Thread by @jenmercieca

The "did bots change the 2016 election" debate reminds me of the "on deaf ears, does presidential rhetoric move public opinion" debate.

Folks who think that public persuasion is a mechanism & you can pretest/post-test & arrive at verifiable conclusions have false expectations about how persuasion works.

From today's CJR: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

Here's a good response to the "on deaf ears" presidential rhetoric argument from David Zarefsky (it might be paywalled for you, I can't tell): jstor.org/stable/2755261…

The assumption is a media consumer (of tweets or fb posts or ads or speeches, etc) has no opinion about something, then sees the <thing> and then grabs hold of that opinion and makes it their own. That's not at all how this works.

In reality, public persuasion works by controlling the discourse, by flooding the media spaces with the same idea/content and drowning out other ideas, by reaffirming ingroup outgroup identities, and (above all perhaps) by repetition.

That accumulates. It's about definitions. It's about controlling the news agenda, the platform agenda, it's about framing and narrative. There isn't a solid "hypodermic needle" effect for persuasion/media, but there are other effects.

If you're trying to find a causal mechanism you probably won't unless you look at a ton of different things, over time. You'd need to track what people saw, how they feel about the people/accounts who post it, and what they saw & didn't see and how often.

You'd need to know about how their brains are processing that information. I'm sure it's doable, but maybe not how it's being done currently.

And, don't take my word for it--look at what the people who are trying to control public discourse say about how they're doing it.

You can learn more by reading this (unlocked) short explainer about frame warfare in @ResoluteSquare resolutesquare.com/articles/1Bu02…

And this short explainer (unlocked) about public persuasion by "moving the Overton Window" to make ideas more acceptable: resolutesquare.com/articles/6EBBy…

See also Kathleen Hall Jamieson (who knows all of the above points) and her 2018 book specifically on this question: global.oup.com/academic/produ…