We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” As Tripodi explains, this coopting of keywords is a silencing tactic by the powerful and well-connected to maintain existing power structures. This tactic is, of course, not limited to CRT. Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and “woke” have also been appropriated in recent memory, and the objective—the maintenance and continuation of the current distribution of economic, social, and political power—is the same.
Search engines and social media facilitate this tactic in two ways. Due to market forces, if one consumes conservative media, the algorithms will feed them more of the same. As a result, when a conservative prosumer searches for Critical Race Theory, conservative sources decrying the evils of CRT will be the first returned.
The product of personalized searches can be partially negated by using “incognito mode” on most browsers, which blocks some tracking features of search engines. Digital media, however, steps into the void. By publishing articles and writing posts espousing the evils of a little-known academic theory, conservatives can effectively manipulate search engines and social media to return results critical of CRT. These platforms will return conservative web pages because they are programmed to present what is available. If most of those pages have a negative disposition toward CRT, then a majority of the search results will also. When these keywords are contested, propagandists with sufficient clout can manipulate the search rankings and media algorithms to return their preferred results by encouraging their followers to engage with the topic on the platform, driving traffic and increasing its perceived importance by the algorithm. Alternatively, one could buy their way to the top.
Keyword appropriation is a common strategy among conservative propagandists, but it has a flaw: competition. To be effective, they must battle in the digital sphere to boost the ranking of their interpretation of specific words and phrases. Another effective strategy is keyword curation, wherein propagandists exploit data voids—when obscure search queries have few results associated with them—for ideological purposes.
One example is crisis actor. The term originally referred to people who played victims in simulated disaster-management and first-responder training exercises. Conspiracy theorists interested in protecting gun rights took over this term, painting the victims and families of victims of mass shootings across the United States as “crisis actors” and therefore as unreliable narrators. As mainstream journalists began learning about the term, largely from social media trolling of parents who had lost children in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, they unwittingly generated more attention and traffic. The more that news outlets used the term, and the more that users queried the phrase, the higher the conspiratorial content rose in the search rankings. (131)
The role search engines and social media play in this tactic should be immediately apparent. Due to market pressures, they are structured to facilitate creative propagandists’ output, and this tactic can be seen in real-time. Roland Fryer is a lauded economics professor at Harvard who recently published a paper that found “no racial differences in officer-involved shootings.” Multiple peer-reviewed papers have since analyzed his methodologies and found them severely flawed, and even Fryer himself has downplayed the credibility of similar analyses in the past. What’s germane from our perspective is how his name has become a keyword in the conservative information ecosystem.
Fryer recently sat down for an interview with journalist Bari Weiss, wherein he claimed there was severe academic pushback on his study’s conclusions, “all hell broke loose,” he claimed. So much so that he claims to have needed around-the-clock police protection for a month. Together, Weiss and Fryer insinuate he was suspended from Harvard for his thought crimes about police shootings, even though he admitted to violating Harvard’s sexual harassment standards for which he was suspended. So, the American conservative movement has a new keyword signifying all the current perceived ills of society—the left-wing takeover of academia, the unhinged woke mob intimidating opponents, and a biased media that refuses to report on stories like Fryer’s. As of February 2024, nearly every news article returned from search engine queries about Fryer are conservative outlets ginning up outrage over these perceived ills and biases. The same can be said about social media posts.
These tactics—keyword curation and appropriation—rely on what Tripodi calls strategic signaling. While the algorithms work to match queries with results, prosumers must also know which keywords to use. When politicians, TV pundits, and social media celebrities repeat these keywords throughout the informational ecosystem, they signal their legitimacy. Tripodi explains, “simply elevating keywords meant to capture conspiracies promotes enhanced public discourse and intrigue,” leading the inquisitively minded to seek more information on the topic. Combined with the constant prodding of “do your own research,” conservative media manipulators herd their followers into isolation.
This process is also done semi-passively through ideological dialects. It ought to be evident that searching “illegal aliens” will return different results than querying “illegal immigrants.” In other words, one’s political lexicon and preexisting beliefs shape one’s search queries, and given that these platforms have no incentive to challenge and every incentive to confirm beliefs, they are all too happy to shuttle you toward potentially harmful rabbit holes of confirmation bias and sensationalism. To give a morbid example, Dylan Roof allegedly searched “black on white crime” when doing his own research on Trayvon Martin before murdering nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. This segmenting of politicos is done in less pernicious ways: conservatives are more likely to include “freedom” and “liberty” in search queries, whereas progressives tend to use terms like “equality.”
Returns for “religious freedom” link back to conservative Christian organizations, while returns for “religious equality” are more likely to connect seekers with organizations like the Equality and Human Rights Commission…These parallel experiences with internet search effectively keep information seekers in silos of their own making, thereby influencing how groups understand current events and their memories of the past. (121)
Through the two-step process of seeding the internet and strategic signaling, mass media manipulators—politicians, pundits, and political commentariat—are able to convince a constituency infused with libertarian ideals of individual freedom and autonomy to cohere around a set of collective ideas.
The partitioning of American partisans and the hollowing out of our public discourse into echo chambers is a product of the infrastructure of digital platforms created to compete for the almighty dollar and media manipulators willing to lie and distort information for personal and political gain. As Josef Pieper warned in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power:
[T]he general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. (35)
Preying on the social needs and expectations of Americans, search engines and social media platforms have created a digital system of profit extraction that is easily bought and manipulated by unscrupulous ideologues peddling propaganda in service power.
I lack the room to explain most of Tripodi’s informative book. So, if you would like to learn more about conservative media strategies, why they resonate with conservative audiences, and support my writing, I highly recommend reading her excellent book. Learn more about the Abuse of Language here.
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You can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter @CommunitarianRE.
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Great and informative! Pulling back the curtain to reveal the $$$$Playbook and how we the people are sucked in to ultimately do the bidding of their masters.