If you haven't read @YochaiBenkler's new book "Network Propaganda" yet, you really should -- an in-depth and data-heavy look at disinformation and radicalization in the US. It's available for free: play.google.com/books/reader?i… I'm going to tweet a few of the insights from it /1
"We are not arguing that technology does not matter, that the Russians did not interfere with US politics, or that Facebook's algorithm is unimportant. Instead, we suggest each of these depends on the asymmetric partisan ecosystem that has developed over the past four decades" /2
"What that means in practice for Americans is that solutions that focus purely on short-term causes, like the Facebook algorithm, are unlikely to significantly improve our public discourse." /3
"Our detailed study of the American case suggests that it is only where the underlying institutional and political-cultural fabric is frayed that technology can exacerbate existing problems and dynamics to the point of crisis." /4
"It is not that Republicans are more gullible than Democrats. It is not that technology has destroyed the possibility of shared discourse. It is the structure of the media ecosystem within which Republican voters find themselves that made them susceptible to manipulation" /5
"These [conspiracy theory] efforts, while real and observable, were not determinative in the election or the first year of the Trump presidency. The top media elites, not Redditors or meme propagators from the alt-right, were primarily responsible for distributing them widely" /6
"It would have been standard practice for a well-balanced media ecosystem to simply refuse to touch such a story. But the commercial model of the outlets that picked it up was designed to produce cathartic outrage in its readers and to be rewarded by clicks and views." /7
"When mainstream professional media sources insist on coverage that performs their own neutrality by giving equal weight to opposing views, even when one is false and the other is not, they fail." /fin
